MIT has long enjoyed a reputation as one of the country's top engineering school. They were one of the first to make videos of undergraduate classroom instruction sessions available at no cost to the public (nothing is free - the tuition payers picked up the tab) through OpenCourseWare. For the past few years, hundreds of videos have been produced and posted that demonstrate various fundamental physical processes. One cool video shows how a Faraday cage keeps an electric field outside the enclosure from affecting the field inside the enclosure where, in this case E=0, and vice versa. A Van de Graaff generator supplies the electric field while a Ben Franklin doll with strands of metal tinsel attached is used as the UUT (the store must have been sold out of Michael Faraday and Robert Van de Graaff dolls). We exploit the same principle in the form of folded sheet metal shields on PCBs all the time to keep RF energy from interfering with other circuitry in the vicinity. Then, entire assemblies are shielded to prevent energy from being radiated to the outside world, as well as to keep outside world energy from influencing the performance of our circuits.

Here are a few of the MIT Tech TV videos that pertain to RF engineering. The entire collection can be accessed on their website: | Engineering (412) | Science (311) | Research (289) | Invention (91) |.