Backhaul, October 2015: the industry 25 and 10 years ago

Backhaul takes you on a trip down memory lane as we look at what was happening in the critical communications field 25 and 10 years ago.

25 YEARS AGO. The cover of the October/November 1990 issue of What’s New in Radio Communications featured the Philips PRM80 series of mobile radios, which had been awarded an Australian Design Award, and also became the first Australian product to receive one of West Germany’s Gute Industrie Form Awards. The very successful units sold all around Australia and across the globe. Elsewhere in the magazine, LW Edwards of Moonraker Australia brought us up to date on marine mobile HF radio antenna design considerations, and we presented a case study on the communications system used by Yellow Cabs in Brisbane. It’s also interesting to be reminded of company names that no longer exist, eg, Aussat, OTC and Marconi (now part of BAE Systems) to name just a few.

10 YEARS AGO. By coincidence, this issue of Critical Comms features JVC Kenwood on the cover, and so did the September/October 2005 issue of Radio Comms Asia-Pacific. Back then, the latest and greatest Kenwood technology was the 180 series of radios, which included VHF and UHF models with FleetSync digital signalling, dual priority scan and QT/DQT sub-audible QT tones and DQT digital codes. Elsewhere in the magazine, Peter Baines, the then managing director of Tait Electronics (Aust) shared his views on the positive future of radio comms, despite the perceived threat from cellular technology; we presented a case study on radio comms for a Sydney-based courier company and another case study on a trunked radio system installed in Bangkok’s underground railway network. We also presented a potted history of radio communications test sets, from the Singer FM-10 RCTS to the (then) latest Rohde & Schwarz and HP models.