Friday 10
ARTA
(Arctic Antenna) was established in 2006 as an MBO from Nera Networks. The company has its main office
in Bergen, Norway with 21 employees with many years 
experience in R&D and manufacturing of quality
microwave antennas (ETSI EN
301126-3-1) and waveguide components. Our customers include defence, telecom equipment providers,
service operators and industrial manufactures.
Way overdue! --"The ESA says it will contribute key components
for a future NASA mission to take humans around the moon within the next few years. Astronauts haven't
gone beyond a low orbit around Earth since 1972, when NASA ended its Apollo program. The agency said
today that it and Airbus have now agreed with NASA to build a module for a second, manned mission that
will
fly around the moon as early as 2021. The Service Module
..."
Rumor has it (according to me) that
Carl
Kohler and his better half, Sylvia, were a real-life couple who lived in the Syracuse, New York,
area, and that his stories came from actual experiences. This one is very believable, even if the details
were changed a bit to make it more interesting. Comical side note: Whenever I see or hear the first
word in the title, it reminds me of a time in Annapolis Junior High School (early
1970s) when the teacher
...
"Princeton University has created silicon chips for
transmitting and receiving THz signals. According to researcher Kaushik Sengupta,
the solution to shrinking THz components to chip size lies in re-imaging how an antenna functions. 'Instead
of directly reading the waves, we are interpreting the patterns created by the waves,' he said. 'It
is somewhat like looking for a pattern of raindrops by the ripples they make in a pond.' 'When terahertz
waves interact with a metal structure inside the chip
..."
News reports
predict many opportunities for Federal defense and science development and production contracts in the
coming years while America tires to rebuild its military, energy, and manufacturing base.
Federal Government Proposal Writing was just released last week, so it
is about as up to date as possible. It's been a couple decades since I was involved in defense proposal
writing - it was a grueling and rigorous exercise. Author George Brown attended the School of Hard Knocks
doing many such proposal efforts at Lockheed Martin and General Electric
...
"The problem of
space
debris has caught the attention of both the public and private sectors. In Japan, the JAXA space
agency will reinforce its monitoring system to prevent small pieces of debris from damaging satellites
and the International Space Station. While the current system covers pieces of debris larger than 1.6
meters, JAXA will make it capable of tracking objects as small as 10cm or so. For the project, JAXA
will install a ground-based radar system
..."
Thursday 9
This
electronics-themed crossword puzzle was published in a 1963 issue of Electronic World.
Crosswords were a fairly standard feature in magazines up through the late last century. Keeping with
tradition , every week (usually) I create an engineering-themed crossword puzzle that uses a hand-selected
collection of a couple thousand words and clues from a dictionary I built over the last 15 years
...
"Imagine you're sitting on an airplane cruising at 36,000 feet.
Just above you, high-energy particles, called
cosmic rays, are zooming in from outer space. While we are largely protected from
this radiation on the ground, up in the thin atmosphere of the stratosphere, these particles can affect
humans and electronics alike. NASA's RaD-X experiment, launched on a giant helium-filled balloon, has
obtained some of the first measurements of their kind at altitudes from 26,000 to more than 120,000
feet above
..."
This is a headline you don't
see very often. New England is experiencing an extreme consequence of AGW as a major
snowstorm moves through the Newington, Connecticut area
...
Saelig
Company has launched the new EQHJ Series Oscillators designed by frequency control specialist
Euroquartz, offering ultra-low phase
jitter. The new EQHJ series oscillators deliver frequency stability from ±25ppm over the whole industrial
temperature range of -40 to +85 °C. Three industry standard surface mount packages are available
- 7.0 x 5.0 x 1.4 mm, 5.0 x 3.2 x 1.2 mm and 3.2 x 2.5 x 1.0 mm. Current consumption
ranges from 3 mA typical (5 mA max.) for the smallest package size to 7 mA
...
The free
whitepapers, pamphlets, books, magazines, and chapter examples listed here are a small sample of a lot
of new items that are offered for FREE through
TradePub.
The publishers make them available to qualifying people as a promotional campaign for their full line
of offerings. Topics include careers, manufacturing, engineering, management, meetings and travel. Note:
I earn a few pennies (literally) when you download one of these
...
