When you think about a ghost town, visions
might be invoked of a deserted Old West town where Wyatt Earp could have passed
through, or maybe you think about a recent news story of one of the empty - or nearly
so - newly constructed towns in some areas of China where a slowing economy has
put big plans on hold.
Believe it or not, there is a group of investors here
in America that plan to construct an entire 15 square mile city from the ground
up, complete with high-rise buildings, a shopping mall, urban areas, suburbs, an
airport and bus terminal, train tracks and paved roads, trees and parks, water and
wastewater facilities, an electrical grid, and virtually everything else you would
expect to find in a typical 20th century city with a population of around 35,000,
but nobody will ever live there.
People would only complicate matters by
necessitating planning for and compliance with crippling regulations and accommodations.
It sounds like the dream of a serious misanthrope. In reality, it is the perfect
environment for conducting large scale systems testing on everything from wireless
communications, to computer networking (including security), to biological and nuclear
emergency procedures, to smart power transmission schemes, to intelligent transportation,
and beyond. This is truly a first-ever, thinking-outside-of-the-box project that
hopes to attract corporate, university, and government customers who need to perform
experiments in real-world settings without the nuisance of real-world humans. Warm
bodies can be provided as needed, like movie lot extras.
This innovation is called the Center for Innovation,
Testing and Evaluation (CITE), and is the brainchild of a company named
Pegasus Global Holdings, LLC,
a private international technology development firm. I saw one of the partners,
Bob Brunley, on a TV show talking about the plan, and decided it would be a good
subject to mention on RF Cafe. Bob said that CITE is modeled after Disney World,
where most of the maintenance and running of the facility is done underground (the
"magic"), and above ground is the "amusement park" where engineers and scientists
"play" with their products and systems. It will be located in Lea County, New Mexico
in the Southeast corner of the state.
A fully-equipped research campus will
be provided that will include "wet and dry lab modular research labs, support labs,
clean rooms, high-bay labs for fabrication, conferencing and meeting space, research
offices and campus administration." Temporary housing will be provided for research
teams. The establishment of permanent customer facilities will also be accommodated
for long-term tenants.
To further insulate itself from outside regulation,
CITE will be a privately-owned, privately-operated test and evaluation center. If
you anticipate the need for such a facility, you might want to contact someone at
Pegasus and get your reservation on the books. This could be big.
RF Cafe began life in 1996 as "RF Tools" in an AOL screen name web space totaling
2 MB. Its primary purpose was to provide me with ready access to commonly needed
formulas and reference material while performing my work as an RF system and circuit
design engineer. The World Wide Web (Internet) was largely an unknown entity at
the time and bandwidth was a scarce commodity. Dial-up modems blazed along at 14.4 kbps
while tying up your telephone line, and a lady's voice announced "You've Got Mail"
when a new message arrived...
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