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 ..."
