The inventions and products featured on these pages were chosen either for their uniqueness in the RF engineering realm, or are simply awesome
(or ridiculous) enough to warrant an appearance.
All Featured Product Archive Pages:
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9 | 10 | 11
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| 15 | 16 | 17
| 18 | 19 | 20
| 21 |
 While company
branding and the user interface have changed over the years since
AppCAD first appeared on the Hewlett Packard
(HP) website, it is still as handy a desktop tool as ever. The most recent
incarnation was provided by Avago Technologies, which bought Broadcom in 2015
and then adopted its name. You can now download a free copy of AppCAD from the
Broadcom website. Rather than do en extensive write-up about all the calculation
screens in AppCAD, I've posted a sampling of screen shots. Amongst them are a
Smith chart s-parameter plotter, a lumped element balun designer, a microstrip
calculator, a mixer spurious product calculator, and thermal dissipation
calculator. Since according to a popular saying a picture reportedly paints a
thousand words ...
 Those of us whose were around in the RF
industry in the 1990s and remember a very fine magazine entitled "Applied Microwave
& Wireless." It was published by Noble Publishing Group. The Archive.org
(aka the Wayback Machine, a la from Sherman and Mr. Peabody cartoon) website has
an archive of 410 published articles (as of this writing) on a variety of topics
including antennas, oscillators, filter design and tuning, direct conversion
receivers, microstrip and stripline, RF link calculations, shielding, co-channel
interference, power amplifiers, lightning protection, SAW devices, GPS,
dielectric measurement, circuit and system computer simulation, transistor
biasing, RF transformers ...
 If you visited the good folks at the
QuinStar Technology booth at the IMS show in
Boston this year (2019), you were probably offered one of the T-shirts shown
here. As you might expect from a company of engineers and scientists, the design
on the T-shirt includes a thinking exercise. Rumor has it that this is the first
question put to interviewees. Can you decode the license plate message? I asked
Ms. Carol Clasby, who probably handed you your T-shirt at IMS2019 (if you
got one), whether someone at QuinStar actually has the license plate and she
responded not yet, but maybe in the near future. I went to the California
Department of Transportation website to see what such a license plate might look
like. It allowed me to reserve the plate, although of course ...
 It seems impossible that you can buy
Visio Professional 2019 and Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2019 for less
than $10 each, but according to the research I did the offers seems to be legitimate.
Evidently, sellers buy corporate subscriptions and then are licensed to distribute
copies to it agents (we, the buyers). This is nothing new because I have seen it
done for many years. After purchasing a product, you are provided with a hyperlink
for downloading the software directly from the Microsoft.com website, and also an
activation key. Heeding te old saying about if something seems too good to be true,
it probably isn't, I decided to test the system. Back in March, I purchased one
copy each of Visio Professional 2019 and Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2019
for $5.99 and $9.99 ...
 My daughter, Sally, in addition to owning
and operating a very successful horse riding school named Equine Kingdom Riding
Academy, has a rather large eBay store she uses as a venue for selling items purchased
at the local Goodwill "Bins" store. She often buys vintage toys with electronics
features - sometimes working and sometimes not. A properly functioning vintage toy,
be it a stuffed animal or a game of some sort, can make a huge difference in the
resale price. When that is the case, she sends them home with me to attempt a repair.
Many times the problem is corroded contacts from leaky batteries. A dental pick
and some isopropyl alcohol usually solves the problem. When that doesn't work, it's
time to open 'er up for a deeper look. Over the years I have found problems ranging ...
 There's a new online interactive Smith chart
s-parameter plotter in town, and it goes by the name of
QuickSmith. Justin Coulston, designer of QuickSmith, sent me an
e-mail asking that I take a look at it. I did, and I like what he has done. Assuming
that anybody reading this is already at least somewhat familiar with the Smith chart,
this report will concentrate on the features of QuickSmith. Keep in mind while checking
out QuickSmith for yourself that it is still in Beta phase, so your feedback to
Justin will be appreciated ...
Coilcraft has been around
as long as I can recall since beginning my electronics career in the 1970s. In fact,
Coilcraft was founded in 1945 near Chicago to make custom coils for television sets.
They began manufacturing a line of standard products in the 1970s - no doubt with
supporting my budding career in mind ;-) Inductors and magnetics are their
primary focus. Coilcraft has been an industry leader in surface mount components,
and was one of the first to provide packaging that could be used by pick-and-place
automatic PCB assembly ...
 A couple days ago I posted an update on the
Watkins-Johnson databook page that had an unauthorized gag graph titled, "WJ-G1/SMG1
Phase vs. VCTL vs. Frequency vs. Phase of the Moon." When RF Cafe visitor and sometimes
contributor Dr. Marek Klemes* read
that, he sent me a note about remembering this "Delayed
Light Turn-Off" circuit from the Signetics 555/556 Timer Databook. It took a
bit of creative Googling, but he managed to find the datasheet (to the right). The
text was a bit washed out from the original low resolution scan, so I reproduced
the labels (green). This Rube Goldberg-ish contraption works thusly: After a delay
determined by the values selected for R1 and C1, the output
of the NE555 timer goes high and causes resistor RL to heat up enough
to ignite match M1. M1 subsequently lights the fuse on firecracker
FC1, which has tied to its body a string that wraps around a pulley and
holds a rock (which weighs precisely 2π pounds ...
