RF Engineers

"Wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat." -Albert Einstein

At First Contact Engineering, we have designed every imaginable type of wireless product from satellite systems operating on a global scale to to Zigbee sensors transmitting across the room powered by a button cell.

We have a fully equipped lab with spectrum analyzers, network analyzers, calibrated antennas and signal generators. We also provide in-house PCB layout for RF circuits and compliance testing at several FCC and CE approved test labs.

Our designs include the following:

Frequency bands - 900 MHz ISM, 2.4 GHz ISM, 5 GHz ISM, UNII, DSRC, MMDS, WCS, cellular bands
Transmitters/modulators - FM, AM, FSK, QPSK, QAM, OFDM, low duty cycle, low power
Receivers/demodulators - high sensitivity, variable bandwidth, small form factor, low current
Synthesizers - audio to microwave, low phase noise, fast tuning, low spurious
Transceivers - full duplex, time division duplex (TDD), multi-channel
Power amps - high linearity for OFDM/QAM, high efficiency for FM, FSK, PSK
Filters - lumped element, microstrip, stripline, cavity
PCB Layout - full suite of layout tools
Antennas - small form factor, directional, omni, integrated or stand-alone

Digital Designers

We are experienced in board designs, using the broad range of processor families such as ARM, PowerPC, various DSP's, FPGA's, various types of buses and serial interconnects.

The digital design as part of a wireless system can be tricky. High speed digital signals produces undesired interference to the radio circuitry which would need to be carefully designed and contained. We are specialized in dealing with these issues.