A
single drop of caloric? "IBM
researchers have established experimental proof of a previously difficult-to-prove law of physics, and
in so doing may have pointed to a way to overcome many of the heat management issues faced in today's
electronics. Researchers at IBM Zurich have been able to take measurements of the
thermal conductance of metallic quantum point contacts made of gold. No big deal,
you say? They conducted measurements at the single-atom level, at room temperature - the first
time that's ever been done
..."
Wednesday 8
"Rohde & Schwarz introduces powerful 6 GHz lab oscilloscope
for multi-domain applications Rohde & Schwarz has added a new 6 GHz model to its
R&S RTO2000 series, opening up measurements on fast communications interfaces
and IoT applications. The exceptional characteristics of the compact R&S RTO2000 lab oscilloscopes
make them the ideal instrument for demanding measurement tasks such as power integrity measurements
..."
"Several commenters in the FCC's Spectrum Frontiers proceeding,
including Microsoft, Intel and Boeing, are urging the commission to reject calls for reallocating all
or part of the
64-71 GHz band for licensed services, arguing that the band will be better served
via unlicensed use. CTIA, T-Mobile USA and the Competitive Carriers Association (CCA) have urged the
commission to reconsider its reservation of the entire 64-71 GHz band for unlicensed operation
..."
Most RF Cafe visitors are familiar with the
negative resistance region exhibited in tunnel diodes. It is what makes them usable, among other
special applications, as oscillators. Although a diode is often part of an AC circuit, it is fundamentally
thought of as a DC device since it permits conduction in only one direction (the exception being a Zener
diode). An AC device in general refers to something used in a line supply circuit at 50 Hz,
60 Hz, or even 400 Hz. Such is the case with this article, which describes negative resistance
characteristics of voltage-variable capacitors
...
"At
school you may have been taught that helium was a noble gas because it was totally unreactive. But,
new research suggests it might not be as virtuous as we first thought. An international team of scientists
has created a stable
helium compound which is composed of both helium and sodium atoms, and say their
discovery marks a 'new frontier of chemistry.' Helium is generally understood to be inert due it
its extremely stable chemical
..."
"Are you chronically
late for work? The good news is, you're not alone. According to a new CareerBuilder
survey, when asked how often they come in late to work, more than 1 in 4 workers
(29%) admitted they do it at least once a month - up from 25% last year
- and 16% say it's a weekly occurrence for them - up 3 percentage points since last year. More than
2,600 hiring and human resource managers and more than 3,400 workers across industries participated
in the nationwide survey, conducted online by
..."
"Researchers in China and Japan have developed a gold-free Schottky
contact for GaN, claiming record on/off current ratio and breakdown voltage for vertical
GaN Schottky barrier diodes (SBDs). The team from Shenzhen University, Shanghai
University, Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Suzhou Institute of Nano-Tech
and Nano-Bionics (SINANO) in China and Tokushima University in Japan believe that such a development
..."
Tuesday 7
"Researchers at the University
of Twente's MESA+ research institute have managed to transmit more than 10 bit of information with a
single photon.
They achieved this using an ingenious method for detecting individual photons. The knowledge gained
from this study can be used to improve the security and speed of quantum communication. The research
results were published in the scientific journal Optics Express. When asked 'How much information can
you transmit using just ..."
If you were to think the effort to encourage
women
to join the ranks of engineers is a recent thing, you'd be wrong. Contrary to what news media rabble-rousers
want you to believe, women have long been welcome in the engineering world. Some, admittedly, were as
welcomed by men into engineering as men were by women into nursing, but those who persisted usually
excelled. As hard as it is for social engineers to accept, evidently most women, at least at this point
in history, would rather pursue career fields other than engineering
...
The presentations recorded at the third annual RF/Microwave Power
Amplifier (PA) Forum during European Microwave Week 2016 (EuMW 2016), featuring both NI AWR Design Environment
and partner solutions, are now available for viewing on the
AWR.TV
YouTube channel. Includes: • Professor Cripps' Keynote: Clipping Harmonic Contours - A
New RF PA Design Tool • Source Pull and Device Performance • Circuit-Level Simulation
with Polyharmonic
...
