Friday 22
Thursday 21
Wednesday 20
Tuesday 19
Monday 18
Software Defined Radio Handbook (Pentek)
14th Edition
 Pentek has published the 14th edition of their
popular "Software Defined Radio Handbook." The download is free, but
you need an account to access it on their website. Written by Pentek vice-president
and cofounder Roger Hosking, it is mostly an infomercial for their products, but
the first dozen pages contain good background information on topics such as sampling,
principles of SDR, and FPGAs. A readily accessible version is available
here
if you do not like creating new accounts ...
 "A 3D printing technique from UC Berkeley
shapes objects all at once rather than layer by layer, allowing for more complex
and smooth objects. A new
light-based 3D-printing approach and machine can fabricate complex
objects in minutes that are smoother and more flexible than what's currently possible.
Dubbed the 'replicator' - a reference to the Star Trek television program - and
developed by researchers at UC Berkeley, the printer uses a ray of light to transform
liquids into objects all at once rather than layer by layer, which is how typical
3D printers create objects. The replicator was a device on the famous program that
would materialize any object on demand ..."
 We hear and read a lot in the news about
the electronic surveillance
carried out by governments - on both foreign entities and civilians. If you think
this is a phenomenon that has only existed since the age of cellphones and the Internet,
you might be interested in this article that appeared in a 1945 issue of the ARRL's
QST magazine. Long before the entire textual content of the Encyclopedia
Britannica could be carried on a USB stick in your pocket - and access virtually
all the information in the world on your iPhone, engineers were developing recording
media to facilitate the capturing and later analysis of over-the-air and wired communications.
They wanted both encrypted and unencrypted conversations. The National Archives
has a huge store of magnetic tapes, vinyl discs ...
 Smiths Interconnect currently has a job opportunity
for an
RF Test Coordinator. Smiths is always looking for curious minds. For new colleagues
who want responsibility and relish a challenge. Those who would like to use their
talents to help make the world safer, healthier, more efficient and more connected.
Job Description: Coordinates and performs the operation, training, maintenance and
continuous improvement of the BTPA RF lab, Compact Antenna Test Range (CATR) &
Environmental Stress Screening (ESS) lab, and the MMW Far-Field (FFR) & Near-Field
Ranges (NFR). Duties & Responsibilities: Utilize engineer drawings, test procedures,
and processes to support Antenna mechanical and test assemblies. Plan performance
schedule for various test and measurement needs to support production schedule and
SII's internal / external customers. Assist Manufacturing Engineering and Test Coordinators ...
 Ha! I've never heard the term "not-spot" before to describe a area with no coverage. "Start-up
UbiquitiLink reckons it’s cracked the challenge of affordable satellite connectivity
to regular handsets through the use of nanosatellites. You can't use traditional
geostationary satellites to fill regular cellular coverage gaps because they're
too expensive and are positioned 35,000 km above the surface of the earth, which
is way further than cellular signals are designed to go and introduces excessive
lag to the signal. An obvious solution is to use satellites at a much lower orbit,
but until now that hasn't been economically viable. UbiquitiLink reckons it has
the answer to this conundrum and went to MWC last week to tell everyone all about
it ..."
 PCB Directory is the largest directory
of Printed Circuit Board (PCB) Manufacturers, Assembly houses, and Design Services
on the Internet. We have listed the leading printed circuit board manufacturers
around the world and made them searchable by their capabilities - Number of laminates
used, Board thicknesses supported, Number of layers supported, Types of substrates
(e.g., material, flexible, rigid), Geographical location, and more ...
Sunday 17
 This very large crossword puzzle will keep
you busy for a while. Since 2000, I have been creating custom
technology-themed crossword puzzles for the brain-exercising benefit and pleasure
of RF Cafe visitors who are fellow cruciverbalists. The jury is out on whether or
not this type of mental challenge helps keep your gray matter from atrophying in
old age, but it certainly helps maintain your vocabulary and cognitive skills at
all ages. A database of thousands of words has been built up over the years and
contains only clues and terms associated with engineering, science, physical, astronomy,
mathematics, chemistry, etc. You will never find a word taxing your knowledge of
a numbnut soap opera star or the name of some obscure village in the Andes mountains.
