This interview digs into a very practical bottleneck in rugged wireless gear: once you push a mobile hotspot into HPUE/Power Class 1 transmit levels, the RF power amplifier heat load grows fast, and the product usually turns into a heavy “metal brick” to stay stable. Frore Systems shows how Sonim’s MegaConnect integrates three AirJet Mini solid-state active cooling modules so a higher-power 5G hotspot can remain pocketable while still serving as a team Wi-Fi node in remote coverage zones. https://www.froresystems.com/
The key point is efficiency: Class 1/HPUE amplifiers are often quoted around the teens in percent efficiency, meaning most battery energy becomes heat rather than radiated power. AirJet changes the packaging trade-off by moving heat with high back-pressure airflow in a thin, fanless module, letting Sonim shrink the thermal solution while keeping vents and airflow paths aimed at the PA and the main PCB heat sources to manage that heat.
From a networking angle, MegaConnect is framed around FirstNet MegaRange operation (Band 14/n14) plus modern Wi-Fi, so the value is uplink reliability and coverage extension rather than peak downlink headlines. In the field, that translates to sending live video, uploading incident data, and creating a local hotspot bubble for nearby devices, while the thermal design reduces throttling and helps the enclosure target IP53-type dust and water-splash resilience at the edge.
Seen in the context of booth demos at CES Las Vegas 2026, it’s a nice reminder that radio “range” features are frequently limited by watts, not marketing. When cooling is compact enough to carry, a responder can walk the perimeter and keep a higher-power uplink available for the rest of the crew, without hauling a separate amplifier or a huge heatsink pack.
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