2008: We have experienced consistent year over year growth and 2008 has been no exception. Since or product portfolio includes a broad offering of both RF amplifiers and modems, we are able to address a wide range of markets. We have seen a steady increase in demand in both the commercial and government sectors. Our commercial business, which covers a wide spectrum of applications from IP gateways to cellular backhaul links, has seen considerable growth in Asia and Africa, prompting us to expand our infrastructure in that part of the world. We’ve also experienced a surge in our government business both in US and in Europe. Our X-band SSPAs received DISA certification late last year resulting in major orders from satcom system integrators, so much so that we had to expand that part of our production facility to keep up with demand. With the placing of the Wideband Gapfiller satellites into service, we expect to see a lot of opportunity for X and Ka-band products going forward.

It’s no secret that the global communications are rapidly converging into the IP domain. Voice, video, and data are losing their dissimilarities as they become readied for transport and are becoming simply “bits shoved into packets”. We did get a head start with our launch of our Evolution series of satellite modems, as they were specifically designed to facilitate migration to IP. Our modem engineering team is particularly strong in the area of IP and our baseband products reflect that. Also, some regions of the world are short of available satellite spectrum to allow expansion and new builds. Our latest modem release – Quantum offers the most sophisticated spectrum saving technologies available today. This includes ViaSat’s patented Paired Carrier Multiple Access (PCMA) technology that allows transmit and receive carriers to occupy the same bandwidth, as well as DVB-S2 in the same modem plus a pre-distorter that can improve amplifier back-off by 1.6 dB.

On the RF products front, our RF engineering group continues to make major advancements in the area of size, weight and power density. New transistor technology is being incorporated into our next generation of SSPAs that will greatly increase efficiency allowing us to generate significant amounts of power in very small packages. We will be releasing solid state amplifier packages that will achieve power levels in excess of 5kW.

As is the case with any business on an aggressive growth curve, our biggest challenge is to meet customer demand while providing the level of pre- and post-sales support necessary to sustain the business. We have launched a number of initiatives in the recent months designed to address this issue head on. Realizing the enormous growth potential of the Asia market, we opened new offices in Thailand and China. These are fully staffed offices with sales professionals and full-time engineers that travel the region to support our customers whenever needed. We established a service and repair facility in India to support our customers in that exploding market. A new engineering and sales facility in Phoenix, Arizona will be coming on line this month. From there, we will be expanding our product portfolio even further as well as adding a new dimension of support to our existing lines.

This has also been a particularly busy year for us in the way of partnerships. An example is the aforementioned agreement we reached with ViaSat for access to their patented PCMA technology. This gives Paradise Datacom membership to an extremely small club of suppliers of this brilliant technology designed to give customers substantial savings on their space segment costs. An equally exciting venture we are currently working will allow us to optimize our Evolution modem for cellular backhaul applications, making it perhaps the most versatile modem for that market available. Our recently released Vision modem line contains DVB-S2 technology on license from ViaSat’s Efficient Channel Coding (ECC) Division.

2009: Speaking for the industry, market forecasts speak well for health in general. Predictions of growth for DTV services in Asia and the Middle East give us confidence that we made the right call to make an aggressive move into the DVB-S2 market with our launch of VISION. As space segments costs continue to rise, cutting-edge spectrum-saving features will be the soup de jour and we’ll be at the front of the line. Quantum will help steer operators of networks based on legacy technologies towards the new world of DVB-S2 + IBS/IDR + PCMA and Evolution will continue to entice the market with unique and innovative features.

In the RF world, demand for tube-based amplifiers continues to fall to newer solid state technologies prompting us to push hard into higher powered products, new developments in Ka-band and amplifier architectures base on Gallium Nitride devices. Hot-swappable, modular amplifiers with switch-less, soft-fail redundancy schemes will dominate our newest RF product offerings.

About the company
Paradise Datacom designs and manufactures satellite modems, transceivers, block up-converters, solid state power amplifiers, low noise amplifiers and associated equipment for the terrestrial segment of the satellite communications market. In addition to the individual products, Paradise Datacom offers customers the possibility of purchasing total electronic package solutions for many of their needs. The ability to offer the full range of related products, manufactured by a single company, is uncommon in our industry. Paradise Datacom is also one of a very few commercial satellite earth station equipment manufacturers with manufacturing and support facilities in both Europe and North America. This ability to manufacture and offer support in two continents differentiates the company as a supplier of satellite communications equipment.