Patent Covers Optical Reporting of RF Antenna status over fiber optic transport

Patent Covers Optical Reporting of RF Antenna status over fiber optic transport

Optical Zonu, a designer and manufacturer of fiber optic solutions for the telecommunication and public safety industry, today announced the issuance of United States Patent US 10,257,739 Issued April 9, 2019 .

This patented technology involves optical reporting of the failure of any active receive-only antenna. Optical Zonu’s fiber transport equipment provides the DC power to the antenna via an internal bias-T. Any open or short on this load is detected and reported optically to the fiber optic Base Unit. This Base Unit has DC loads on the center pin of each RF output port. If an antenna failure is detected, these loads are removed thus passing the alarm condition to the connected RF receiver equipment. The distribution of GPS timing signal over fiber, widely used for cellular baser stations, in CRAN hubs for example, is greatly simplified since the equipment is designed to connect directly to an active GPS antenna. Using fiber transport with the innovation protected by the above patent enable seamless integration.

This RF receiver equipment generally has its own local and remote alarm reporting management system. In this way, Optical Zonu’s optical alarm reporting provides full visibility to the antenna status without the need for installing and configuring additional monitoring software. The Optical Zonu Fiber Transport provides additional alarm reporting via contact closure alarms which may be “punched” into the discrete alarm box for the existing system Network Management System.These features allow the Optical Zonu Fiber Transport to be installed quickly and easily into any network with full visibility to component status.

“We are pleased to strengthen our intellectual property protection with the addition of this patent in the United States covering this application of our core technology,” stated Meir Bartur, Chief Executive Officer of Optical Zonu Corporation.

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