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4 of the September 2019 homepage
archives.  Friday 27
 Being that this episode of John T. Frye's
"Carl &
Jerry" series appeared in a 1958 issue of Popular Electronics magazine, it would
have been in the era while the techo-sleuthing buddies were still high schoolers.
Having already assisted the local law enforcement solve a few challenging conundrums
by exploiting their electronics knowledge, the sheriff enlists them to help locate
a moonshine operation that thus far has eluded discovery by his force. Being Ham
radio enthusiasts, Carl Anderson and Jerry Bishop were particularly inclined to
devise wireless technology to achieve their objective to, a la Dudley Do-Right,
"always get [their] man." Such is the case here. As always, a technical learning
opportunity is enmeshed with the storyline.
 RF Cascade Workbook 2018 is the next phase in the evolution
of RF Cafe's long-running series, RF Cascade Workbook. It is a full-featured
RF system cascade parameter and frequency planner that includes filters and mixers
for a mere $45. Built in MS Excel, using RF Cascade Workbook 2018
is a cinch and the format is entirely customizable. It is significantly easier and
faster than using a multi-thousand dollar simulator when a high level system analysis
is all that is needed. An intro video takes you through the main features ...
 ConductRF is the brand name for Electronic
Assemblies Manufacturing, Inc.'s, complete range of RF interconnect products. ConductRF
products include solutions for both commercial and precision RF applications for
both
RF cable assemblies and connectors. Our manufacturing
capabilities include solutions built at our ITAR registered facility in Methuen
as well as partner facilities in the U.S. and around the world. ConductRF offers
cost effective equivalent and improved RF solutions to all major interconnect manufacturers,
specializing in phase stability over temperature ...
 In times of peace and times of war,
Amateur radio operators are the first in line to serve their countrymen and
citizens all over the world. As documented in the pages of the American Radio Relay
League's QST magazines throughout the years of World War II, Hams proved
to be invaluable to the effort. Even though probably none had previous radar system
experience, their practiced aptitude for electronics made them perfect candidates
for the task. In appreciation for their heroic efforts to help ultimately win the
war on all fronts, the U.S. military put a lot of effort into preparing radiomen
and radarmen for life in the civilian world. This article from April 1945, nearing
the end of the war, discusses the value of military experience...
 "Japan's Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp
has been working to reduce substrate resonance and ground-bounce effects in
indium phosphide (InP)-based chips through wafer-level
backside processing. The aim is to ensure stable operation of the chips at frequencies
needed for sub-millimeter-wavelength electromagnetic radiation and high-speed applications.
The high frequencies of such devices are needed to support future mobile communications:
smartphones, 5G, IoT, autonomous motor vehicles, and so on. The 5G sector is looking
to 10 Gbits per second data rates using V- and E-band radio frequencies of
40-75 GHz and 71-76 GHz/81-86 GHz, respectively. Beyond 5G at 100 Gbps
data rates, even higher carrier wave frequencies of ~300 GHz will be needed.
Also, InP-based ICs ..."
QuinStar Technology designs and manufactures
mm-wave products for communication, scientific, and test applications
along with providing microelectronic assembly, rapid prototyping, and mass customization.
Amplifiers, Oscillators, Switches, Attenuators, Circulators, Isolators, Filters,
Waveguide, Antennas, Phase Shifters, Transceivers, Mixers, Detectors. QuinStar specializes
in cryogenic amplifiers, circulators, and isolators. Please
visit QuinStar today to see how they can help your project.
Thursday 26
 For some reason, a lot of people seem to have
a harder time grasping the
concepts of magnetism than the concepts of electricity. Maybe it is because
most of the machines and appliances we are familiar with run off of electricity
supplied by the electric utility distribution system - not the magnetism distribution
system. The fact that motors, transformers, and relays, which are present in one
form or another in every household, office, and factory, are as reliant upon magnetic
effects as they are electrical effects is lost on the multitudes. Maybe if we received
monthly magnet bills to pay instead of electric bills, there might be more interest
in understanding the phenomenon. At the most fundamental level, electric and magnetic
circuit equations exist that are nearly the same, but with magnetism terms used
rather than electricity terms; i.e., duality ...
