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.
Monday 20
"ARRL Public Relations Committee Chairman Scott Westerman, W9WSW,
believes
collegiate Amateur Radio clubs need to blow away the dust and cobwebs and modernize,
in order to attract new members. He urges college and university ham radio clubs to seek common technological
ground with younger generations, in order to attract new Amateur Radio licensees. 'We really need to
be thinking in terms of state-of-the-art technology, because that's what 'the kids' are looking for
..."
Almost certainly the earliest observed evidence of the existence
of an
ionosphere as part of the Earth's atmosphere is aurora activity. Alley Oop, B.C., and friends
had no idea that the wavering colors were the result of high energy, charged particles from our sun
were interacting at altitude with the Earth's magnetic field. This article from a 1935 issue of Short
Wave Craft gives a nice introduction to what was known of the ionosphere at the time, which wasn't a
whole lot since no in situ measurements had yet been made via sounding
...
Planar Monolithic Industries (PMI) recently introduced four new
products in their extensive line of
RF
and microwave components - an absorptive SP2T PIN diode switch for 50 MHz to 18 GHz, a compact RF
amplifier for 50 MHz to 18.0 GHz, an SDLVA (Successive Detection Logarithmic Video Amplifier) for 50
MHz to 18 GHz, and an 8-bit digital phase shifter for 2.0 to 6.0 GHz
...
"Graphene foam
reinforced with carbon nanotubes can hold thousands of times its own weight and still bounce back to
its full height. The material is thermally stable and highly conductive, making it suitable for batteries
and other electrical applications. A chunk of conductive graphene foam reinforced by carbon nanotubes
can support more than 3,000 times its own weight and easily bounce back to its original height, according
to Rice University scientists. Better yet, it can be
..."
"Gadgets
are set to become flexible, highly efficient and much smaller, following a breakthrough in measuring
two-dimensional 'wonder' materials by the U. of Warwick. Dr Neil Wilson in the Department of Physics
has developed a new technique to measure the electronic structures of stacks of two-dimensional materials
– flat, atomically thin, highly conductive, and extremely strong materials. Multiple stacked layers
of 2-D materials - known as
heterostructures - create highly
..."
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.
Clues in this puzzle with an asterisk (*) are pulled from this past week's (2/13 -
2/17) "High Tech News" column on the RF Cafe homepage (see the
Headline Archives
page for help). Enjoy
...
Friday 17
Teledyne Microwave
Solutions (TMS) operates nine manufacturing facilities engaged in research, design, development,
and manufacturing of microwave products.
Amongst their extremely broad line of products are RF and microwave amplifiers, integrated assemblies,
VCOs, frequency mixers, detectors, power dividers, switches, limiters, LNAs, attenuators, and AGC &
log amps, TWTs, satellite modems. TMS service the commercial, space, and military markets. Please visit
Teledyne Microwave today to learn how they can help your project
...
Six new pages of radio service data sheets have been added to
my growing list, which now totals 177 (that's a lot of work for not a lot of
pay). I try to find examples of actual radios on the Internet
to show what they looked like.
• Admiral 6EI &
6EIN
• General
Electric 250
• Detrola 571A &
571B
• Farnsworth
EC-260, EK-262,
EK-263, EK-264, & EK-265
• Howard 920
• United
980744 & 980745
"Inmarsat recently brought to light how its
LoRaWAN-based network, developed in partnership with Actility is delivering on its
strategy to bring the Internet of Things (IoT) to every corner of the globe. Early applications in Asset
Tracking, Agribusiness and Oil & Gas are helping businesses in remote regions of the world become
more efficient, reduce costs and drive new revenue through IoT-based solutions. Inmarsat and Actility's
three early applications cover: Asset tracking: Tracking the location, movement, health and other key
..."
Mini-Circuits
has been running ads lately for 'reflectionless filters,' the likes of which are of great interest to frequency conversion
circuit designers who like to place filters on RF and/or IF mixer ports. Normal filters have very bad
out-of-band VSWR, which causes spurious signals to be reflected back to the mixer ports for 're-mixing,'
causing even more spurious. The problem is typically addressed by placing attenuators between mixers
and filters, which is undesirable from a noise figure perspective. This book by Mathew Morgan caught
my attention because it deals with the issue
... (here is a good article in
MWJ)
"Modern computer technology is based
on the transport of electric charge in semiconductors. But this technology's potential will be reaching
its limits in the near future, since the components deployed cannot be miniaturized further. But, there
is another option: using an electron's spin, instead of its charge, to transmit information. A team of scientists
from Munich and Kyoto is now demonstrating how this works. Computers and mobile devices continue providing
ever more ..."
Online
calculators are a great convenience even in the 'The Age of the Phone App.' Website-based calculators
have the advantage of being accessible from any device, and without having to download and store it
in memory. Federal Custom Cable has a fairly
extensive collection of basic electrical, RF and microwave type calculators. They are all conveniently
listed on a single page. Before using any calculator I have never used before, I validate its accuracy
with known quantities ...
"The
Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is claiming a record:
104 satellites launched on a single rocket. India record space launch feb2017 Taking
off this week, it was the 39th flight for the country's India's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV)
design, with ISRO's own 714kg Cartosat-2 earth observation satellite as its primary payload. Sharing
the ride were 103 nano satellites together weighing ~663kg. All went off into a 505km polar sun-synchronous
orbit from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre
..."
Thursday 16
"The High
Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) in Gakona, Alaska, will soon undertake its first scientific research campaigns
since the facility was taken over by the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) Geophysical Institute
18 months ago. Among the investigators is UAF Researcher Chris Fallen, KL3WX, who will be working under
a National Science Foundation grant, 'RAPID: Spatiotemporal Evolution of Radio-Induced Aurora.' Fallen
says the HAARP transmissions will take place within the facility's
..."