"A team of scientists from the Nanoelectronic Materials Laboratory
(NaMLab gGmbH) and the Cluster of Excellence Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden at the Dresden
University of Technology have demonstrated the world-wide first transistor based on
germanium that can be programmed between electron- (n) and hole- (p) conduction.
Transistors based on germanium can be operated at low supply voltages and reduced power consumption,
due to the low
..."
vidaRF has just introduced a new catalog for their extensive line
of off-the-shelf
drop-in isolators and circulators. These products feature low IMD, low insertion
loss, and high isolation, that are BeO-free. Up to 500 W peak power in the 800 to 2,700 MHz
band. Custom designs are available on request. Please contact vidaRF today for assistance
...
"Under
a new
space-based tracking system, no plane would ever have to be off the grid, thanks
in part to a reconfigurable radio developed for NASA. NASA's powerful radio communications network allows
us to receive data such as pictures of cryovolcanoes on Pluto - or tweets from astronauts aboard the
International Space Station. But to send larger quantities of data back and forth faster, NASA engineers
wanted higher-frequency radios that can be reprogrammed from
..."
Monday 6
"Two U.S. technology companies are moving forward with a U.S.
Air Force research program to develop new enabling technologies to enhance
military communications and battlefield intelligence capabilities. Officials of
the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, have announced a $75 million
increase in the Air Force Research Lab's Human Interface Research and Technology (HIRT) program
..."
Since 1996, Isotec has
designed, developed and manufactured an extensive line of RF/microwave connectors, RF components and filters for wireless service providers.
Isotec's product
line
includes low PIM RF connectors and also low PIM RF components such as power dividers and directional
couplers up to 40 GHz. Please contact Isotec today to see how they can help with your current program
...
"Researchers - Dan Zhao and Simone Fabiano - at the Laboratory
of Organic Electronics at Linköping University, have created a
thermoelectric organic transistor, which can be controlled by a change in temperature.
A temperature rise of a single degree is sufficient to cause a detectable current modulation in the
transistor. The heat-driven transistor opens up the possibility of many new applications such as detecting
small temperature differences, and using functional
..."
Well, it's Monday again and there's nothing you can do about it.
Hunker down for another 40 hours (maybe only 36 or so by the time you read this)
and prepare to battle the forces that seem to work against you be they electronic or human. Hopefully,
things aren't all that bad, but the potential is always there. It's commonly known as Murphy's Law:
"Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong." It is said that
laughter is the
best medicine, some here is a low level inoculation against what's to come
...
Note: You need to sign in to see this report. Most respondents
were MEs (45%), then EEs (22%). 31% had
been engineers >30 years. Most had excellent benefits. "In Q4 2016, Design News conducted a
survey of engineers' career and salary information. What follows is question-by-question
data based on 1,150 survey respondents from across the U.S. on a wide range of job- and career-related
topics including salary and compensation totals, areas of engineering focus, career planning, opportunities
..."
"From our personal homes to the nation as a whole, feeling safe
and protected is a commodity we should not take for granted. And engineers are working to use technology
to keep us safe, protected, and on top of any possible spy activity that might come our way. These devices
that have the power to destroy mortars, kinetic weapons, and missiles. The
Laser Developed Atmospheric Lens (LDAL) creates a volume of atmosphere that changes
the path of electromagnetic energy. This can redirect the pulses
..."
For the sake of avid cruciverbalists amongst us, each week I create
a new crossword puzzle
that has a theme related to engineering, mathematics, chemistry, physics, and other technical words.
You will never be asked the name of a movie star unless he/she was involved in a technical endeavor (e.g., Hedy Lamar). Clues in this week's puzzle with an asterisk (*)
are pulled from this past week's (1/30 - 2/5) "High Tech News" column on the RF Cafe homepage
(see the Headline Archives page if necessary). Enjoy
...
Friday 3
There are many designs for
multiple-wavelength antennas available. Some use resonant 'traps' and specific length sections of
lines to change the effective RF length according to specific frequency bands, and others employ complex
phasing of multiple antennas to a single-point feed. Doing so allows operation across bands that do
not necessarily fall within or close enough to harmonic ratios, while still presenting decent VSWR to
the transceiver for acceptable performance. Still
...