 The Spring 2019
U.S. News University Rankings for
graduate programs have just been released,
showing the most innovative schools and the best engineering colleges. Not surprisingly,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) comes in at #1, Stanford University
is #2, and University of California - Berkeley takes #3. Full-time tuition for out-of-state
students at MIT is $51,520/year, SU gets $54,015/year, and UC Berkeley charges $26,544/year.
Parvoo University ranked #8, with $29,132/year for tuition. My alma mater,
UVM, ranked an embarrassing #128 ...
 Prior to atmospheric sounding rockets and
orbiting satellites, all information gained and theories developed on the nature
of Earth's upper atmosphere and its interaction with
electromagnetic waves (radio in particular) were purely academic, not the result
of empirical data. That is not to say the theories were wrong (although some were),
just that they were incomplete. For that matter, even today there is still much
to be learned and, according to an excellent article in the October 2015 issue of
the ARRL's QST magazine titled "Five Myths of Propagation Dispelled," there
is still a lot of misinformation being believed and promulgated about shortwaves
and how they travel in the atmosphere. This work (very much worth your time) is
a great testament to the level ...
 QuinStar Technology was recently certified
for
flight hardware testing by Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). After administering
the JPL System Safety Survey and Vendor Chamber Verification Survey, JPL certified
QuinStar's thermal vacuum chamber for testing flight hardware for JPL/NASA missions.
The chamber enables hardware testing under a simulated space environment. The 6.5
cubic ft. (0.2 cubic meter) chamber handles a temperature range of -100°C to 150°C
and achieves a vacuum level of 5 x 10-7 torr. In addition to the thermal
vacuum chamber, QuinStar's environmental test lab includes thermal, shock, vibration,
and humidity testing capabilities. With these testing processes, our class 10,000
clean room, in-house design and fabrication capabilities ...
 "The Air Force Office of Scientific Research
has awarded FIU a $4.8M grant to launch the Center for Physically Reconfigurable
and Deployable Multifunctional Antennas. The center will be led and directed by
researcher Stavros Georgakopoulos, associate professor in the Department of Electrical
and Computer Engineering at FIU's College of Engineering and Computing and inventor
of foldable origami antenna systems. The goal of the center is
to develop innovative and advanced origami-based antenna technologies for next-generation
Air Force and Department of Defense systems ..."
 KR Electronics designs and manufactures high
quality filters for both the commercial and military markets. KR Electronics' line
of filters includes
lowpass, highpass, bandpass, bandstop and individually synthesized filters for special
applications - both commercial and military. State of the art computer synthesis,
analysis and test methods are used to meet the most challenging specifications.
All common connector types and package form factors are available. Please visit
their website today to see how they might be of assistance.
Wednesday 25
 This is an instance where I scanned and posted
later parts of a multi-month article because I had not yet purchased the edition
with the first in the series, but I have it now. Author J.G. Ello, of the Radiation
Measurements and Instrumentation Electronics Division of Argonne National Laboratory,
introduces the physics of
nuclear radiation along with the genesis and evolution of nuclear technology.
Alpha, beta, and gamma radiation is explained, as is the decay phenomenon and energy
levels. It is all at an introductory level, and from a classical Bohr model perspective.
If you are new to nuclear physics, these four articles are a good starting place.
 Skyworks Solutions is excited to share that
we were just honored as a
Top 50 Employer by STEM Workforce Diversity magazine in their 18th
annual ranking of U.S. firms. Based on the magazine's reader survey, the list recognizes
the top companies who provide a positive work environment for diverse groups and
people with disabilities in the science, technology, engineering and math professions.
We are proud to promote diversity through inclusion of all employees - empowering
them to help shape the future of wireless through collaboration and innovation.
To see our past recognitions and awards, please visit the Awards page on our website.
 This edition of
Rohde & Schwarz's monthly newsletter includes
topics like "PAM4 Makes S-parameter Accuracy Critical!," "Explore an EMC Chamber
and Control Room Without Leaving Your Desk" (with a très cool 3D virtual environment),
and "Tips & Tricks on How to Verify Control Loop Stability." There is also an
announcement for a seminar for their "RF Fundamentals Seminar Tour" which kicks
off in October.
