Special Report
I’d lived and breathed technology for so
Cultivating
long from my early days at Granada
Television, Michael Cox Electronics, Alpha
Image and Oxtel that starting a new
company operating in the broadcast
industry seemed an exciting prospect. In
Sx appeal
March 2005 Phabrix was born.
My main pre-occupation in electronic
design had been with the Oxtel Imagestore
range, AES embedding and de-embedding,
format conversion and image processing. If
you think about it, all these factors form
the main beating heart of a lot of the
technology behind broadcast.
PHILLIP ADAMS, managing director and founder of UK based
As the ideas formed, and we grew as a
Phabrix Ltd, reports.
company and talked to more engineers, it
soon became clear that they needed a
tarting a business from scratch is broadcast industry. testing device that wasn’t bench bound - or
S
always a challenge, particularly in Well after I’d sent expensive - and it had to have a toolset to
a business environment as a lot of vegetables make it useful and appealing.
demanding of technological to their maker and So a bit like a Swiss army knife, a
advances as the broadcast industry. Setting lost the battle with product conceived as a simple mix of
up Phabrix has been no different, in fact the rats I thought technologies developed into three test
it’s probably been even more of a challenge it was time to cut instruments in one; an SDI signal generator,
(and a thrill) than Oxtel, the business I my losses and analyser and monitor with an amazing
founded along with two other colleagues in return to array of tools. Given the name of the
1992. This year I completed my 26th year in something I did Phabrix Sx, the Sx appeal being its support
the broadcast industry starting as a know a little about for 3G, it rapidly developed as a hand held
sponsorship student at Granada Television - electronic video and audio testing device capable of
in 1982. engineering. Only supporting 3G-SDI, HD-SDI, SD-SDI video
Of course many of you will know that for a bit of fun I
Phillip Adams.
plus AES - a world first for such a product.
Oxtel was successfully sold to Miranda and told my wife! Of course technology assisted this level of
I guess I thought a period of happy The great thing about experience of multiplicity with the new FPGA’s available.
retirement growing organic vegetables in course is that if you have a little time to These highly sophisticated field
the polytunnel in our garden was the way allow it to brew - days in the polytunnel programmable gate arrays are all part of the
to go. Not content with vegetables we and chasing after escaped piglets - the secret of the Phabrix Sx’s speed and
moved onto rearing rare breed Tamworth building blocks of creativity from all that versatility, and certainly as a key factor
pigs which brought its own challenges! experience settle down and I was thankful when you think of how the formats and
But me an organic farmer! Alas, it for the months out to look again at our standards are changing in the industry.
wasn’t to be and I found myself being lured fascinating industry and what made me Keeping up with these changes requires a
back to electronic engineering and the excited about it. type of fluid technology that is easily
reprogrammed in the field - a feature which
FPGAs excel at.
The importance of this became evident
recently at the HD Masters conference in
London which we sponsored. As always the
healthy debate of HD was still in full swing
highlighting the need for a test instrument
agile across standards. Whether your
flavour of HD is 720p, 1080i or 1080p, 24
or 50 fps, testing of all these multiple
standards is important, particularly when
commissioning. OB trucks and field
engineers too required an instrument that age 76.
was portable, robust and had the toolset to
test all these standards and of course 3G
infrastructure is going in everywhere. If it
was HD at IBC2007 its 3G at this year’s IBC.
With the implementation of many
Continued on P
74 IBE SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2008
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