Today in Science History -
 Each month Radio & TV News magazine contained a section entitled, "What's New in Radio," which reported on some of the latest happenings in the fields of commercial, military, space, transportation, broadcast, and all other forms of wireless communications. This 1958 issue show the world's first volume production airborne digital computer, designed by Hughes Aircraft Company, installed in the nose of a U.S. Air Force F-102A Delta Dagger fighter jet (built by Convair). The 456th Fighter Interceptor Squadron website has a lot of information about the Hughes MA-1 Digitair computer and its integration with airborne radar to create a flight control system that could guide aircraft to a target for ordinance (bombs, missiles) deployment. Other topics included a wideband oscilloscope from Electronic Industries (EIC) that handled a whopping 5 MHz...
 Paul Rako has a useful article over at Electronic Design entitled, "How to Select a Fuse." Not all fuses are created equal however, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. "Fuses for Electronics" and "Selecting the Proper Fuse"" are a couple articles I've posted on the topic from vintage magazines. Paul begins, "It's easy to trivialize the need for a fuse and how to select one. We have all been annoyed or exasperated by a blown fuse. Sometimes we wish there was no such component needed for our circuits. With the advent of electrical distribution in the 1800s, fuses became an essential device in preventing fires. Electrical systems need them for the same reason. Electronic systems have the same fire concerns and they need fuses as well..."
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 ThinkRF Corporation, the leader in software-defined spectrum analysis, today announced the launch of the ThinkRF™ Surveillance System for in place monitoring and bug detection to secure facilities or to understand channel utilization for dynamic signal allocation. The complete surveillance system allows government agencies and enterprises to locate unauthorized RF signals more quickly and cost-effectively, even in difficult indoor environments, such as large corporate office buildings, government facilities, and other secure locations. The system is comprised of a ThinkRF R5x50 Real-Time Spectrum Analyzer, combined with the Kestrel Technical Surveillance Countermeasures (TSCM) Professional Software, as well as omni-directional or optional directional antennae, and all other required equipment in an easily transportable case. The fully integrated, networkable system can be deployed...
 For a given semiconductor compound, the maximum operational speed of a transistor is governed pretty much by its gate thickness. Capacitance and impurities along with lithography precision and accuracy are the culprits. Shrinking gate sizes and growing crystals with greater purity has driven operational speeds upward significantly over the years. An equivalent set of issues plagued vacuum tube development a century ago. The physical spacing of grid elements wrt each other as well as to the cathode and plate placed an upper limit on amplification bandwidth. As always, judicious study of the underlying causes led to the development of new designs that, along with improved manufacturing techniques, overcame existing barriers and, also as always, exposed yet a new set of limiting criteria for conquering...
 "A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in France and one in the U.S. has found that objects of different mass dropped in space fall at a rate within 2E-12% of each other. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the group describes their satellite-based physics study and what they learned from it. Most everyone has heard the story of Galileo dropping two different sized cannon balls from the Tower of Pisa in the 17th century to demonstrate his theory that in the absence of air resistance, two objects will fall at the same rate. Einstein later refined the theory and added it to his Theory of General Relativity. Since that time, many people have tested the theory, and it has always been confirmed. Still, some physicists believe that there are bound to be exceptions to the theory because of the disconnect between general relativity and quantum mechanics..."
 Since 2003, Bittele Electronics has consistently provided low-volume, electronic contract manufacturing (ECM) and turnkey PCB assembly services. It specializes in board level turnkey PCB assembly for design engineers needing low volume or prototype multi-layer printed circuit boards. Free Passive Components: Bittele Electronics is taking one further step in its commitment of offering the best service to clients of its PCB assembly business. Bittele is now offering common passive components to its clients FREE of Charge.
 Upon seeing this advertisement by Bell Laboratories for their "Twistor" form of magnetic memory data storage in a 1958 issue of Radio News magazine, my thought was that it was just another flash in the pan, so to speak, in the history of breakthrough, paradigm-changing inventions. It was a variation of the non-volatile magnetic core memory that used sections of ferromagnetic wire twisted around copper wire in such a way that electrical currents directed to particular intersections in an x-y grid would cause a magnetic orientation to be set (store a bit) and a set or read and sense wires permitted detection of the stored magnetic field to be determined (read a bit). The Twistor was hailed as a much more manufacturable form of the magnetic core memory, which required production workers with small hands and finger to manually thread...
 News headlines are filled with stories about how certain segments of the society are routinely excluded from participation in activities which have been historically 'dominated' by adult white males. Not only have 'outsiders' been prevented from engagement, but, you would likely conclude based on the invective words that drip from the pens and/or mouths of those reporting, tireless campaigns have been mounted to see to it that exclusiveness continues. I will agree that there have been instances of preferential treatment by some groups and people, but I also know many attempts have been made over the decades to attract other than white males into all kinds of activities normally associated with white males. In fact, it is not a stretch to say many specialty groups go out of their way to make a big deal out of non-typical persons interested in joining. Here is one of many examples that appeared in a 1935 (yes, 1935) edition of Short Wave Craft where the editor, Hugo Gernsback, encouraged women and girls to get involved in amateur radio...
