History

The early '80s witnessed two intertwined aspects which boosted the activities: the digital revolution reached commercial radio links and the RT20 thus leveraged 4-QAM modulation in order to provide low-capacity links while the increased globalization opened up international markets and the company business expanded to Norway, Great Britain and gradually to Europe. A quality control system was soon implemented to meet and certify the improved production standards.

In partnership with then it:Telettra, the Company developed the multi channel radio network covering the national extents, named RIAM, for the national electric company, Enel. The radio equipments were governed by a microprocessor, in the wake of the widespread usage of these new components which offered a huge range of new possibilities for coordinating radio components when compared to traditional dedicated circuits.

With the increased demand for traffic, higher frequencies were needed and in the second half of the 80's the company commercialized its 18 GHz radio transceiver with a capacity up to 2Mbit/s, based on specifications of Enel. A 13 GHz equipment with 4Mbit/s was instead first provided to the Mercury operator in the UK.

Thin film manufacturing techniques for printed circuit boards were adopted during the 80s by the company for its microwave products beyond 10 GHz with ad-hoc equipments and production lines (yellow room) and soon upgraded to chip-and-wire technologies in white rooms (clean room). Documents show the RT28 transceiver remained in service until 2008 in the Italian Aosta Valley.
Split-mount RT28 radio transceiver by Siae Microelettronica.png
18GHz RT28 split-mount transceiver, capable of up to 2Mbit/s communication (1986)

In 1986 the Company introduced the "split-mount" configuration, where an indoor unit (IDU) is connected to an outdoor unit ODU. The IDU provides the network interfaces and carries out the baseband tasks while communicates with the ODU, usually by means of an intermediate frequency, which is tasked of radio frequency up/down conversion and is connected to the antenna. The split-mount configuration is still currently in use in several modern radio products and the boost in sales at that time was recognized in the 1988 edition of Major Companies of Europe.