About Us

Our History

The company was founded in 1988 by Leon Ricardi as a consulting company, LJR, Inc., in Torrance, CA. In 1997 the name was changed to better reflect the antenna design and manufacturing work we were beginning to perform. We have changed locations a few times as we required more manufacturing space. The company is entirely employee owned and financed. The present owners have been with the company since 1991.Optim Microwave, Inc. is now located in Camarillo, California. We occupy a 15,000 square foot facility where we do the design, assembly, and testing of microwave antennas and components. Most of our products are for the commercial market. We have around 20 employees.

Our Resources

In addition to commercially available software, we have our own suite of proprietary RF modeling software which we use heavily for the design of antennas and microwave components. We have several programs, each of which can analyze a specific type geometry. We use these programs as the computing engines of optimization programs to perform many of our designs.Our heavy use of optimization led to our name, Optim Microwave. We use EM modeling software from CST to model geometries which are not well suited to our own in-house software. We have a large farm of computers, a few of which are shown in the photograph to the right, which perform the optimizations 24 hours a day.

Our Future

Over the years we have designed and developed many antenna types including phased arrays, reflectors, and lenses. Our present area of expertise is the design of specialized antennas for the in-motion satellite communication market. We sell a number of ku-band and ka-band antennas for the marine market which range in size from 11 inches to 5 feet in diameter for receive-only or transmit/receive applications. We also have a number of low-profile antenna designs which are used on aircraft and ground vehicles. Additionally, we design and manufacture many related components for these antennas (diplexers, OMTs, adapters, polarizers). In the cases where the technology is unique, we have pursued and received patents.We are actively researching new antenna designs. These efforts are driven by the needs of our customers.

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