Vaunix Technology, a manufacturer of USB controlled and powered
test equipment, recently produced an insightful technical brief discussing
handover/handoff testing using USB-based digital
attenuators for complex and scalable fading simulations. Traditional fading simulations have relied
upon complex and expensive single-box testers, which are ultimately limited by the number of ports,
internal hardware, and proprietary and inflexible software. Other methods for enabling fading simulations
...
For many years now I have been scanning and posting Radio Service
Data Sheets like this one featuring the
Colonial Model
652, 5-tube broadcast short-wave superheterodyne radio receiver for many years now. There are still
many people who restore and service these vintage radios, and often it can be difficult or impossible
to find schematics and/or tuning
...
•
Stewart-Warner Model 1271
•
ERLA Model 4500
•
Clarion No. TC-31
"The bar keeps getting higher
and higher for companies looking to get into the
Patent Power
scorecards. In 2010, the lowest-ranked company in each scorecard had an average Pipeline Power score
of 145. In this year's scorecards, this average is up to 183, an increase of over 26%. Of course, some
industries are more patent-intensive than others, making their scorecards even more competitive. For
example, Crossbar's Pipeline Power score of 626 qualifies it for only 20th place in
..."
The revised first
edition of Experimental Methods in RF Design is now available from the ARRL. Co-written and
updated by Wes Hayward (of MicroSmith fame), W7ZOI, Rick Campbell, KK7B,
and Bob Larkin, W7PUA, Experimental Methods in RF Design explores wide dynamic range, low distortion
radio equipment, the use of direct conversion and phasing methods and digital signal processing. Use
the models and discussion included in the book to design, build and measure equipment at both the circuit
and the system level. Readers are
...
"The Hispasat 36W-1 (AG-1) will be the first satellite to use
active Ku band antennas. The
Hispasat 36W-1 (AG-1) is the first mission of the SmallGEO platform, developed by
OHB System AG with the European Space Agency and HISPASAT. It will supply multimedia services with 20
transponders in the Ku band and 3 transponders in the Ka band to Europe as well as the Canary Islands
and South America. As the provider of the satellite's antenna system, Airbus Defence and Space in Spain
supplied a total of three
..."
Thursday 2
Triad
RF Systems has introduced the TA1049, a 700
to 6000 MHz, 5 W, broadband SSPA The TA1049 is a broadband SSPA for applications such as EMC
testing, EW/Jamming, and general purpose lab use. It utilizes internal DC DC conversion, so it can operate
from a +9 to +33 V supply voltage without any effect on RF performance. The TA1049 can be shipped with
an integral heatsink and heatsink/fan assembly if required. This class AB GaN module is designed for
both military and ...
"In
the fourth 'close shave' of the year, an asteroid will fly between the Earth and the moon tonight,
only days after its discovery. Dubbed asteroid 2017 BS32 - the space rock is believed
to be between 11 and 25 metres (36 to 82 feet), or around the size of a double decker bus. It will pass
closest to Earth at 20:23 GMT (15:34 ET) today, coming twice as close to the Earth as the moon
..."
"AT&T quietly acquired a company called FiberTower in a move
to bulk up its high-end spectrum holdings in advance of 5G. FiberTower, which is in bankruptcy, has
spectrum in the
24 GHz and 39 GHz bands covering 8.4 billion MHz POPs, according to Wells Fargo
Securities and AllNet Insights. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The carrier revealed the pickup
in a media announcement earlier this week outlining Project AirGig, a new initiative that uses power
lines to guide wireless
..."
"The Air
Force has embarked upon a formal Analysis of Alternatives (AoA) to determine a path for its constellation
of Wideband
Global Satellites (WGS) – a course which could result in wider use of existing commercial technologies
or an effort to engineer and build a new dedicated constellation of satellites, Air Force and industry
officials said. The first group of WGS is expected to begin coming to the end of its service life
in coming decades ..."
Dealing with the problem of
lightning
strikes was of concern long before electronic equipment needed to be protected from its effects.
(Before I forget to mention it, Mac introduces Barney to the Zener diode in this 1963 saga) Fires that
were the result of lightning have always been a problem in nature, but they were really catastrophic
to civilization once cities crowded with close-quartered wooden buildings became the norm. Benjamin
Franklin observed that when the many lightning-induced fires of Philadelphia were sparked, it was almost
always the tallest
...
