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Communications Research Centre (CRC) celebrates its 40th anniversary in 2009. What better time to showcase the "firsts" achieved at CRC laboratories. CRC played an integral role in designing, building and/or testing the technologies and/or hardware that led to the following accomplishments at the national or international level.

	Alouette, 1962	Canadian satellite – designed, built and tested by Defence Research Telecommunications Establishment, the forerunner of CRC – launched into space, making Canada the third nation in space
	Anik-A, 1972	Commercial domestic communications satellite at C-Band
	GaAs-FET, 1973	Space-qualified gallium arsenide field effect transistor amplifier
	SARSAT, 1976	Proof-of-concept test of a satellite system for search and rescue
	Hermes, 1978	Direct-to-home satellite television broadcast; also used for telehealth and tele-education
	Telidon, 1978	Public demonstration of Telidon videotex/teletext system, a forerunner of on-demand access to information found through the Internet today
	Fiber Bragg Gratings, 1978	Discovery of photosensitivity in optical fiber, leading to the development of fiber Bragg gratings
	Broadband Fiber Optics, 1979	Trials of providing telecommunications service to homes over a broadband fiber optic distribution system
	Satellite News Gathering, 1981	Mobile, self-contained satellite news gathering terminal, with capacity for one video and two audio signals
	Cospas-Sarsat, 1982	Rescue using Cospas-Sarsat satellite system
	ARPANET, 1985	International terrestrial connection to ARPANET, predecessor of the global Internet
	HDTV, 1987	Demonstrations of high definition television
	SHARP, 1987	Unmanned airplane flight powered by microwaves from a ground station
	Over-the-air Broadcast Radio, 1990	Demonstration of digital radio
	CRC-COV, 1991	Coverage prediction software to help design single-frequency networks (SFN)
	Internet Radio Broadcast, 1993	Commercial radio broadcast over Internet
	Spectrum Explorer, 1996	Wide band RF spectrum scanning system with direction finding
	Broadband HDTV Demonstration, 1998	Two-way HDTV telemedicine workshop with Japan
	Mobile Broadcasting, 1998	Interactive multimedia mobile broadcasting demonstration platform
	Haughton-Mars, 1999	Video conference between Canadian Arctic and CRC using a 0.5m Ka-Band suitcase terminal
	Mobile Internet, 2000	Internet access/usage in a moving vehicle at Ka-Band
	Software Defined Radio (SDR), 2002	Reference implementation of the Software Communications Architecture (SCA) specification
	WiMAX in Aerostat, 2008	Rapid-deploy aerostat to improve communication coverage, tested for Department of National Defence

Canadian First

World First

North American First

Canadian/Japanese First