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In March 1990 Jotax won an order to design and develop a modem from first principles to deliver compressed video images within tight time constraints across the PSTN. The French version of the modem is pictured above.
The parent company of TVX (Modern Alarms) had 180,000 installations that would ultimately require updating with the new equipment. This meant that the design not only had to be rugged but it needed to be flexible enough to interface with all of the differing hardware types already in the field.
Work was carried out in collaboration with Edinburgh University on the video data capture and compression technique. However, all of the hardware for sending, receiving and collating images prior to display on a PC platform, was the responsibility of Jotax.
To collate the incoming video information banks of modems were configured in racks operating in parallel, with eight modems to a rack. The incoming information was error corrected, sorted, and presented to an operator in good time for video picture analysis.
During this period the system was introduced into France, Belgium, Germany, Hong Kong, USA and Japan. Location work in Belgium and France was undertaken to tailor the system to their networks.
Jotax designed, manufactured and delivered pre-production hardware for the complete communications package.
At the point where our involvement in the project came to an end production was up at 2000 modems per month (mixed surface mount and conventional technology) and 160 data collation units had been delivered, primarily to the US.
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