Dear Calaveras, this is Javier Ruano, GM with Televes USA. I’ve asked you before both in public and privately through this forum, and I’ll do it again here, do you have personal experience with any Televes antenna products? I’ve read your posts in this forum and others with interest over the years. You seem pretty well set in your opinions about our antennas, seemingly traceable back to incomplete and quite misinformed articles published many, many years ago, but it seems to me, without having first hand knowledge of Televes products. In case you have not had the opportunity and are just putting out opinions based on your interpretation or what you've read in the internet, I'd be happy to provide you with some samples for your perusal. Please, feel free to PM with an address.
Just for context, Televes is a company that has been involved with terrestrial television ever since its foundation in the 1950s. Nowadays we are a multinational covering many different verticals but deeply involved in anything that has to do with DTT (we are, after all, founding members of DVB). From the the design, development and manufacturing of broadcasting transmitters and SFN gap- fillers OEM'd by some of the main brand names in the industry, all the way to professional monitoring and test and measurement equipment, and everything else in between, from aerials and digital processing headends to distribution equipment all the way to the very last outlet in the home. To this day, and as opposed to most of our competitors in the antenna space in the US, we at Televes design, develop, and manufacture all our products in our state-of-the-art facilities located in the Northwest of Spain. When it comes to antennas we roll our elements from raw aluminum, inject our clamps and electronics shielding out of zamak, inject our own plastic parts out of only top performing ABS plastic, and use stainless steel hardware throughout. We make our own printed circuit boards, ensuring the reliability needed to put them inside a dipole on an aerial, all of this with quality assurance and traceability throughout the manufacturing process (for your interest, ISO 9001 and 14001 certifications can be found on the website). All of this manufactured in a 100% robotized Industry 4.0 Manufacturing process paradigm ensuring the most stringent quality control procedures.
We of course have our own certification labs where not only we can approve CE and UL marks, but more importantly subject all our antenna products to extensive EM testing, saltwater and UV resistance, temperature and vibration shock, etc., simulating decades of on the field life for any new products long before they ever reach the market. We actually certify some competitors in these very labs.
The result of this painstaking process are antennas built to quality standards that far exceed what you find in other brand names sourcing their products mostly from the far east these days, or otherwise. I trust you would surely recognize this should you ever be able to experience our products in person.
We currently have subsidiaries in 18 countries, our products are otherwise distributed and sold in over a hundred countries worldwide, and we are, by all accounts, one of the worldwide leading technology companies when it comes to DTT solutions. With regards to the US we've had an office in Denver since the late 90s, but truth be told we have never had a focus on terrestrial television here until fairly recently with the renewed interest in OTA over the last few years. Admittedly our design philosophy is quite different from what you are used to seeing and experience in the US market, flooded with very dated designs and OEM branded far East originated product frequently more concerned with profit margins, marketing and presentation than with quality and performance. As I said, we've watched opinions such as yours in forums from a distance an in amusement for a while, but we believe it's come a time to clarify who we are and what we are all about. I do apologize for this long and winded presentation of who we are as a company, but trust it is pertaining to put these discussions in its adequate context. We are no newcomer to the space, trust me on this.
For many, many years now our antennas have included preamplifiers built in right at the dipole, you will no doubt surely agree with me that this is the optimal location to apply amplification in a signal acquisition system, if amplification is going to be applied. This is rarely seen, and there is a clear business reason for it, it's not cheap to do it right. Sturdy shielding, temp resisting PCBs and quality componentry need to be used throughout. It's far easier to throw a preamp somewhere further down the line, or leave that worry to the customer. Our latest generation of antenna products incorporate what in the marketing literature is known as TForce, our newest iteration of antena pre-amplifiers that automatically adjust their gain to adapt for the conditions of the signal received by the antenna, aiming to deliver an optimum output level for distribution at all times, despite the changes in receiving conditions.
For this the Televes Corporation has designed and manufactures proprietary MMIC chipsets that allow to reach performance parameters not achievable with regular discrete component designs. Some of the key design elements and performance parameters of these solutions are proprietary and we are not at the liberty to share just anywhere, but believe me we have no "nasty habits" or engage in unfounded marketing gimmickry. Quite honestly we have struggled for decades with the US antenna manufacturers tradition of listing the antennas with "miles" ratings. We just develop solutions aimed at covering a wide variety of scenarios, subject to constant improvement and which prove their worth time and time again all over the world.
One should not think of Televes antenna products in terms of a traditional antenna plus a pre-amplifier. From the ground up our antennas and electronics are designed hand in hand to complement each other and provide peak performance, as a system. Of course our hardware antenna designs are fairly unique as well, many times misunderstood and although they've been copied ad nauseam over the years, remain top performing, compact, and imitated time and time again.
Now, going back to your above post if I may, I will be the first one to agree that amplitude differences in a spectrum analyzer plot are not what we should base our opinions on. I have to assume the OP customer posting this review here does not have access to a proper meter that can provide MER per carrier, which is what we would all like to see.
Actually sometimes when such graphs are brought up our antenna performance is often misinterpreted!. Please, allow me to elaborate. I am sure you'll concur with me than in a system comprised by a signal acquisition antenna and an amplifier, the best system is not necessarily that which has the highest gain. The best system will be the one that is able to deliver a larger number of carriers with the best carrier to noise ratio. Of course we have to be mindful that we are using the right tools so the measurement is not altered by noise floor of the measurement equipment itself, as it quite often happens. In a Televes TForce system the gain is variable and it is adjusted automatically. Very seldom the amplifier, which features a vast dynamic range, is applying maximum gain, so when compared to a preamp with fixed gain it will frequently show a lower amplitude, which is not indicative of a worse performance, quite the contrary. Furthermore an automatically self adjusting system such as this provides far greater flexibility for our antenna solutions to adapt to a much wider range of applications and changing circumstances in a particular install. Of course this is not just any AGC, as any adjustments due to energy entering the band for a number of reasons, need to be done carefully as to not induce decoding artifacts or locking issues in the tuning device. All of this is carefully taken into account in the TForce system. The input signal received by the antenna is not as relevant, as the system will adapt and the installation will continue to perform within quality parameters. As a manufacturer of antennas and provider of solutions this is an important parameter, the number of different scenarios where our different antenna models perform equally or better than competing products. Yet another factor, frequently overseen, is the physical volume occupied by the antenna solution. From a design perspective, as any RF engineer can realize, it really has to be a poor design if an antenna that's far larger still underperforms when compared to one of ours, yet it happens time and time again. With all of the above in mind, we trust we provide very flexible, adaptable, and top performing solutions, with a build quality that quite honestly exceeds what can be found in the market nowadays.
You are of course entitled to your opinion sir, but I would like for it to be educated and based on actual user experience. The offer stands if you wish to test any of our products. I trust you will be pleasantly surprised. After all one would think that a company that develops broadcasting exciters, transmitters, and spectrum analyzers, should know how to design and manufacture a decent enough over the air antenna.
Sincerely
