|
Here is page 1 of the December 2014 homepage archive
 Make 2015 the year you finally jump
onto the
Arduino bandwagon. For $55US you can get started on an Arduino
project in 2015. Includes a 72 page full color instruction manual giving you a full
introduction to Arduino programming as well as step by step tutorials on how to
use each component in this kit. This Kit is recommended for the beginner
interested in leaning the basics of Arduino programming as well as the expert in
Programming.
 Linx Technologies
announced today that it has joined the Thread Group, an industry organization dedicated
to market education and product certification for Thread, a low-power, wireless
mesh networking protocol designed to easily and securely connect hundreds of devices
in the home. Linx Technologies will have access to the Thread specifications, which
are built on open standards and IPv6 technology with 6LoWPAN at its foundation,
and will be able
 Aluminum wire's
role in electronics and electrical service systems is an interesting case study.
Early on, as this article reports, aluminum was seen as a panacea for harder to
find copper sources and attendant price increases. Back in the early 1970s when
I first began working as an electrician while taking vocational courses in high
school,
aluminum wire was being installed in low-end tract homes, apartments,
and townhouses in order to save a little money. The National Electric Code permitted
it at the time because it had not been in service long enough for its cold flow
nature to manifest itself as loosening connections and eventual fires due to sparking
under load. Brittleness after repeated stressing also caused arcing and resulted
in fires
…
 This is
my final batch of interesting
tech articles
from 2014 editions of the industry's premier engineering magazines. The selection,
as always, reflects my personal preferences, but I do throw in a few that just plain
look interesting. 2015 is mere hours away now, and it promises a whole new batch
of writings by really smart people.
-
Universal Radio Platform
Handles Digital and Legacy
Analog, P. Whytock
-Will OpenRFM Shake up the
Microwave Industry?,
B. Manz
-
Smartphones Join Musical
Instruments in Altering the
Brain, J.P. Joosting
-
Fusion Energy Heats Up for
2015, M. Dunn <more>
 Have you heard
of an
Alford Loop antenna? I hadn't until reading this article. It is
a four-sided structure consisting of identical folded ½-wave dipoles on each
side, with a common feed. Opposing sides have their elements 180 degrees out of
phase with respect to each other. The intention is to provide nearly omnidirectional
FM radio reception across the entire 88-108 MHz band. A little research on
the Alford Loop reveals that
Mr. Andrew Alford developed this configuration to enable
simultaneous, co-located transmissions of FM radio stations. In that case the four
antennas are individually fed by transmitters on different frequencies. Alford is
credited with inventing antenna
…
 "Any
time the voltage 'over here' is different than the voltage 'over there,' current
will flow." - H. Ward Silver, N0AX, ARRL author of "Hands-On Radio" column
in
QST (January 2015). Mr. Silver is also the
lead editor of the
ARRL Handbook.
 For the last two centuries
our wars have been fought to secure freedom from oppressive regimes, either for
our own citizens or for citizens of allied countries requesting our assistance.
In the entire history of the United States, no land has ever been claimed during
or after the conclusion of the conflicts. Although the human cost has been tragic
- especially for those who have lost family members or suffered injuries - one undeniable
benefit has been the advancement of technology. "Necessity," it has been said, "is
the mother of invention." World War II resulted in significant advances in
wireless communications, and the civilian radio industry was
…
 This is the final engineering
crossword puzzle of 2014, that is to say the 52nd of the year. I have created more
than 500 crossword puzzles, each using a custom-built library of words and clues
specific to engineering, science, mathematics, etc. - no numbnut celebrity names,
clothing articles, or mountains on the continent of Africa. Thanks, fellow cruciverbalists,
for another year of participation. Don't forget to print out an extra copy to leave
in the John for your fellow indisposed workmate to pass time with.
 One very satisfying aspect
of 'rolling your own'
audio frequency coils (aka chokes, aka inductors),
is how well the simple inductance equations match measured end results. Unless you
really manage to mangle the job, if you use the right equation and are reasonably
careful to observe wire size, spacing (including insulation), and core
diameter, you will be amazed at how close practice matches theory. Although strictly
speaking audio frequencies run from a few Hertz up to maybe 15 kHz for people
with really good hearing. My experience is that similar success can be had
even into the low MHz realm with just a little tuning
…
 This
is often a really frustrating time of year for those in search of a new job. Unless
a potential hiring company is desperate to fill a particular open position, the
many delays caused by people trying to use up the last days of their vacation allotments
for the calendar year, the hustle and bustle of preparing for holiday decorations
and events, kids …
-
Things Hiring Managers Want
from Job Seekers, A. Fertig
-
Reasons You'll Never Get a
Raise, Catherine Conlan
-
Should College Students and
Entry-Level Pros Be on
LinkedIn?, by YouTern <more>
 It
was only the first day at engineering college and already the first familiar techno-caper
was underway. Indiana's
Parvoo University was about to get an initiation into the world
of
Carl and Jerry. As with all of John Frye's tales this one mixes
serious electronics topics with a bit of fun and a life lesson. There were no 'bad
guys' here as in many other episodes, but they boys did get an unexpected introduction
to Parvoo U.'s president! Despite the story's title, the day ended well.
