Mid-'80s, Europe's first satellite-delivered cable TV services

We were in the SATVRN rack-mount CATV and SMATV receivers, and kick-started the UK home dish business with Ferguson's SM01/02 satellite systems.

Late '80s, BSB

We designed the tuner/demodulator for the Wolsey D-MAC head-end box.

'80s through '90s, BSkyB analogue via Astra

If you had an Amstrad PAL set-top box, you were using our tuner technology - the inexpensive but high-performance 1100 series enabled Sky's £199 satellite package. Amstrad fitted RWT to all their analogue satellite receivers (over 5M units, some with dual tuners), as well as their DSR (Digital Satellite Radio) units for the German audio separates market.

Late '90s, establishment of DVB-T (OnDigital)

The BBC/Broadcast Technology professional DTT monitoring receivers use RWT 2100-series tuners.

A new Century: Freeview

We designed the acclaimed SetPal tuners for NovaPal's £99 Freeview box, marketed under the Daewoo, Dijam, Labgear, Triax and BT badges, setting new benchmarks for DVB-T sensitivity. The same tuner featured in set-top boxes, DVRs, iDTVs and iDVCRs from DigiFusion, Beko and Bush, and a special dual-IF variant was created for the combination Freeview-plus-DAB receivers from Goodmans and Matsui.

How about DAB radios?

Our tuner for Frontier Silicon's Venice 1 module enabled the £99 kitchen radio (Pure 'Evoke') and is still employed in the majority of UK-market DAB products. The tri-band 2500 series (Venice 2) features in up-market receivers from Sony and Bang & Olufsen.

Ongoing developments

One exciting field is antenna diversity for DVB-T. We are currently working with a customer on a 4-way diversity front end complete with active antennas for integration into an LCD TV, enabling reliable indoor reception of Freeview on second (kitchen and bedroom) TVs where no fixed antenna is available.

- Read more about RWT's enabling rôle in these markets.

What we do:

RWT designs tuner/demodulator products for all communications and media products, but we specialize in high-volume mass-market consumer media applications such as digital TV. We prefer to produce custom designs for specific applications, and will assist customers in developing their specifications. Most of our designs are now licensed to the customer for manufacture as part of the host product rather than as a subassembly, to which end we provide assistance with integration at board level.

What we don't do:

We are not a manufacturer. The only hardware leaving our lab is in the form of engineering samples, so please don't ask us to quote for volume supply of tuners!

- May we design an RF front end for your product?

- Contact RWT...