 "This
must be the early prototype for Google Glass," was the first thing that came to
mind when I saw this story in a 1962 edition of Popular Electronics. It
is intended to allow 'future' astronauts to have improved situational awareness
by providing means to look behind himself without needing to turn around, and to
receive mission data via a miniature CRT embedded within the viewer. Voice communications
is featured as well. Hughes Aircraft Company might just want to consider assigning
a handful of its highly paid attorneys to look into a patent infringement action
based on the original content of its "Electrocular"
headset paperwork. A small percentage of any award will be appreciated ...
 "Vacuum tubes initially played a central
role in the development of electronic devices. A few decades ago, however, researchers
started replacing them with semiconductor transistors, small electronic components
that can be used both as amplifiers and switches. Although vacuum tubes are now
rarely used in the development of electronics, they have several important advantages
over transistors. For instance, they typically enable faster operation, better noise
immunity and greater stability in extreme or harsh environments. In a recent study,
researchers at the NASA Ames Research Center have demonstrated that nanoscale
vacuum channel transistors can be fabricated
on silicon carbide wafers. Fabricating this type of transistor ..."
 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.
Tuesday 24
 The claim of a "non-conducting metal sheet"
as a substrate for drawing electronic circuit traces seemed suspicious, so I did
a search for non-conducting or at least low conductivity metal, and there is no
such thing. The advertisement says components can be soldered directly to the board
without effecting a connection. Even low conductivity metals to which solder will
adhere are good enough electrical conductors to prevent components from being attached
on a common surface without significant conduction (i.e., short circuits) between
them. A pen with conductive ink is used across the surface to create interconnecting
paths. My guess, although I could not locate any information on the company's substrate
fabrication, is that the board had an array of isolated copper pads that would be
bridged by the conductive pen.
Metal Circuit Systems Corporation was ...
 Keysight Technologies has just published
a whitepaper entitled, "Tactics for Improving Distortion Measurements." This involves
intercept points and mixer spurious product characterization by injecting the proper
test signals. "In today's wireless communications and digital radio systems, frequency
channel spacing is close to achieving spectral efficiency. Testing for unwanted
and nonlinear spectral distortion is critical for narrow frequency channel spacing
and wide bandwidth communication systems. Components, modules, sub-systems, and
entire devices generate distortion. The distortion products might be in-channel,
in-band, and out-of-band unwanted spectral signals. Distortion not only degrades ..."
 Anatech Electronics offers the industry's
largest portfolio of high-performance standard and customized RF and microwave filters
and filter-related products for military, commercial, aerospace and defense, and
industrial applications up to 40 GHz. Anatech has introduced three
power divider / combiner designs: a 4-way version covering 1-40 GHz that handles
up to 20 watts, an 8-way version for 0.5-18.0 GHz and 30 watts, and a 16-way
version for 800-960 MHz for up to 10 watts. Custom RF power combiner / divider
designs can be designed and produced when a standard cannot be found, or the requirements
are such that a custom approach is necessary.
 One of the best ways to learn about how something
work is to build and operate it yourself. This article from a 1974 issue of Popular
Electronics magazine presents a
voice scrambler that exploits a simple spectral inversion technique to create
a mirror image of the original voice spectrum. Spectral inversion occurs whenever
the difference frequency is taken during a mixing process, so that low frequencies
are translated to the high end of the band and high frequencies are translated to
the lower end of the band. The result in the case of audio (voice) is garbled sounding
speech. It is probably the simplest form of scrambling that is easily unscrambled,
but it serves as a good learning tool ...
 "Researchers at the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign have replicated one of the most well-known electromagnetic effects
in physics, the
Hall Effect, using radio waves (photons) instead
of electric current (electrons). Their technique could be used to create advanced
communication systems that boost signal transmission in one direction while simultaneously
absorbing signals going in the opposite direction. The Hall Effect, discovered in
1879 by Edwin Hall, occurs because of the interaction between charged particles
and electromagnetic fields. In an electric field, negatively charged particles (electrons)
experience a force opposite to the direction of the field. In a magnetic field,
moving electrons experience a force in the direction perpendicular to both their
motion and the magnetic field. These two forces combine in the Hall Effect, where
perpendicular electric and magnetic fields ..."