 Fairview Microwave, a global supplier of on-demand
microwave and RF components, introduces expanded offerings of low
PIM RF cables, cable assemblies, adapters and terminations commonly
used in indoor/outdoor commercial telecom and cellular applications as well as distributed
antenna systems (DAS). Offered in Fairview Microwave's latest low PIM
product expansion are 20 cable assemblies, 20 RF adapters and 2 RF loads. The majority
of
 The $100 Startup:
Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future,
by Chris Guillebeau. It's a long title, but aptly descriptive according to the rave
reviews posted on Amazon. Having thoroughly enjoyed running RF Cafe for the last
15 years, I definitely recommend that you make 2015 the year you finally jump in
and start a business of your own - if that's the kind of thing you've been wanting
to do. The pay might be lousy, at least at first (and forever for that matter),
but it beats spending a lifetime doing something you really don't want to do.
Detector Circuits
 This is
the first of a three-part series on
radio detector circuits by Mr. Robert Scott. He begins in this
article with describing diode action and progresses to uses in various types of
signal detectors in radio receivers. A discussion of modulation and distortion sources
is included as well. The next article in the series discusses hi-fidelity triode
detectors; the plate rectifier, infinite-impedance detectors, grid rectification,
and regenerative circuits.
 As I write this, Santa and his team of eight tiny
reindeer (plus Rudolph, of course), are mere moments away from Sydney,
Australia . He's making his way east toward, among other places, Germany, France,
Spain, the UK, and Greenland. In less than 16 hours, it will be Christmas Day on
the Atlantic coast of North America. In order to assure Santa's safe journey,
NORAD headquartered at Cheyenne
Mountain in Colorado Springs, CO, has been real-time tracking his journey every
year since 1955 using a combination of radar, jet aircraft, satellites (since
the early 1960s) and SantaCams (since the 1990s). The publically
available display begins at …
 Z-Communications announces a new RoHS compliant
VCO model V480MEM2-LF. The V480MEM2-LF operates at 445 to 480 MHz with
a tuning voltage range of 0.5 to 2.5 Vdc. This high performance VCO features
a spectrally clean signal of -113 dBc/Hz @ 100 kHz offset and a typical tuning sensitivity
of 25 MHz/V. The V480MEM2-LF is designed to deliver 0 dBm of output power into
a 50 Ω load while operating off a 3.3 Vdc
 As the fast-emerging
Internet of Things (IoT) continues to gain momentum,
the demand for reliable low cost wireless data modules increases every day. In response
to this demand, Linx Technologies is pleased to announce the release of the low
cost 900 MHz HumPRO™ Series wireless data transceiver module. Available today in
900 MHz, the HumPRO™ 900 MHz version outputs up to 10 dBm. This results
in a line-of-sight range of up to 1 mile. Other sub-1 GHz frequencies
will be
 "Maybe
Christmas… doesn't come from a store. Maybe Christmas, perhaps… means
a little bit more!." - Mr. Grinch, in "How the Grinch Stole Christmas!," by Dr. Seuss.
Every year a day or two before Christmas I put
up a couple musical videos that I particularly like, figuring that many visitors
are like-minded and will appreciate them as well.
 This video by Cloverton
is titled "A Hallelujah Christmas." You might recognize the music adapted from Leonard
Cohen's "Hallelujah."
 It was on September 11, 1977 that David Bowie
and Bing Crosby joined together at the Elstree Studios in London, England. Crosby
was there to tape what would prove to be his final Christmas TV special
(he died on October 14, 1977 — 33 days after taping
the duet) and he invited Bowie to appear as a guest star.
 The
Christmas card
industry might be fooling most people, but they ain't foolin' me! This season's
level of glitter-shedding cards is at an all-time high, which serves to confirm
conclusively what I have suspected for years - the Christmas card companies and
the computer companies are in cahoots to see to it that there is plenty of that
colorful, electrically conductive material spread around to guarantee it will get
sucked into computers with forced-air cooling to land on and short out circuits!
