Kantronics Inc. is busy selling its high-tech communications equipment for use by a utility company in California, hunger-relief workers in Uganda and astronauts – and cosmonauts, for that matter – aboard the International Space Station.

All from a new, modest, 4,000-square-foot sales and engineering office on Sixth Street in Lawrence, 35 years after the company’s founding across town as a technological mecca for ham radio operators.

“We’re still encoding and decoding data, just like we used to,” said Cheryl Seiwald, the company’s president and chief executive officer. “But what we’ve done is change our target market and our business model. :

“I basically turned the company upside down. We’re a startup all over again.”

Kantronics, 3115 W. Sixth St., still has the same seven employees it had when it moved in November from its original home at 1202 E. 23rd St., where expansion projects in the 1990s had allowed the company to carry more than 50 employees and fill orders for more than 2,000 electronics components, mostly used by hobby radio users.

These days, the same technology is employed, only on a smaller scale. Kantronics now markets just seven products, all of which are manufactured, by contract, at S and Y Industries in Winfield.

Two products are proving particularly popular, she said.

The first, known as the Talon Universal Data Controller, is installed on vehicles, pipes or other equipment that call for constant monitoring, Seiwald said. The radio modems send data back to a central point.

So far, customers such as Pacific Gas and Electric, the United Nations World Food Program and NASA have bought the controllers to help keep tabs on workers and operations, for safety reasons.

After years of sluggish sales – while Internet communications continued to cut into the company’s core business – Kantronics last year saw its total sales rise by 20 percent from 2004, Seiwald said.

Now, another new product is starting to gain traction in the market, she said: a controller that is installed on a car, then uses GPS to track where the vehicle goes for as long as 45 days. The user can download the data on a media card, then pump it into a computer to show everything from each address visited to total mileage traveled, all on an Excel spreadsheet.

“That’s going to affect sales for 2006,” she said.