Fifty years is a long time for a company in any industry. In the microwave industry, for example, a mere handful of companies can trace their roots back one-half century, making this achievement by Weinschel Corp. (Frederick, MD) all the more meaningful. Founded as Weinschel Engineering and now known as MCE/Weinschel Corp., the company has prospered during a period when many companies began and failed, building a strong foundation upon its high-frequency attenuator technology.

Weinschel, which takes its name from founder Dr. Bruno O. Weinschel (see sidebar, "The Founder"), began life in 1952 in Kensington, MD. The company offered the world's first commercially available coaxial attenuators, and quickly established a solid reputation for the quality of its attenuator products. Within the first half of its history, the firm had already designed and developed comprehensive product lines in fixed attenuators, continuously variable attenuators, step attenuators, motorized step attenuators, resistive power splitters, terminations, coaxial connectors, and adapters. In support of its products, the company also set standards for attenuation and power measurements, including more than 60 technical articles in the 1978-1979 catalog.

That measurement expertise, combined with the variety of components developed at Weinschel, led to the development of proprietary measurement tools, such as attenuation-measurement and power-meter-calibration instruments, which would eventually be offered to the general public as commercial products, such as the model VM-3 an VM-7 attenuator and signal-generator calibrators and the later model VM-24 signal-generator calibrator (see MicroWaves, May 1982, Cover). The VM-7 was an advanced 30-MHz receiver (Rx) with −110-dBm sensitivity and 110-dB wideband dynamic range. The VM-24, which combined six measurement instruments including a frequency counter, signal source, and power meter, operated from 0.01 to 18 GHz.

In August 1986, Dr. Weinschel agreed to sell the company to the British company Lucas Industries, Inc. The company had grown to 259 employees by that time, working within a 50,000-sq.-ft. facility set on 19 acres in Gaithersburg. Lucas would acquire other American electronics companies, including Aul, EPSCO, and Zeta.

Weinschel would experience relative stability for approximately a decade following the Lucas acquisition. The company added to its component lines, offering higher-power fixed coaxial attenuators and terminations to 500 W and 40 GHz; continuously variable, manual, and programmable step attenuators; power dividers; directional couplers; coaxial adapters; blind-mate connector systems; phase shifters; and custom subsystems. In 1994, Weinschel Corp.'s Quality Management system was approved to ISO 9001, EN29001, BS5750-Part 1, and ANSI/ASQC Q9001-1994 standards.

But much would change in 1995, a period during which the company would change hands twice within a period of months. "Within one 12-month period, we had three different owners: Lucas, Sierra Technologies, and MCE Technologies," notes Bob Stephens, Weinschel's president and CEO. Lucas had chosen to focus on its core business groups in aerospace systems and subsystems, and to sell off its component subsidiaries, such as Weinschel.

The Weinschel that emerged under MCE Technologies (Fig. 1) remains very diversified in terms of product lines, regions, number of customers, types of customers, markets (military, commercial, mobile, satellite, etc.), and applications (see sidebar, "MCE At A Glance"). "We have maintained the foundations of the company, which is the coaxial attenuators," notes Jimmy Dholoo, vice president of engineering, "but we have expanded our technologies and product lines." Examples of the company's responsiveness to changing technical requirements are its lines of low-intermodulation (IM) attenuators and its patented blind-mate connectors with flush-mounted contacts, which are capable of operating to 50 GHz. Dholoo and his engineering team regularly set new standards for attenuation products, introducing novel developments such as a DC-to-40-GHz, 20-W attenuator that is currently unavailable from any other supplier.