That's right, it simply cannot be a coincidence that the sales of notebook and desktop
computers rises markedly each year between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Being the
traditionalist kind of guy that …
 If a girl can do it, then
so can I. That was my thought after watching a video where Ally replace the protective
glass on a
Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone. Just kidding, of course, but I like
to ruffle feathers. Anyway, my daughter, Sally, owns and runs a horse riding academy
(Equine Kingdom) and does a lot of hard, heavy work that would exhaust
many men. Her daily lesson scheduling is done with her smartphone. It spends most
of the day in her pocket, or on the ground after being dropped. If anyone can break
a phone being protected by an OtterBox, it's Sally, and she did just that. She thought
the LCD display was broken, but fortunately it was just the protective glass cover
on the front. Replacements cost $10-$12 on Amazon, but the procedure
…
 RFMW announces design and sales support for a
35 W GaN power amplifier designed for weather and marine radars in the X-band
(9-10 GHz). TriQuint's
TTGA2622-CP offers power added efficiency of >43%. Operating
from a 28 V supply, it draws only 290 mA. The TGA2622-CP offers high power
in both pulse and CW operation thanks, in part, to TriQuint's Cu-base packaging
offering superior thermal management. Large signal gain is 27.5 dB
 Radar and satellite
engineers have been wishing for / dreaming about the possibility of digitizing RF
signals right at the antenna without the need for analog down conversion. Doing
so eliminates the increased cost and reduced reliability associated with a larger
component count. It is the ultimate in software defined radio (SDR).
The IC from IBM Research
and Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) has as its first planned
application is the Square
Kilometer Array (SKA) radio telescope installation in Australia
and South Africa.
 It's hard to believe, but
Christmas day is almost here again! This is the first time in 8 years that Melanie
and I have lived less than a 9 hour drive from the kids (30 minutes now),
so the season has lasted more than just a couple days for us. Here is my traditional
Christmas crossword puzzle for your enjoyment while you are waiting for the boss
to give the word to leave early on Christmas Eve day. Except for a handful of season-specific
words and clues, the rest are all engineering and science related, as always.
Merry
Christmas to everyone!
This
Radio Service Data Sheet is from the series published by Radio-Craft
magazine in the 1920s and 1930s. I am posting them for the benefit of people who
restore those vintage models to working order. It is still possible to buy Sam's
Photofacts packages that include schematics and alignment data, but these info sheets
fill the gap for ones either not available, or for someone needing to get a feeling
for what he/she is up against before making a full commitment to the task
…
Pasternack Enterprises introduces a completely new line of broadband RF power
combiners. The broad bandwidth of these new combiners makes them the perfect complement
to systems using components such as power amplifiers, antenna feeds, attenuators
and switches. A special area of usage for these power combiners is in combining
individual power amplifiers together into a large power block in an amplifier system.
The new RF power combiners from Pasternack are offered in the popular 2-way
 For a lot of
people this will be the last work day of the year as we head into the final weekend
before Christmas. If you have been thinking about finding a different means of income
in 2015, or just want to make your current situation better, rest assured there
is plenty of advice for you on how to do either. Rules, methods, and expectations
have changed considerably in the last few years, especially as benefits packages
have changed in a lot of cases in order to align with ever-changing government regulations.
Good luck in whatever your plans happen to be. Here are a few contemporary articles
to assist you in your endeavors.
- How to Throw a Great Office
Holiday Party
-
Surprising Health Problems
that Come from Working
Too Hard
-
Mistakes Job Seekers Just
Can't Make <more>
 LEGO
blocks have been used to model everything from ancient Roman ruins to famous people
to turbine jet engines. Robots, Babbage's difference machine, and 3-D printers have
been made from them.
LEGO has reaped a much-deserved windfall in profits the last couple
decades as artists and techies have adopted the inexpensive plastic building units
for use in professional qualify presentations and objects. Now, physicists at the
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have built a
practical
Watt balance instrument from LEGOs that measures Planck's constant.
The full paper is available on Cornell University's
arXiv.org (pronounced
"archive")website.
 Skyworks Solutions introduces a hyperabrupt junction tuning varactor
diode for automotive, consumer, defense, and infrastructure markets. The SMV1275-079LF
offers high capacitance ratio and low series resistance ideal for low phase noise,
UHF, and VHF voltage-controlled oscillators, voltage-tuned phase shifters, tunable
bandpass filters, and microwave tuners (at frequencies up to and above 2.5
GHz). The new diode is offered in a small 1.5 x 0.7 x 0.5 mm package.