12/7/2018
Longtime RF Cafe visitor, electrical engineer, and occasional contributor Alan
Dewey sent me a note yesterday saying a book for which he helped provide a large
amount of research data has been published by authors Iain Dey and Douglas Buck.
"The Cryotron
Files: How the Inventor of the Microchip Put Himself in the KGB's Sights," is
an extensive delve into the background of Dr. Dudley Allen Buck, whose son,
Douglas, conducted an extensive investigation into his father's mysterious death
that happened to coincide with the death of his colleague and two other scientists
just days after being visited by Soviet computer experts. Dr. Buck was a superconductivity
researcher during his short, highly productive life. A cryotron, BTW, is a superconducting
switch that would make for very low power supercomputers if it could be made practical
in IC form ...
11/20/2018
 An advertisement for Mini-Circuits' DIY
Vector
Network Analyzer Kit appeared in the October issue of Microwaves & RF
magazine. It is evidently the first of a planned series of University Projects.
Billed as an attempt to "Bridge the gap between textbook theory and real-world measurement,"
Project No. 1-UVNA-63 targets college laboratories as low-cost means of procuring
a high performance vector network analyzer (VNA) at a reasonable cost ($2,495.00).
The frequency range is 100 MHz to 6 GHz. Having the student build the
1-UVNA-63 provides a familiarity with a block diagram level understanding of 2-port
VNAs and gives hands-on experience with assembling RF components. Included are filters,
directional couplers, a transceiver PCB (made by Vayyar) ...
11/1/2018
 Take a look at this
ARRA (Antenna &
Radome Research Associates) attenuator advertisement that appeared in the September
2018 issue of Microwaves & RF magazine a tell me if it reminds
you of something you might have seen in the 1960's through 1980's. That might not
have been the intention, but seeing it sure triggered my nostalgia mechanism. Even
the tag line, "When it comes to attenuators, nobody - but nobody - can fill our
shoes," idiom, being somewhat dated, conjures up memories of vintage company slogans.
Of course the black and white format feeds the perception. Maybe I'm wrong, but
if it appeals to me for any reason, the ad designers have done their job ...
10/9/2018
 Rohde & Schwarz has been publishing a
series of good old-fashioned printed (aka hard copy) Pocket Guides on RF test and
measurement topics. This latest one titled, "Key Characteristics of Signal Generators and Modulation Methods: Pocket
Guide," arrived in my mailbox (the physical one at the curb, not Outlook). There
are 116 pages chock full of an amazing amount of descriptions, equations, tables,
and graphs. The main topic areas are analog, vector, and arbitrary (ARB) waveform
generators, and analog and digital modulation methods. It also reviews associated
topics like phase noise, VSWR, intercept points, etc. A sampling of them are reproduced
below. You can get your own free copy by filling out the form on the R&S website ...
10/8/2018
 Sitting in the waiting room in the local Jeep
dealership, waiting for the technicians to do the annual inspection on the 2011
Patriot, I noticed a 12 volt car battery sitting on a table. At first I assumed
it was just a sales pitch for a new battery, but then I noticed a bunch of small
cables coming from its bottom edge. As you can see in the photo I took of it, those
cables are mobile device charging cords with mating connectors for Apple, USB, and
miniUSB ports. An Internet search did not turn up any of these things, so maybe
Mopar engineers came up with it. Times sure have changed from when ...
6/18/2018
 Rohde & Schwarz is offering at no cost
a variety of reference charts (posters) for hanging on your lab or office wall,
and some handy-dandy Pocket Guides. In the current age of (seemingly) paperless offices
and laboratories, opening a cardboard package from R&S containing the pictured
items caused me to wax nostalgic over the days when sales reps handed out such materials
during workplace meetings and at trade shows. Wall charts are still fairly easily
obtained, but the spiral-bound pocket guides are more rare. Maybe soon we'll be
seeing the resurrection of cardboard slide rule calculators ...
3/14/2018
 Mr. Oleg Sakharov, Director of the Center
of Telecom. Technologies, LLC, recently sent me information on the
MLinkPlanner software for performing microwave communications
link design. Judging only from the provided screenshots and the online documentation,
MLinkPlanner looks to be very user friendly and loaded with features. I downloaded
the 7-day free trial and did a quick fictitious link between my house in Erie, PA,
and the WBEN AM radio station in Buffalo, NY. My route is mostly over Lake Erie,
so there was not much in the way of obstructions, other than the curvature of the
earth ...
