News | RACOM - Part 4

RACOM tries to do as much as possible in-house so that it is not dependent on third parties and has control over the quality and delivery times for its equipment.

As our production volumes are constantly increasing, we have higher requirements for the production of mechanical parts of our products. The existing mechanical manufacturing facility has been utilized to the maximum and there was no more space to accommodate additional CNC and other machines that are necessary for the production of mechanical parts of our products. Therefore, we had to handle part of our production in cooperation.

RACOM has owned the land and the project to build a new facility for several years. Since everything indicates that the demand for our products will continue in the future and we have other products in development that the market is eagerly awaiting, we have decided to start construction of a new facility for mechanical production in January 2022.

The contract for the construction was signed on January 28, 2022, 4 weeks before the war in Ukraine started. Despite all the negative circumstances, we decided to start the construction and in March the first excavators went on site. We managed to complete the construction on a slightly increased budget and on schedule.

On October 24, 2022 we took over the finished building. Nowadays we consider it a small miracle that the construction, including the final work on the surrounding land, was completed within 7 months. In November we moved everything to the new premises and since December all mechanical production is running here.

We now have 1,600 m² of space available, so we have sufficient reserve for the future. The factory meets the most modern requirements. Among other things, there is an air conditioning system that keeps the internal temperature in the production area within the range of +/-3 ^oC. This allows us to produce microwave filters and duplexers with an accuracy of thousandths of mm.

The new building is only 1 km away from our headquarters, so there are no logistical problems either. The land on which our new production facility stands is large enough to allow us to expand further if necessary.

We believe that our investment of 2.8 million EUR makes a lot of sense and will soon be visible in the quality and availability of our products.

RACOM is pleased to announce the launch of the third generation M!DGE cellular router. Our cellular routers are mainly used for data communication in SCADA & Telemetry applications in critical infrastructure for Power and Water, Oil & Gas and other industries. They are also suitable for many other applications where high reliability and 24/7 service are required, such as POS, ATM, Security, etc.

The M!DGE3 was introduced at the ‘RACOM Partner Meeting’ in Prague in September 2022 and is now officially launched. The firmware of this even more powerful router is based on the RipEX2 radio modem, so it has the same fully responsive web interface. The M!DGE3 provides more interfaces including SFP and only one HW model covers frequency bands worldwide.

M!DGE cellular routers have been on the market since 2012 (M!DGE2 since 2018) and have proven themselves in thousands of industrial installations in dozens of countries around the world. M!DGE together with RipEX radio modems offers an unrivalled solution for combining mobile and licensed UHF/VHF radio in one hybrid network.

M!DGE2 remains in our portfolio and it is up to customers which model they choose. We are confident that the M!DGE3 will be as successful as the previous generation and will soon find its place in the market. The first dozens of M!DGE3 units have already been successfully installed in EVN in Vietnam.

Please be advised that the newly discovered critical vulnerability in the OpenSLL with identifiers CVE-2022-3786 and CVE-2022-3602 does not affect any of the RACOM products, as we are using a version of OpenSSL lower than 3.0.

About a year ago we informed you about the tough situation on the components market. At that time, we hoped that the situation would soon return to normal and that our production would be running smoothly by now. We had no idea how wrong we were…

Fortunately, we are managing to solve the problems and our production is still running, but we consider it fair to inform you openly about the current situation, which is +/- the same for all manufacturers.

In addition to shaky economy because of Covid that we described in June 2021, other factors have been added that no one had any idea about a year ago.

Since February this year, the war in Ukraine, with its associated energy crisis, has affected us. This is hitting the whole of Europe and driving up prices across the board. Inflation in the European Union exceeds 10% (18% in the Czech Republic). All material inputs and operating costs such as electricity, gas, etc. are tens of percent more expensive.

Another, much more serious problem that we have to overcome is the shortage of components of all kinds. Manufacturers are behaving in a completely unpredictable way. It is common for delivery dates that have been confirmed for more than a year to be extended by another year just before delivery, or simply to be announced that the specific part has been discontinued.

Component manufacturers often point to shortages of primary materials such as silicon, tantalum powder, etc. For these reasons, they limit the product range. Therefore, it happens that parts that are not in stock will not be available for a long time. Getting trustworthy information and firm delivery dates is almost impossible today.

There is no choice but to buy on the open market at the last minute with all the risks described in our news ‘Fake components’. Unfortunately, the situation on the open market has also gotten much worse. Manufacturers are hardly able to supply their direct customers, distributors’ warehouses are empty for a long time. A year ago, it was still possible to find parts in quantities of thousands, today it is difficult to find them in tens of pieces, regardless of price.

Thanks to RACOM’s in-house development and production, we can respond in part by replacing missing components where possible. This is usually not done without redesigning PCB boards and time-consuming testing. Since our products have superior technical parameters due to, among other things, the use of specific types of components and chips, replacement is often not possible.

Thanks to the experience and enormous efforts of our staff, we manage to keep our production running and deliver our products on acceptable dates at fair prices. We hope that we can continue to do so and that the situation will gradually improve.

We apologize in advance for any problems. However, you can see from the above examples that reputable manufacturers are not having an easy time of it today.

In early September we organized another ‘RACOM Partner Meeting’, where our most important partners from all over the world meet to exchange experiences and learn about news in RACOM.

As a lot of water has passed since the last meeting in 2018, this year’s meeting was extremely popular and was finally attended by 132 participants representing 57 companies from 33 countries from all continents. If it weren’t for the problems with visa processing and ticket prices, there would have been a lot more of us in Prague.

