When 51-year-old Agilent engineer Skip Crilly began constructing his own SETI research project near his home in Spokane, Washington, he didn’t expect to find the elusive “Wow” signal. But an epiphany from the blue is exactly what he got.
With the help of friends, Crilly combined 7 donated satellite dishes, relaying the signals via microwave to his home-built FPGA-based FFT processor board.
He developed a technique for combining antenna signals in his SETI-oriented Mabuhay network, that utilized complex signal processing techniques. He refined his phased array antenna techniques and realized they could be applied to a variety of applications right here on Earth.
Crilly called his SETI project “Mabuhay“, a friendly greeting (translated “Long Live..”), spoken in the Philippines. His American parents raised him in the Philippines. He chose the name “Mabuhay” because of its friendly meaning. (Plus, ET civilizations have to “live long” to communicate with other ETs.)
Mabuhay began through donations. Seven parabolic dish antennas with diameters of 3 m, 3 m, 3.7 m, 3.7 m, 3.7 m, 4.6 m, and 6.1 m were located at four sites in Washington and Idaho. A steerable 4.6 m dish points to “certain peculiar” places in the sky. The remaining non-steerable antennas will search about one degree of the sky around a fixed declination. For several hours a day, five of the antennas will be pointing close to the plane of the Milky Way galaxy. They monitor frequencies around 2.8 GHz at each site, using two orthogonal polarization feeds per antenna.
The Agilent engineer had researched radio frequency technology behind Navy radars, Ethernet data management, and applied it to networking. His Geocities web site, now several years old, documents some of their progress;
“My interest in radio communication started in the Philippines. My Dad showed me how to build radios and antennas, and my Mom made sure I could find all the radio and antenna parts I needed. That’s how this all started; getting radio parts at Spark Radio and Electrical Supply in Quiapo, a district in Manila.
The FPGA-based FFT processor board and VHDL code is progressing well, thanks to the generosity of my employer and the enormous help I’m getting here from my friends Rich and Shanuj. We have the parts we need to load the PC boards when we get them back. Each PCI card will perform eight one-million point FFTs in hopefully less than 0.5 second. The system is real time, and loads memory while the previous data is measured. I made an error in a design file and fixed it, and the FFT now has better signal to noise ratio.
“Ray put up a new tower at SCC and a 6 foot dish for the 5.7 GHz microwave link. It’s working very well. I’m almost done with the 35 foot tower at my house to improve that link.Several 2.8 GHz Low Noise Amplifiers have been built and tested. Agilent Technologies (split from Hewlett-Packard) ATF-36077 transistors are being used. Measured amplifier noise temperature is 34 Kelvins. A total of fourteen amplifiers need to be built and tested.
At a central processing site, seventy simultaneous real-time antenna beams will be formed. Signal processing is performed using a combination of FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) and x86 Processor hardware and software.
Effectively, we hope to have an overall search system that is roughly equivalent to having about ten seven-meter dishes pointing in ten directions. Each pointing direction will have a four million channel receiver “listening” (with 0.5 Hz bandwidth per channel).”
The “Wow” signal that Mabuhay Networks, came up with was Crilly’s insight into the application of these signal processing techniques. Crilly’s discovery may “change the physics of Wi-Fi“.
Crilly founded Vivato. Mabuhay Networks was founded in December 2000 and became known as Vivato, which officially launched in November, 2002. Industry veterans Ken Biba, who cofounded Xircom, Phil Belander, a former executive at Aironet and Xircom and Agilis and HP/Agilent veterans Skip Crilly, Bob Conley and Jim Brennan are the principles.
Vivato’s phased array antennas and signal processing techniques are revolutionizing Wi-Fi. Vivato extends the range of Wi-Fi from 1000 feet to a mile or more - using ordinary Wi-Fi clients built into laptops and PDAs and available everywhere for $40.
The cost and management of Wi-Fi deployments will be dramatically simplied and range dramatically extended with Vivato’s phased-array technique.
A Spokesman-Review story reviews the birth of Vivato:
“The moment of truth for Skip Crilly and associate Bob Conley occurred exactly two years ago, when the two men met in Conley’s Liberty Lake basement. Together, the two engineers at Agilent’s Liberty Lake site had spent 47 years with the company. All Crilly and Conley had was a good idea, plus the backing of Jim Brennan, another Agilent engineer who saw potential in the idea.
The three realized none of them had the business skills to lead the company. Conley’s only true business experience was teenage summer work at the White Elephant on North Division.
Crilly, on a hunch, looked up an old college fraternity mate, Ken Biba, who had taken a number of tech jobs in California.
Crilly and Conley sent e-mail to Biba, outlining the idea. After about a month, Biba’s next message back to Crilly read: “You are an evil person.”
“It was like standing on a beach and deciding to set off with just a wooden raft,” Crilly said about launching Vivato.
Today, 60 engineers work in Spokane. Getting the money proved relatively easy. In early 2001 Biba landed an initial investment of more than $2 million. Over the next few months, he pulled in another $20 million, raising a lot of eyebrows after US Venture Partners, one of Silicon Valley’s major venture capital firms, became a key investor.”
Vivato’s Wi-Fi switches, deliver high-speed packets of data over distances up to four miles. Unlike cell-phone towers that transmit in all directions, the Vivato devices transmit data in a beam array covering a 100-degree-wide sweep.
Whether Vivato’s phased array Wi-Fi antenna can “rewrite the physics of 802.11 networking” remains to be seen. Meanwhile Skip Crilly and friends are scanning the sky. The elusive “Wow” seems tantilizingly close.
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