Boston. Wow.
Attending shows in a town like this – legendary historical landmarks, beautiful city skylines, incredible harbor views, and great night life – always presents a challenge because, well, we’re here to work, and not necessarily spend all our time out in the magic of the city.
Add to this the fact that Boston is experiencing an amazing week of perfect temperatures and extremely pleasant late spring weather, and it all adds up to this town being a potentially disastrous venue for us, who so badly need to focus on work.
So it’s a good thing that we look forward to the International Microwave Symposium so much every year, as actually making our way in through the Boston Convention Center doors could prove to be a little tricky. But once we’re inside we remember just how much we love this event.
A couple new products
Industry exhibitions are always so much more fun when there are new products to introduce, and we are fortunate enough to have a couple exciting products with us this year. The mid-year timing of IMS lends itself perfectly to releasing previews of products to come later in the year, so we brought our forthcoming VSG60A vector signal generator and SM200B spectrum analyzer along with us – both due for general availability in Q4 of 2019. Both products were the highlight of the booth for us today, with the two devices working in tandem for a couple of our demos.
Feedback on both devices was overwhelmingly positive, but one surprise for us was the high interest in our new signal generator – maybe even just a bit more than our new spectrum analyzer.
Now this doesn’t mean that the 2 seconds of calibrated I/Q capture at 160 MHz bandwidth provided by the SM200B didn’t catch any eyeballs – it did, and it’s a welcome and much needed addition by those requiring this enhanced analysis capability. And for the users of our 20 GHz analyzer, improvement on this device was music to their ears.
But the deep interest in the agility and flexibility in waveform generation provided by the VSG60A was inspiring! We of course did our due diligence in market research before developing the signal generator, and we based the specs of the device on user feedback – but reception of the device in our booth was considerably more enthusiastic than we imagined it would be, which was fantastic!
Can’t put a price on it
It’s stuff like this feedback that makes trade show attendance invaluable. Nowhere else are you able to bounce your ideas and products off so many talented people in such a short amount of time – it’s like product research in fast forward!
And it’s this very thing that keeps us coming back for more… looking forward to day two!