This year’s meeting was held in the beautiful refectory of the Dominican Monastery in Prague. After hearing a short organ concert in the adjacent St. Giles Church, we took a historic tram to the second part of the program in the Strahov Monastery brewery. After dinner, we enjoyed a walk along the Royal Route through Prague at night via Hradčany and Charles Bridge to Old Town Square, where the participants were accommodated.

During the official part of the program, in addition to news in all our product lines — Radio modems, Cellular routers and Microwave links, we introduced the new members of our management team who are participating in leading the company in the direction set by its founders in 1989.

Lunch was followed by presentations of our projects given in an unusual interview format. In a relaxed atmosphere, the participants learned how RACOM contributed to a wedding in Mexico, or how our partners from Norway were surprised that we refused to sell them one of our first radio modems in 1998 without training, even though they had personally come for it.

The afternoon and evening continued in an informal atmosphere, with partners exchanging experiences with each other and taking advantage of the presence of RACOM development staff to get information directly from our kitchen. The expert discussions continued during the Friday workshops.

On the occasion of the installation of the 10,000th RipEX radio modem in the CFE network in Mexico, our partner Solstand received an jubilee piece of RipEX in the form of a cake.

Most of the participants, especially who came from far away (New Zealand, Australia, Philippines, Colombia, Peru…), took advantage of our offer to attend the training and tour our production facilities, spending the whole week in the Czech Republic.

Many thanks to all our partners for their participation and we look forward to the next meeting.

Covid’s restrictions have finally eased and so we were able to attend several conferences and exhibitions in the first half of this year and after a two-year gap we were finally able to meet our customers face to face.

In March, we were in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for the UTCAL Summit 2022. UTCAL brings together leaders from energy companies with representatives from regulators, research institutes, industry, suppliers and key domestic and international experts.

This year, in addition to our booth at UTCAL, we delivered two presentations: ‘Reliable Communication in SCADA Networks with Next Generation IP Radio Modems’ and ‘High Performance Radio Networks’. Both were well attended and met with excellent response.

In May we had a booth at Distributech in Dallas, USA. Although the event was postponed from its original January date to May, this did not affect attendance. Our booth was busy all the time with both existing and new customers and our experts were occupied from morning to night. Traditionally, customers from Latin America also travel to Distributech, so we took the opportunity to meet our major distributors from Mexico and Brazil.

In June we attended two events — Futuretec in the Czech Republic and ‘RACOM in Morocco’.

Futuretec is a traditional conference for Czech ISPs. We have traditionally attended this conference, and in addition to our booth, we also have presentations. This year we talked about the status of development of our new link for the 80 GHz band, for which the Czech market is eagerly waiting, so it is no wonder that the hall was filled to the last seat. The second, purely technical, presentation ‘How to run >50 PtP Gigabit FDD links in freebands’ attracted a large number of listeners too.

RACOM’s Radio modems and Cellular routers are also successful in the North African market, so in June we organised a two-day event together with our partner in Morocco, inviting local customers. In addition to representatives of our traditional customer, RADEEF, the electricity distributor, representatives of other energy companies and other businesses also came to Casablanca, and we are confident that the number of our products installed in Morocco and surrounding countries will continue to grow.

The Webinar ‚Next generation Radio modems‘ we delivered on 9th June 2022 was really successful. We finally had more than 300 participants from 56 countries.

As the attendees were really from all over the world, the idea of having four sessions for different time zones and one session in Spanish in addition to English worked very well.

If you couldn’t participate in live session or if you want to return to it, the full recording is accessible on RACOM YouTube channel, both in English and Spanish.

You can learn there about the latest trends in VHF/UHF Radio modems, especially:

Data speed and Network throughput
Static and Dynamic routing on Radio channel
Necessity of different protocols on Radio channel
Other state-of-the features like Security, QoS etc.

We thank all attendees for their participation, the questions they had, and we look forward to seeing you at our next Webinars.

Webinar recording in English

Webinar recording in Spanish

You are welcome to join us at our Webinar on 9th June 2022 to learn about the latest trends in VHF/UHF Radio modems.

Next generation Radio modems are full-powered IP Routers with plenty of interfaces where VHF/UHF, Cellular, Fiber, Ethernet and Serial are integrated into just one box and can back up and complement each other.

Among others things, you will learn about:

Data speed and Network throughput
Static and Dynamic routing on Radio chanel
Necessity of different protocols on Radio channel
Other state-of-the features like Security, QoS etc.

We will discuss how these new advanced capabilities improve the reliability and security of modern Smart Grid and SCADA networks for mission-critical applications.

Our experts will be ready to reply your questions at the end of this 45 min. webinar.

To make your participation as convenient as possible, the webinar will be organized in four sessions for different time zones.

Date: June 9, 2022

04:00 GMT — Australia, New Zealand, East Asia

Examples of local times:

Auckland 16:00
Sydney 14:00
Perth 12:00
Malaysia 12:00
Jakarta 11:00

08:30 GMT — Europe, Middle East, Africa

Examples of local times:

Central Europe 10:30
United Kingdom, Portugal 09:30
Morocco 09:30
Egypt, South Africa 10:30
UAE 12:30

14:30 GMT — LATAM (in Spanish)

Examples of local times:

Mexico, Peru, Panama 09:30
Sao Paulo 11:30
Lisbon 15:30
Madrid 16:30

16:30 GMT – North and Central Americas, Caribbean

Examples of local times:

Los Angeles 11:30
Dallas 12:30
Chicago 13:30
New York 14:30

Looking forward to meeting you soon!