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.
Monday 23
 Secure communications has been a concern
to governments, corporations, and even private individuals since the beginning of
time. Lives and fortunes depend upon being able to guarantee confidentiality in
data and messaging. Guarded meeting rooms, secret couriers, and trusted comrades
were the earliest forms of
secure communications when word of mouth and written messages were the only
means available. Once electronic transmission and reception came onto the scene,
new methods were needed to help protect message content since access to the signaling
media was often as simple as tapping into a telegraph or telephone wire or tuning
a wireless receiver to the frequency of interest. A need for real-time encoding
and decoding of messages in order to support convenient conversation required the
development of not just sophisticated and efficient cryptographic techniques ...
 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 7,000 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. Banner advertising begins
at $175/month ...
 Electro-Photonics LLC, a market leader in
RF and Microwave components, announces the availability of an
SMA connectorized hybrid coupler: Q3XP-10000R-SMA. Our new Q3XP-10000R-SMA 90°
hybrid coupler operates from 2-18 GHz, dissipates 20 W, and offers excellent
coupling flatness and isolation for the most critical applications. Applications
include signal splitting / combining, antenna beam-forming networks, balanced amplifier
circuits, and I/Q modulators / demodulators. This coupler has an extremely small
package of 1.85 x 1.39 inches (47 mm x 35.29 mm). The Q3XP-10000R-SMA
is RoHS compliant.
 Here is a good old fashion Q & A
session on
Ham radio topics, with the emphasis on 'old.' QST magazine published
a couple of these columns in the 1960s, and this is the second in the series. It
is the half-century-ago equivalent of the contemporary "The Doctor Is In" column
by the ARRL's Joel Hallas, W1ZR. I didn't read anything that wouldn't be applicable
today, especially if you have some vintage gear. As with most such articles, there
is something to be learned by just about anyone who deals with electronics, especially
in the RF realm. One particularly interesting part is where the author, in response
to a question about building and tuning your own radio, states, "Too many beginners
are concerned about making 'Chinese Copies' of [manufactured] equipment ...
 ConductRF is continually innovating and developing
new and improved solutions for RF Interconnect needs. See the latest
TESTeCON RF Test Cables for labs. ConductRF makes production
and test coax cable assemblies for amplitude and phased matched VNA applications
as well as standard & precision RF connectors. Over 1,000 solutions for low
PIM in-building to choose from in the iBwave component library. They also provide
custom coax solutions for applications where some standard just won't do. A partnership
with Newark assures fast, reliable access. Please visit
ConductRF today to see how they can help your project!
 "Additive electronics provider Nano Dimension
has developed
3D printed capacitors with its DragonFly additive manufacturing
system. The capacitors are embedded in the body of the additively manufactured printed
circuit boards (PCBs), saving space and eliminating the need for assembly. Nano
Dimension's extensive testing with capacitors of different 3D dimensions have shown
consistent results with statistically validated data. The repeatability results
show less than 1% variance. The technology uses the same dielectric and metal traces
as in the additively manufactured PCB yielding capacitors with a capacitance range
from 0.1 nF to 3.2 nF. The successful results are based on over 260 tests ..."
 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.
Sunday 22
 This
RF Cafe Engineering & Technical Headlines Crossword Puzzle contains at least
10 words from headlines posted on the homepage during the week of September 16 through
September 20, 2019 (marked with an asterisk*). These custom-made engineering and
science-themed crossword puzzles are done weekly for the brain-exercising benefit
and pleasure of RF Cafe visitors who are fellow cruciverbalists. Every word and
clue - without exception - in these RF Cafe puzzles has been personally entered
into a very large database that encompasses engineering, science, physical, astronomy,
mathematics, chemistry, etc. Let me know if you would like a custom crossword puzzle
built for your company, school, club, etc. (no charge).
These archive pages are provided in order to make it easier for you to find items
that you remember seeing on the RF Cafe homepage. Of course probably the easiest
way to find anything on the website is to use the "Search
RF Cafe" box at the top of every page.
About RF Cafe.
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