In recent years there has been much discussion about cable free seismic data acquisition systems for the oil and gas exploration on land. Most of these discussions has been focused on the weights of the systems, battery management and whether real-time quality control is possible when using recording systems with extra large channel counts.

Cable free seismic acquisition also becomes mandatory for regions with extreme topography (rivers, lagoons, jungle, marsh areas, mountains, canyons, etc.) where access is very difficult and often very dangerous. In addition there are several large cities, roads, highways and numerous densely populated towns where for many years, 2D and 3D cabled seismic projects have engendered social unrest with resulting high levels of damage to and theft of the seismic acquisition equipment.

As we move towards 5G, bandwidth demand is exponentially increasing due to the number of connected devices and subscribers, and the extremely growing demand for traffic.

Although high bandwidth requirement can directly be supported by resorting to an increased spectrum usage, the availability of very large chunks of spectrum is critical especially in cities. Moreover, operators don’t want, and often cannot, reorganize their frequency plans in order to liberate wider frequency bands and higher bandwidth spectrum.

We conceived and developed a microwave modem able to generate a very large number of microwave carriers, allowing for an interesting increase in link throughput. While traditional microwave radios use monolithic channels of 112MHz or 224MHz, and do channel aggregation in the analog domain, our modem does massive aggregation of carriers all in digital. Trunk radios require highly complex hardware filters and branching units to combine RF carriers at the final microwave frequency, our modem does it all in baseband, in a single full-outdoor unit. Furthermore, the number of aggregated channels is impressive, going far beyond typical 8+0 setup to achieve a record 128+0.