Inducted in May 1996 for pioneering work in the development of digital satellite communications technology.
S. Joseph Campanella is a life-long resident of the Washington, DC area. He earned his BSEE (Magna Cum Laude) from Catholic University of American in 1950, his MSEE from the University of Maryland in 1957, and received the DEE degree from Catholic University of America in 1965. In this early phase of his career he worked in a very broad spectrum of disciplines involving sonar, fire-control, audio and EM wave signature classification, signal processing, communications, and speech source coding (vocoders). He became Vice President of Electronics Research at Melpar in 1963 and held that position until 1967.
In early 1967, Campanella joined the start-up of COMSAT Laboratories where he rose to the position of Vice President and Chief Scientist. A first major accomplishment was the development of the adaptive echo canceller which is now used worldwide in all modern telephone systems. He next led a team to develop the first digital speech interpolation systems which, by filling in the pauses in two-way conversation, increased the capacity of a telephone circuit by up to 2.5 times without impairing the quality of service. He pioneered development of the 120 Mbit/sec time division multiple access (TDMA) systems now extensively used on geostationary orbit satellites of the Intelsat System for non-satellite-switched and for satellite-switched multi-beam operation. He also designed the ground/space network control system for NASA’s beam hopping Advanced Communications Technology Satellite (ACTS). He next led a program to introduce digital signal processing onboard satellites to demodulate and demultiplex FDMA uplink signals, reorganize and reroute them to downbeams and then multiplex and modulate them to enhance the end-to-end link performance.
Presently he is Chief Technical Officer at WorldSpace, a company designing new satellites for direct digital broadcast to small, low cost radio receivers.
Campanella holds the 1990 IEEE Behn Award in International Communications, is a Fellow of the IEEE, and Associate Fellow of the AIAA, a member of Sigma XI and Phi Eta Sigma. He holds more than 15 patents, has authored more than 70 technical papers and has published four chapters in technical text books and encyclopedias.
Campanella passed away in 2013.
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