Record year for radio specialist

Wood and Douglas reports a record year supplying products for telemetry, broadcast and security applications.

Wood and Douglas reports a record year supplying products for telemetry, broadcast and security applications.

The split across sectors comprises 80% in telemetry and the balance divided between security and broadcast applications.

However it is expected that the security market will increase now the company has started to ship its new dVMo digital video link.

Commenting on the results Alan Wood indicated that while the September to August financial year had started quietly, the last two quarters had seen a dramatic upturn with greatly increased business from existing customers.

Middle East uncertainties and the SARS outbreak were almost certainly factors.

A particular strength is that Wood and Douglas is one of the few British companies who can offer both design and manufacture in the UK.

The company is able to supply standard or bespoke radiocommunication hardware and software at OEM module level through to complete end user products.

A very significant percentage of company resources are dedicated to the process of design and development.

Almost half the company sales income is due to exports around the world with the USA as a key market.

In addition Wood and Douglas has started to ship its new digital link to its first security customers in the USA.

The dVMo (digital video for moving objects), designed for law enforcement and military applications uses digital video technology dramatically improving performance over traditional analogue products.

Benefits include superior digital image quality and the potential for multiple services.

This allows for the joining and relaying of several images from different cameras using multiplexed transport streams on the same spectrally efficient radio channel.

The link comprises the dVMo-T transmitter and the dVMo-R receiver and uses a data format that is a derivative of DVB-T.

COFDM modulation techniques together with an efficient MPEG codec provides high resistance to multipath reflections while achieving a very low encoding delay of only 50ms.

This is ideal for real time control and monitoring applications.

COFDM excels where a large number of reflections are available to "bounce" the radio signal around.

This gives the capability to "see round" corners.

Traditional analogue radio signals in similar situations would suffer from cancellation or nulling effects with attendant massive picture disturbances.

The dVMo therefore is ideal for use in complex city environments or for deriving images from the inside of buildings.

This is often a key requisite for the emergency services where good quality video and sound information is needed from fixed and moving sources.

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