 There's
that IoT (Internet of Things) buzz phrase again. Perhaps it is getting
tiresome because even after being around for about two years, almost nobody really
knows what it refers to. Many never remember even having heard of it. Have you?
Do you know what is means? Join the crowd. IPV6 was created to handle all the billions
and billions of connected appliances and wearable devices we'll all own and/or wear
in near future. This first article in Microwave Journal presents a brief introduction
to IoT, in case you care.
-
Internet of Things Focus,
M. Ouzillou, R. Yu
-
The Evolution of Harmonic
Load Pull, Dr. I. Tsironis
-
Software-Designed Instrument
Revolution (p.22) B. Driver,
V. Fernandez
- Simulate and Test Chirped
Radar - It's Not Just for the
Military Anymore, F. Raffaeli,
T. Nguyen <more>
Z-Communications, Inc. announces a new RoHS compliant VCO model
CRO2273B-LF.
The CRO2273B-LF operates at 2265 to 2280 MHz with a tuning voltage range of
0.5 to 4.5 Vdc. This high performance VCO features a spectrally clean signal
of -115 dBc/Hz @ 10 kHz offset and covers the band with a typical tuning
sensitivity of 4 MHz/V. The CRO2273B-LF is designed to deliver +3 dBm
of nominal output power into a 50Ω load while operating off a 5 Vdc supply and drawing
typically 20 mA of current. This low noise
Seamless integration of
wireless communications with wired communications has not always
been a yawn in technical strategy discussions. It has really only been since the
early 1990s with the introduction of ubiquitous cellphone systems that someone on
a wireless device could connect directly with a wired (i.e.,
landline) contact and not need an intermediary operator to facilitate. Some
military systems, the Inmarsat system and a few other proprietary systems were available,
but not to the public at large. This article reports on some of the Army's early
attempts at implementing wireless-to-wired communications. Unlike present day systems
that rely heavily
10-50 GHz Power Divider
ET Industries is a leader in the design of high frequency, wideband
Power Dividers.
Model D-1050-2 is a 2 way power divider spanning 10-50 GHz. The maximum insertion
loss is less than 1.80 dB. Amplitude balance is 0.5db maximum and phase balance
is 5 degrees maximum. The minimum isolation is 16 dB and VSWR is 1.70:1 maximum.
Connectors are 2.4 mm female. Housing size is 1.15" x 1.06" x 0.5".
For a mere $10 you can own this iotatronized, blinking LED Christmas tree for
wow your co-workers. It comes as a kit and needs a 9V
iotatron battery to act as both the power supply and a weighted
base. Velleman has a lot of simple, inexpensive, build it yourself
electronic kits. Hurry - there are only seven shopping days left
'til Christmas!
 The good folks at
IMS ExpertServices have published an interesting short article
highlighting the increasingly difficult technical issues being brought before courts
in intellectual property (IP) cases,
 and an inability by judges to render informed
opinions based on evidence presented. Attorney
Ryan Thompson addresses the issue in a case involving Silk Road
and its use of Bitcoin payments to remain 'under the radar' of law enforcement for
nearly two years. While there are some amazingly intelligent jurists in the courts,
expecting any one person to possess enough knowledge of both law and the subject
at hand (a circuit design, software code, a rocket engine fuel injector, an
automotive braking
…
Anatech Electronics, a manufacturer of RF and microwave filters, has published
its December 2014 newsletter. As always, it includes both company news and some
tidbits about relevant industry happenings. This month,
Sam Benzacar looks
into his crystal ball and dares to predict the RF / microwave market's future for
defense, the wireless industry, the Internet of Things (IoT), Wi-Fi,
and industry, medical, and scientific applications in 2015. Sam has been in the
business of designing and selling filters for all these industries for a long
 If you
are reading this, then chances are you owe a part of your livelihood to three gentlemen
by the names of Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley. On this day 66 years ago the trio
announced their discovery of a gain producing semiconductor device that they dubbed
a 'transistor' due to its dual nature as a transconductance amplifier
and a variable resistance. This article by magazine editor Hugo Gernsback, in celebrating
the 10-year anniversary of the transistor, mentions that somewhere in the neighborhood
of 30 million of the little miracle components would be sold that year. The microprocessor
in the device you are using to read this contains more than a billion. By comparison,
the 'primitive' year-2000-vintage Intel Pentium 4 itself integrated
…
 "...Nature is no respecter of military emergencies."
- K.B. Warner, W1EH, in the January 1942 issue of QST magazine, regarding
the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) decree suspending indefinitely
all amateur radio activities in the U.S. following the December 7, 1941 attack on
Pearl Harbor. Read the complete "War
Comes!" article.
|
