Rosenberger presents a new and innovative GPS over Fiber system for applications where coax cannot be used to route the GPS signal to base stations. With more centralized RAN and large-scale DAS applications, there are many cases where the GPS antennas are located too far from the base stations for coaxial losses to be acceptable.
To overcome this issue, the GPS over Fiber system converts the RF signal to light, transmits it over the fiber, and then restores the light to the original RF signal. Working in contrast to the many systems that employ a bulky remote unit – which requires power and separate mounting space – as well as a large master unit encompassing an active GPS splitter, Rosenberger has rethought the process and designed a fiber-optic replacement for the coaxial cable. Instead of a master unit and a remote unit, the system uses an electrooptical converter (E/O converter) at the antenna and an opto-electrical converter (O/E converter) near the base station. By employing this method, the E/O converter becomes a small, compact unit that connects directly to the GPS antenna. The unit is so small that it can even fit within a 1 ½ inch pipe of the kind often used to mount GPS antennas.