12/18/2017
 Hyperlinks all around the Internet pointing
to Hittite's infamous Mixer Spurious Product Calculator broke suddenly when Analog
Devices swallowed up Hittite in 2014. The good news is that if you still want to
use it, you can find it as the ADI Mixer-Spur Graphical Representation tool on the
ADI website. However, Marki Microwave now has a much nicer
Spur Calculator that you will want to consider. It provides both
a Spur Web format and a Spectrum Analyzer format for presenting mixer spurious products.
The interface is very user friendly both for the input and the output specification.
The Spur Web screen uses a format pioneered ...
12/1/2017
 QuickSmith, a creation of Nathan Iyer, has
been around for a long time. It is without a doubt one of the most feature-filled
examples of RF design software around. Nathan recently released a Web-based version
of QuickSmith on a GitHub server, which means it works on any platform with a browser
- desktop or mobile. Access is free, and you can save and reload your design files
rather than losing your work once you leave the website. Being online also means
that the latest version is always available. The screenshot to the right illustrates
where to place series and parallel components, and where to access the sweep ...
8/30/2017
 You might think the world doesn't need another
RF basics book, but the fact is there are so many new people coming into the field
that there is always room for one more - particular a well-done edition like "RF Basics Handbook" from Rigol Technologies. The PDF download
is free, but you do need to fill out a submission form. A replication of the table
of contents give you an idea of all the topics covered. The photos and drawings
are very good quality. Of course the equipment used in the publication are representative
of Rigol's product line, but that's to be expected ...
8/15/2017
 Amateur radio operators take note: Heathkit,
which in years past was a prime supplier of homebuilt ham radio gear, has just announced
plans to manufacture its first piece of test equipment in three decades. "Now there's
the Heathkit® HM-1002: Intuitive, intelligent, affordable, accurate measurement.
The next-generation
Heathkit® HM-1002 Precision RF Meter™
picks up where our venerable SWR / wattmeters of yesteryear -- and everyone else's
-- stopped. Incredible new features, yet simple for beginners to assemble and understand.
And you can build and maintain it yourself." ...
6/26/2017
 Dr. Andrei Muller, progenitor of the
world's first 3D Smith
Chart software program, has teamed with a handful of able colleagues to release
this commercial version of this paradigm-changing design and analysis tool. 3D Smith
Chart enables you to visualize S-parameter data in ways not possible from the Flatland
dweller's perspective that is the traditional 2D Smith chart. Flatland existed
in a plane, and from an observer's perspective a 3-dimensional object entering the
plane from along the Z-axis seemed to appear out of nowhere ...
5/22/2017
 This back-page advertisement by
Model Rectifier Corporation
(aka MRC) appeared in the January 1972 issue of
American Aircraft Modeler magazine. Note the cool collection of
[now] vintage test equipment shown in support of testing
the R/C system. The advertisement shows a rhombic antenna, the Dana 8015 RF frequency
counter, Tektronix 7904 oscilloscope, HP spectrum analyzer, RF communications synthesizer
RF generator, Anritsu precision field strength meter. I was 13 years old at the
time, and anxiously watched for in the mailbox each month ...
4/17/2017
 RF Cafe visitor Tony C., who is an engineer
working for on of America's great, longtime manufacturers of green farm equipment,
sent me a link to this unique memory IC released by Signetics on April 1, 1973.
Being April 1, 2017, it seems to be an appropriate day to post the Signetics 25120
Fully Encoded, 9046 x N, Random access Write-Only Memory datasheet that per Wikipedia,
"...was created 'as a lark' by Signetics engineer John G 'Jack' Curtis and was inspired
by a fictitious and humorous vacuum tube datasheet from ..."
April 1, 2017
 How many times have you dug through a drawer
of coaxial connector
adapters and found what seemed like every possible combination of TNCs, Ns,
SMAs, TNCs, UHFs, SMBs, and <fill in the blank>s
except the one you really need? Sometimes the reason is simply because all on hand
are being used for something else and cannot be 'borrowed' for your use. Other times
it is because the need never existed before. Usually, a quick search on the Internet
will turn up exactly want you want, but for decent a quality adapter you will pay
a stiff price - especially if it is a rare combination of connector types. The truth
is, not often is a combination like QMA-Male-Right-Angle-to-TNC-Female-Bulkhead
adapter or ...
7/15/2016
 Just as the paperless office, predicted to
quickly become a reality when personal computers were beginning to dominate the
workplace and home in the 1980s, has yet to occur, neither has desktop software
for high-end applications totally replaced online equivalents. Microsoft has made
good progress in the last few years in moving part of their Office suite online,
you still need a local copy of Visio, Project, and even their Visual Studio software
development tools if you want to use them. Graphics and video editing software cannot
be used efficiently online. The problem is mostly due to time latency between user
input and software display response. Speed on the host server end is addressable
with pumped up computing power and extra
...
7/7/2016
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