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4 of the December 2019 homepage archives.  Friday 20 Thursday 19 Wednesday 18 Tuesday 17 Monday 16 Sunday 15 Friday 13  This RCA advertisement from a 1948 issue of Radio−Craft magazine packed a lot of meaning to American citizens who had recently experienced the trials, tribulations, and ultimately victories of World War II. Company president David Sarnoff, a well-known electronic communications industry titan before the war, served under a special commission as a Brigadier General in the U.S. Army during WWII to oversee radio communications. He was very familiar with the tragedy of communism and socialism, having experienced its ruinous philosophy. Hitler and his minions forbade citizens, under threat of imprisonment or worse, from listening to radio lest they learn of the war's progress or of the freedoms experienced in other parts of the world. Propaganda via radio was a daunting weapon for and against all engaged nations, and even some Allied governments outlawed both transmitters and receivers ...
 The November 2019 issue of Astronomy magazine included an interview with Apollo 12 moon-walking astronauts Alan Bean and Pete Conrad. It is the 50th anniversary of the world's second manned excursion to the moon's surface on November 19, 1969. Amongst the science experiments and tasks to be performed was the deployment of a plutonium fuel cell that would power the equipment remaining on the surface after the Lunar Module blasted off. Most of the gear had been set up without incident, but the fuel rod got stuck inside its transport cylinder. None of that science gear would be of any use with out a power supply. After unsuccessfully trying to free the rod without risking damage, it finally came down to whacking it with one of those infamous $400 NASA hammers to get it out. Bean's comment to Houston upon completion was, "Don't come to the Moon without a hammer."
 RF Cafe typically receives 8,000-15,000 website visits each weekday and about half that on weekends. RF Cafe is a favorite of engineers, technicians, hobbyists, and students all over the world. With more than 7,000 pages in the Google search index, RF Cafe returns in favorable positions on many types of key searches, both for text and images. New content is added on a daily basis, which keeps the major search engines interested enough to spider it multiple times each day. Items added on the homepage often can be found in a Google search within a few hours of being posted. I also re-broadcast homepage items on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you need your company news to be seen, RF Cafe is the place to be. Banner advertising begins at $175/month ...
 RF Cascade Workbook 2018 is the next phase in the evolution of RF Cafe's long-running series, RF Cascade Workbook. It is a full-featured RF system cascade parameter and frequency planner that includes filters and mixers for a mere $45. Built in MS Excel, using RF Cascade Workbook 2018 is a cinch and the format is entirely customizable. It is significantly easier and faster than using a multi-thousand dollar simulator when a high level system analysis is all that is needed. An intro video takes you through the main features ...
 With more than 780 custom-built symbols, this has got to be the most comprehensive set of Visio Stencils available for RF, analog, and digital system and schematic drawings! Every object has been built from scratch to fit proportionally on the provided A- and B-size drawing page templates (you can use your own page if preferred). Components are provided for equipment racks (EIA and ETSI) and test equipment, system block diagrams and conceptual drawings, and for schematics ...
 This assortment of custom-designed themes by RF Cafe includes T-Shirts, Mouse Pads, Clocks, Tote Bags, Coffee Mugs and Steins, Purses, Sweatshirts, and Baseball Caps. Choose from amazingly clever "We Are the World's Matchmakers" Smith chart design or the "Engineer's Troubleshooting Flow Chart." My "Matchmaker's" design has been ripped off by other people and used on their products, so please be sure to purchase only official RF Cafe gear. My markup is only a paltry 50¢ per item - Cafe Press gets the rest of your purchase price. These would make excellent gifts for husbands, wives, kids, significant others, and for handing out at company events or as rewards for excellent service. It's a great way to help support RF Cafe. Thanks.
 RF Cafe's raison d'être is and always has been to provide useful, quality content for engineers, technicians, engineering managers, students, and hobbyists. Part of that mission is offering to post applicable job openings. HR department employees and/or managers of hiring companies are welcome to submit opportunities for posting at no charge (of course a gratuity will be graciously accepted). 3rd party recruiters and temp agencies are not included so as to assure a high quality of listings. Please read through the easy procedure to benefit from RF Cafe's high quality visitors ...
 BAW is "new technology?" "IoT building blocks include sensors that use quartz crystals. Discrete clocking and quartz crystal devices used to achieve wireless connections can be costly, time-consuming, and complicated to develop, however, and are often susceptible to environmental stress in factory automation or automotive applications. A new technology called bulk acoustic wave (BAW) makes it possible to create simpler, smaller MCU designs while increasing overall performance and lowering costs. BAW can enable the next generation of industrial and telecommunication applications by changing how we approach system designs today. BAW consists of a piezoelectric material sandwiched between two electrodes that converts electrical energy to mechanical-acoustical energy, and vice versa ..."
 "Here are a few tips for developing documentation that decrease the pain for developers and improve the quality of the documentation. Writing documentation is not the most exciting endeavor an engineer can embark on. It's often boring, time consuming, and there are so many more interesting things that could be done. It sometimes amaze me that development projects are documented so poorly - if they are even documented at all. Documentation is meant to help preserve important concepts and information about the development cycle. This information could be used to get up to speed on the product, make decisions about updates and changes, or even to prove that proper procedures ..."
 "The Netherlands-China Low Frequency Explorer (NCLE) is a prototype radio telescope built to record weak radio signals from a period just following the Big Bang, called the Dark Ages. These signals are blocked by the Earth's atmosphere, which is why the telescope was placed on a satellite and brought to a location behind the moon. With this satellite, called QueQiao, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) has been navigating a lunar lander that has been driving around the back of the moon since early 2019. The Netherlands-China Low Frequency Explorer was developed in the Netherlands by Radboud University (Nijmegen), ASTRON (Dwingeloo) and the ISISpace company (Delft) ..."
 "Researchers at the University of Delaware have created a high-electron mobility transistor with record-setting properties, including record low gate leakage current (a measure of current loss), a record high on/off current ratio (the magnitude of the difference of current transmitted between the on state and off state) and a record high current gain cutoff frequency (an indication of how much data can be transmitted with a wide range of frequencies). This transistor could be useful for higher bandwidth wireless communication systems. For a given current, it can handle more voltage and would require less battery life than other devices of its type. Yuping Zeng, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Delaware and her team of researchers has created a high-electron mobility transistor, a device that amplifies and controls electrical current, using gallium nitride (GaN) with indium aluminum-nitride as the barrier on a silicon substrate. The results were published in the journal Applied Physics Express. "
 "Murata has developed the first multi-layer ceramic capacitor with a maximum capacitance of 0.1 μF. The GRM011R60J104M, measures 0.25 x 0.125 mm and is available in a 0804 footprint. Mass production of this new product is scheduled to begin in 2020. As smartphones supporting 5G become more widespread and devices such as wearable devices become increasingly multi-functional and more compact, the demand for smaller and higher density electronic circuitry is growing. Among the components employed in this circuitry, multi-layer ceramic capacitors are essential for electronic devices and are used for a wide range of applications ..."
 "Using a clever technique that causes unruly crystals of iron selenide to snap into alignment, Rice University physicists have drawn a detailed map that reveals the "rules of the road" for electrons both in normal conditions and in the critical moments just before the material transforms into a superconductor. In a study online this week in the American Physical Society journal Physical Review X (PRX), physicist Ming Yi and colleagues offer up a band structure map for iron selenide, a material that has long puzzled physicists because of its structural simplicity and behavioral complexity. The map, which details the electronic states of the material, is a visual summary of data gathered from measurements of a single crystal of iron selenide as it was cooled to the point of superconductivity ..."
 Not sure how I missed this, but on July 21th,
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