This series features products that won the Radio World Best of Show Award at the 2026 IBC Show. Winners were chosen for their innovation, feature set, cost efficiency and performance in serving the industry.
RFE Smart Link is an integrated remote site management solution that evolves passive monitoring into active, autonomous edge control.
The system acts as an intelligent “local brain” installed at remote transmission sites, integrating Davicom’s Cortex 360 unit.
It operates on an industrial Linux-based platform with electromagnetic and electrostatic discharge (EM/ESD) immunity across extreme temperature ranges.
Smart Link independently executes operational logic, manages site emergencies and triggers physical I/O automation even during network blackouts.
The core technical architecture is based around the Cortex 360 unit, which features high-resolution analog inputs, digital inputs, status lines and programmable virtual gates and logic schedulers.
“This hardware design provides a highly flexible layout allowing for completely tailor-made automations customized to the specific functional requirements of any broadcast facility,” RFE says.
Then the operational algorithms and control logic embedded within Smart Link are designed by RFE. Its software integration layer unifies RFE primary transmission equipment with third-party site infrastructure, including auxiliary sensors, generator controllers and climate hardware, into a centralized ecosystem.
The platform performs real-time environmental sensing and automated site climate control to safeguard transmission hardware. By tracking shelter ambient temperature and humidity levels, it automatically alternates dual air conditioning units on a scheduled six-hour cycle to equalize mechanical wear and extend equipment operational lifespan.
In the event of extreme heat spikes, the system overrides routine duty scheduling to engage both cooling units simultaneously, preventing thermal shutdown and keeping rack-mounted transmitters within thermal operating limits.
For power management and signal continuity, Smart Link provides continuous tracking of AC mains voltage, UPS batteries and backup diesel generator status. It interfaces with RFE’s DSDE-RF redundancy controllers to manage automated or manual switching across 1+1 transmitter configurations (TX-A and TX-B), executing high-speed changeovers during primary transmitter or RF power stage failures to maintain uninterrupted signal delivery.
Network integration and remote management are maintained via a built-in web server supporting industrial protocols including SNMP (v1, v2c, v3), ModBus RTU/TCP and secure HTTP/HTTPS.
Users can monitor site telemetry, manually trigger General Purpose Relays (GPIO), view historical log data and reconfigure site logic remotely using web browsers or dedicated iOS and Android mobile apps.