 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 8,000 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. Advertising begins at $45/month.
 "Analog machine learning hardware offers a promising alternative to digital counterparts as a more energy efficient and faster platform. Wave physics based on acoustics and optics is a natural candidate to build analog processors for time-varying signals. In a new report on Science Advances, Tyler W. Hughes and a research team in the departments of Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, California, identified mapping between the dynamics of wave physics and computation in recurrent neural networks. The map indicated the possibility of training physical wave systems to learn complex features in temporal data using standard training techniques used for neural networks. As proof of principle, they demonstrated an inverse-designed..."
 Windfreak Technologies designs, manufactures, tests and sells high value USB powered and controlled radio frequency products such as RF signal generators, RF synthesizers, RF power detectors, mixers, up / downconverters. Since the conception of WFT, we have introduced products that have been purchased by a wide range of customers, from hobbyists to education facilities to government agencies. Worldwide customers include Europe, Australia, and Asia. Please contact Windfreak today to learn how they might help you with your current project.
 Copper Mountain Technologies (CMT) has produced a series of videos to help users of its diverse line of VNAs get the most out of their extensive capabilities. Proprietary features in both hardware and software supplies VNAs designed by CMT with capabilities far beyond similar equipment by other companies. This video entitled, "Time Domain Reflectometry Measurements with a Vector Network Analyzer," is one of a series of videos that can be found on the Copper Mountain Technologies website. Time Domain Reflectometry (TDR) has traditionally been performed using a fast oscilloscope and a very sharp impulse or step type excitation. Reflections from the excitation are measured at the source and distance and the magnitude...
 Innovative Power Products (IPP) has over 30 years of experience designing & manufacturing RF & microwave passive components. Their high power, broadband couplers, combiners, resistors, baluns, terminations and attenuators are fabricated using the latest materials and design tools available, resulting in unrivaled product performance. Applications in military, medical, industrial and commercial markets. Take a couple minutes to visit their website and see how IPP can help you today.
 As with my hundreds of previous engineering and science-themed crossword puzzles, this one for January 26, 2020, contains only clues and terms associated with engineering, science, physical, astronomy, mathematics, chemistry, etc., which I have built up over nearly two decades. Many new words and company names have been added that had not even been created when I started in the year 2002. 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 or a geographical location like Tunguska, Russia, for reasons which, if you don't already know, might surprise you...
 A momentous development that changed the field of radio communications warranted merely a half-page announcement in 1935 when frequency modulation inventor Edwin Armstrong had his article published in Radio-Craft magazine. It indisputably changed the world while causing poor Mr. Armstrong much grief in defending his right to the invention. Spread spectrum modulation / demodulation would be the next big communications advance that began with the frequency hopping (FHSS) scheme dreamed up by Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr and pianist Antheil George during World War II. Direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) followed in the digital age, and since then I do not know of any fundamentally new communications technology in that time...
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 Precision ruggedized VNA cables from ConductRF offer RF engineers great alternatives to costly OEM cables that are now past their best days, and now you can reach out to Digi-Key for a quick and easy replacement. We have standards for applications at 18 GHz, 27 GHz, 40 GHz, 50 GHz & 70 GHz. Our torque resistant connector heads and phase stable constructions ensure great performance for many tests to come. ConductRF VNA series provides customers with reliable ruggedized solutions for lab and production vector network analyzer testing. We Know, Results Count...
 "Engineers from the ESA and Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), have designed a novel 'water drop' antenna lens for directing radio wave signals. In the same way that optical lenses focus light, waveguide lenses serve to direct electromagnetic radio wave energy in a given direction. This can be used to minimize energy loss when sending out a radar or a communication signal. Traditional waveguide lenses have complex electrically-sensitive dielectric material to restrict electromagnetic signals as desired. But once the top plate of this water drop waveguide lens has been added on, it comes down purely to its curved shape for directing signals through it. The inventors of this new lens design, which received an ESA Technical Improvement award in February 2017, likes to call it..."
 Keysight Technologies' Matt Ozalas and Thomas Winslow will present a free webinar entitled, "Designing for Stability in High Frequency Circuits," on January 29th at 1:00 pm ET. "High-frequency circuit designers often struggle with stability. Learn techniques to identify and solve stability problems in the design phase before they become headaches in the lab. Classical techniques will be discussed, and a new technique will be introduced using a bidirectional impedance probe in PathWave Advanced Design System (ADS) called the 'Winslow Probe.' Techniques to identify and solve stability problems in the design phase Basic design examples to compare various stability techniques Realistic examples of a successful high frequency power amplifier design..."
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