"To most people, crystals mean
diamond bling, semiprecious gems or perhaps the jagged amethyst or quartz crystals beloved by collectors.
To Norman Yao, these inert crystals are the tip of the iceberg. If crystals have an atomic structure
that repeats in space, like the carbon lattice of a diamond, why can't crystals also have a structure
that repeats in time? That is, a
time crystal? In a paper published online last week in the journal Physical Review
..."
Engineers at
Flann
Microwave are celebrating the publication of a new three-part international standard that will define
how waveguide is used for decades to come. The team at Flann played a key role in the development of
the new IEEE standard - IEEE 1785, which sets requirements for waveguides from 75 GHz to 3.3 THz. Previously
there was no internationally agreed standard for waveguides operating above 330 GHz. The new standard
is set
...
"Scientists
have discovered that electrons in
vanadium dioxide
can conduct electricity without conducting heat, an exotic property in an unconventional material. The
characteristic could lead to applications in thermoelectrics and window coatings. Vanadium dioxide (VO2)
nanobeams synthesized by Berkeley researchers show exotic electrical and thermal properties. In this
false-color scanning electron microscopy image, thermal conductivity was measured by
..."
Wednesday 1
"Ericsson is asking the FCC for permission to use
27.5-28.35 GHz spectrum so that it can conduct tests using a 5G base station, but
it's asking that confidential treatment be given to details of what's being studied and the antenna
parameters. The company seeks an 11-month license to do the tests but wants authorization by February
28 in time to conduct a demo at the Verizon Board of Governors meeting, according to the application.
Ericsson says the information for which it seeks confidential treatment
..."
"In a 2012 poll of U.S. employers, respondents were asked which
types of colleges they preferred to hire from. The results were unambiguous: Company executives and
hiring managers considered
online colleges inferior to every type of on-campus college. They even preferred
for-profit colleges to online colleges, despite the shady track record of many for-profit schools. The
curious thing about the survey is not the result, but the way the question
..."
"Murata has
started production of the LQM18JN Series of
chip
inductors for near field communication in January. In recent years, an increasing number of electronic
devices such as smartphones have included NFC capability. An NFC circuit utilizes a chip inductor for
impedance matching, however, current with large amplitude flows in an NFC matching circuit. With a common
matching inductor, the effect of magnetic saturation hinders the expected performance
..."
"Google Fiber and Nokia are among the companies arguing for rules
promoting more
efficient use of spectrum, but satellite companies and their broadcast and content
partners - including The Walt Disney Company and CBS Corporation - see the proposed changes as threats.
Last year, the Fixed Wireless Communications Coalition (FWCC) submitted a petition for rulemaking asking
the FCC to approve a policy for what it calls a more efficient use of spectrum by eliminating
..."
The early 1960s was the era of nuclear apocalypse, the Bay of
Pigs fiasco, school children practicing duck and cover tactics, and backyard fallout shelters. Concern
over survivability of
nuclear radiation was big business for both the civilian and government / military communities not
just for food, medicine, breathable air and potable water, but for electronics as well. After all, being
cooped up in your subterranean universe for weeks or months while waiting for the outside environment
to be habitable could be awfully lonely without some method of contacting other survivors. Consequently,
much work was conducted to characterize and
...
Skyworks is pleased to introduce the
SKY66105-11,
a new high performance, highly integrated RF front-end module (FEM) designed for high power Industrial,
Scientific and Medical (ISM) and Connected Home applications operating within the 902 to 931 MHz frequency
band. This FCC-compliant module integrates harmonic filters and shielding, making it an ideal design
choice for sensors, smart meters (water, gas, electric) and machine-to-machine
...
"Nano Dimension, the Israel 3D printing specialist, has successfully
3D printed electrical circuits, in which it
embedded electrical components, through placement, as an integral part of the printing
process. The company's 3D printer – the DragonFly 2020 – enables 3D printing of PCBs with conductive
ink and dielectric ink. Today, the company announced a successful proof of concept of PCBs inkjet printing,
in which electrical components were placed during
..."