You might, however, encounter the name of a movie star like Hedy Lamarr ...
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 If
television was "a chinch," in 1953 as this
Radio-Electronic article claims, the world would have had it long before
then. Just like looking up the work-out solutions to a physics problem in the back
of a textbook, a lot of things look simple and obvious once someone else has already
done it. I guess that's not really a fair criticism of this piece since author Aisberg's
goal is to assuage some of the doubts and misconceptions a lot of people had about
the relatively new technology. 1953 is the year that the NTSC formalized its color
TV standard, which , BTW, was careful to accommodate B&W transmissions on the
same channels - similar to how AM-FM stereo and stereo FM radio can coexists with
monaural (mono) broadcasts. Television, in case you are not aware, began as an electromechanical
system with picture frames and shutters, spinning discs, and other Rube Goldberg contraptions ...
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 "Gene Frantz may have been the visionary
for DSP back in the 1970s, but now he thinks we need to turn our attention back
to
analog to tackle the big challenges of artificial intelligence (AI). Previously
a principal technology fellow at Texas Instruments, Frantz is now a professor at
Rice University. He is also the co-founder and chief technology officer at at Octavo
Systems, a fledgling semiconductor-in-package (SiP) company based in Austin, Texas.
Speaking during the launch of Octavo's OSD32MP1 - the company's first SiP based
on the newly announced STMicroelectronics STM32MP1 microprocessor - Frantz told
EE Times that he believes SiP and analog processing will be the future. He said
AI needs a better solution and suggested that we should consider going back to analog
signal processing ..."
 "The undersea West African Cable System links
Africa with Europe. Huawei Marine Networks Company made upgrades. A new front has
opened in the battle between the U.S. and China over control of global networks
that deliver the internet. This one is
beneath the ocean. While the U.S. wages a high-profile campaign
to exclude China's Huawei Technologies Company from next-generation mobile networks
over fears of espionage, the company is embedding itself into undersea cable networks
that ferry nearly all of the world's internet data ..."
 "The aerospace giant Lockheed Martin is working
with Sequans Communications to develop new
LTE for satellite technologies. The two companies are enabling
LTE end user devices to connect directly to geostationary satellites in what they’re
describing as a world-first achievement with wide application. 'Sequans has expertise
adapting LTE technology for special purposes such as this one,' said Scott Landis,
a director at Lockheed Martin, in a press release. 'Sequans engineers modified their
existing LTE chips to enable a new LTE-to-satellite communication specification
developed by Lockheed Martin. LTE to satellite represents an important breakthrough
in mobility and connectivity ..."
 "Researchers from the Moscow Institute of
Physics and Technology teamed up with colleagues from the U.S. and Switzerland and
returned the state of a quantum computer a fraction of a second into the past. They
also calculated the probability that an electron in empty interstellar space will
spontaneously travel back into its recent past. The study is published in Scientific
Reports. 'This is one in a series of papers on the possibility of violating
the second law of thermodynamics. That law is closely related to the notion of the
arrow of time that posits the
one-way direction of time from the past to the future,' said
the study's lead author Gordey Lesovik ..."
 "To keep up with Moore's Law - an observation
made in the 1960s that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles
about every two years - researchers are finding ways to cram as many transistors
as possible onto microchips. The newest trend is 3D transistors that stand vertically,
like fins, and measure about 7 nanometers across - tens of thousands of times thinner
than a human hair. Tens of billions of these transistors can fit on a single microchip,
which is about the size of a fingernail. A modified chemical-etching technique,
called
thermal atomic level etching (thermal ALE), was used to enable
precision modification of semiconductor materials at the atomic level ..."
 "A new 'quantum radio' has been demonstrated that can detect the weakest
signals allowable under quantum mechanics. Researchers have demonstrated how to
detect the weakest radio signals allowed under quantum mechanics, opening the door
to advances in radio astronomy and medicine, and physics. The Quanta in the Noise
Researchers at Delft University of Technology (DUT) in the Netherlands have built
a quantum circuit that allows them to listen to the faintest signal allowable under
quantum mechanics, leading to possible advances in radio astronomy, medicine, and
attempts to reconcile quantum mechanics and relativity ..."
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