ANTENNAE COULD BE KEY TO FUTURE.

Byline: Jim Erickson Seattle Post-Intelligencer 

When the city of Medina slapped a moratorium on the construction of cellular phone antenna sites in February, local authorities said they were trying to prevent the upscale Bellevue suburb from becoming a forest of bristling wireless communications towers.

Many communities around the country share that concern, and justifiably. Cellular phone companies are finding that customer growth is fast outstripping the capacity of their existing facilities to handle additional call traffic, and the only solution seems to be to add more antenna sites.

With the federal government opening up the airwaves to unbridled wireless competition, scores of PCS, or personal communication services, companies also plan to weave their own transmission networks, potentially compounding what some consider visual blight.

Technology may yet bail out the carriers, some of whom already have resorted to disguising antennae to look like palm trees.

Metawave Communications Corp. of Redmond hopes in September to begin producing so-called ``smart antennae'' that tests show can reduce the number of cell sites by 30 percent to 100 percent - at the same time improving call quality and reducing the number of dropped calls.

With development contributions from cell phone pioneer Doug Reudink, Metawave's Spotlight antenna platform will break into an estimated $4 billion market for cellular and PCS networks.

The Cellular Telephone Industry Association estimates there are 19,000 cell sites in the country today. In four years, that will grow to 30,000. Including PCS, the number of planned new installations may top 100,000, ``and every one is a candidate for a Metawave system,'' said Tom Huseby, the private company's chairman and chief executive officer.

Cellular phone systems blanket a region through an interlocking network of low-powered antennae, each providing a circular coverage pattern - a cell.

Problems start to crop up as users multiply. The frequencies in a given cell site become crowded, increasing interference and cross-talk as cell phones inadvertently intercept signals on nearby frequencies.

Engineers coped for a while by splitting cell site coverage into three 120-degree sectors, allocating a part of the radio spectrum to each and thereby reducing interference by assigning calls on clashing frequencies to different sectors.

But by splitting up the frequencies, the overall capacity of each cell site was reduced. To compensate, carriers were forced to reuse the same limited radio spectrum more often by adding more cell sites covering smaller areas.

Many carriers are fast reaching the limits of the strategy. Also, the sites cost between $500,000 and $1 million, and gaining zoning approval to put up new antenna towers can take more than a year.

Reudink, Metawave's president and chief technical officer, is a Ph.D mathematician and former Boeing technologist and was a top researcher with fabled Bell Laboratories for more than 20 years. In 1991, Reudink joined U S West's mobile phone subsidiary as director of wireless planning, and during his tenure, he continued developing ``multibeam'' antenna systems, work which he had started in the early 1980s while at Bell Labs.

Multibeam platforms are seen as a way to extend the life of existing cellular networks by overcoming the quality/capacity trade-off.

Computer chips and intelligent software manage frequency use on the fly, allocating as many frequencies as possible to the busiest sectors, while at the same time maintaining enough frequency separation to minimize interference.

Until this year, Bell operating companies like U S West were barred by the courts from manufacturing and selling telephone equipment. New Vector, eager to take advantage of smart antennae, released the intellectual property rights to Reudink to spin off the technology.

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Photo: (Color) Tom Huseby, left, and Doug Reudink of Metawa ve Communications are set to begin producing their multibeam platforms in the fall.

Associated Press