Dan Barton, President and CEO, Alive Telecom, lets his passion guide his company.
Alive Telecom, which celebrated its 20th anniversary last month, started out as a service company, first doing broadcast system sweeps and then providing interference studies and rooftop safety analysis, among other services, but Barton didn’t stop there.
“My first love was designing and building antennas, especially on the broadcast side,” Barton said. “After a year or two of just doing service work, I really missed the antenna side of things, making the actual products,” Barton said. “We started getting more involved with antenna work.”
Because Barton and the initial employees of Alive Telecom had come from tenures at Andrew Corporation, they had vast backgrounds in designing and building antennas for multiple markets. The size of the company, now 20 employees, and the varied expertise of the employees, have allowed it to take on many specialized orders for a wide variety of antennas over the years. 
Sometimes when antenna companies merge or when companies simply change their mindset, some legacy product lines get dropped. Where there is a hole in a product line, Barton sees an opportunity, and Alive Telecom is happy to fill it with a 21st century solution.
Today, Alive Telecom provides customized solutions in addition to supplying and servicing a catalog of telecom products that includes broadcast antennas, in-building DAS, public safety antennas, CBRS and point-to-multipoint antennas. Plus, it offers advanced antenna options that include panel antennas, available in 35, 45, 60, 90 and 120 degree sectors, and pylon style antennas, which are available in omni and directional horizontal patterns.
Barton and Alive Telecom have seen a lot of change in the marketplace over the last two decades. Broadcast transitioned to digital TV and then repacked and vacated the spectrum at 600 MHz. Public safety moved from analog to digital. Distributed antenna systems went from being a niche market, deployed only in transportation hubs and municipal buildings, to a mainstay in every arena and stadium and major office building.
The Citizens Broadband Radio Service is a good fit for Alive Telecom’s products and services, according to Barton. “If John Deere or Amazon want their own private LTE, we can help them set up their campus or their manufacturing facility and make sure they have proper coverage, and also provide the antennas,” he said.
Because of the broadcast repack, broadcasters have had to come up with unique Azimuth patterns to fit into certain markets, especially the top 20 markets. Alive Telecom has been using Simulation Software for 12 years to develop antenna arrays that are lightweight with less wind loading, while providing the same power and performance.
“We’re very open to providing something that’s a little unusual,” Barton said, “if someone needs excessive beam tilt or a little extra null fill or a pattern that has a little scale about the backside cut out, or some other split peanut type thing.”
Three years ago, Alive Telecom became a Global Preferred Vendor for Motorola, and Barton expects public safety DAS will be one of the firm’s biggest growth areas for the next four to six years.
Public safety has a special place in Barton’s heart. He is passionate about designing antennas for public safety, especially DAS, because he is from the south side of Chicago, where there has always been a Barton on the police force, for more than 100 years. Even now, he has family and friends on the City, County and State force.
“It makes me feel good that the police are using a radio system that we’re helping support,” Barton said. “I have a vested interest. I don’t want to hear from a family member that they were in a situation, and their radio didn’t work when they were trying to call for help.”
Alive Telecom provides both commercial wireless DAS and public safety DAS. In fact, last year, it installed two parallel systems, one being commercial wireless and the other an 800 MHz P25 system, in a 14-story, 500,000-square-foot courthouse. Both had to meet Barton’s exacting standards.
“When we do a DAS for public safety, we will develop our own antennas if we don’t feel like there’s an antenna that is the right fit out there,” Barton said.
For more information about Alive Telecom, visit https://alivetele.com.
Reader Interactions