Here
are a few interesting photos from the annals of
radio communications' 1935-era history that include airborne, land mobile, and fixed operator stations
from around the world. Japanese amateur radio operator Seichiro Handa is shown sitting in his 'shack'
donning headphones and a Morse code key. The author mentions that judging by his high quality radio
equipment, Mr. Handa's finances seemed to be unaffected by the Great Depression that hit the United
States and
...
Modelithics,
Inc. is pleased to announce the latest release, of the Modelithics® COMPLETE Library version 17.0 for use with the Keysight EEsof EDA Advanced
Design System (ADS) simulation software. This release marks another big milestone with over 15,000 commercial
electronic components from over 65 different vendors now represented in the COMPLETE Library of advanced
simulation models. The version 17.0 release contains 34 NEW MODELS, in addition to the already extensive
collection of high accuracy, scalable parasitic
...
The
Nokia 3310 was one of the first reverse engineering reports I wrote for a former
employer. Internal antennas were new on the scene. Nokia was undeniably king of the cellphone world.
"On Sept. 1, 2000, the top movie in the country was 'Bring It On.' The No. 1 song was Janet Jackson's
Doesn't Really Matter, from Nutty Professor II. And the newest cell phone on the market was the Nokia
3310 - a sturdy little brick of a phone. A lot has changed since then. But get ready for a blast from
the past: Rumor has it the Nokia 3310 might be making a comeback. Sure, it was technically 'retired'
in 2005, after selling some 126 million units (per Nokia)
..."
"Oscilloscopes
are one of the primary electronic diagnostic tools, and there are a lot of vendors to choose from. While
all oscilloscopes generally looked similar when they first appeared, things have changed radically since
then. For example, do you know the difference between a
digital phosphor oscilloscope (DPO) and a digital storage oscilloscope (DSO)? Here's
a little quiz: Out of all the devices depicted in Fig. 1, can you select the oscilloscopes
..."
"The University of Bristol has been awarded a £4.3 million grant
from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to lead an important new project
to develop
GaN-on-Diamond microwave technology. This next generation technology will underpin
future high power radio frequency and microwave communications, space and defense systems, paving the
way towards 5G and 6G mobile phone networks and much more comprehensive radar systems
..."
Wednesday 15
Here is some serious die stacking...
"Computer scientist David Blaauw pulls a small plastic box from his bag. He carefully uses his fingernail
to pick up the tiny black speck inside and place it on the hotel café table. At one cubic millimeter,
this is one of a line of the
world's smallest computers. I had to be careful not to cough or sneeze lest it blow
away and be swept into the trash. Blaauw and his colleague Dennis Sylvester, both IEEE Fellows and computer
scientists at the
..."
Jerry missed an opportunity to patent his capacitive touch switch,
the sort used to control everything from living room lamps to kitchen sink faucets. Untold millions
of dollars in royalties could have paid for his engineering degree at Parvoo University and then used
the rest as seed money for a startup business. When I started reading the adventure of
Carl & Jerry, I thought they were going to rig the metal door to issue a high voltage pulse
to whatever touched it, but that probably would have been too much of a liability for Popular Electronics
to risk since readers would sometimes replicate the devices described
...
"Graphene's unusual electronic structure enables this extraordinary
material to break many records of strength, electricity and heat conduction. Physicists at the Center
for Theoretical Physics of Complex Systems (PCS), in collaboration with the Research Institute for Standards
and Science (KRISS), used a model to explain the electronic structure of
graphene measured by a new spectroscopic platform. These techniques, published in
the journal Nano Letters, could promote future research on stable and accurate quantum measurements
for 2D
..."
This latest collection of articles from our industry's magazine
publishers with a mix of topics including one of my favorite: grounding. Items move onto and off of
all homepages quickly, so even if you visit Microwave & RF, Microwave Journal,
Microwave Product Digest, High Frequency Electronics, et al
...
•
Tile Arrays Accelerate the
Evolution to Next-Gen Radar
•
Opportunities for High Frequency
Materials in 5G and the IoT
•
How Trump's
New FCC May
Affect
You <more...>
"The International Amateur Radio Union Region 1 (IARU-R1) Monitoring
System (IARUMS) newsletter reports a mysterious 'foghorn' - a Chinese over-the-horizon (OTH)
burst radar - is operating in Amateur Radio bands. 'We observed the mysterious foghorn
on 7, 10, and 14 MHz,' the newsletter recounted. 'This is a Chinese OTH radar, which is often jumping,
and sounding like a foghorn.' The signal is frequency modulation on pulse (FMOP) with 66.66 sweeps-per-second
bursts ..."
"Researchers
from Brown University have shown experimentally how a unique form of magnetism arises in an odd class
of materials called Mott insulators. The findings are a step toward a better understanding the quantum
states of these materials, which have generated much interest among scientists in recent years. The
study, published in Nature Communications, helps to confirm novel theoretical work that attempts to
explain ..."
Tuesday 14
No it's not a college engineering class prank like the yearly
piano drop at MIT's Baker House or University of British Columbia in Vancouver engineering students
dangling a VW Bug from the Golden Gate Bridge. This is water "dunking" test carried out by a
television manufacturer to assure that its products can survive an accidental exposure to moisture.
I assume the water below is fresh water and not salt water. Vacuum tube TV sets were at a great disadvantage
for survivability compared to modern solid state sets with LCD displays
...
"U.S. military researchers will use an online Webcast to brief
industry later this month on a new initiative to determine if humans and other living things can communicate
with one another biologically with radio waves without the use of conventional antennas or RF transmitting
equipment. Officials of DARPA in will present a Webcast from 1 to 2:30 p.m. eastern time on Tuesday,
21 FEB 2017, concerning the upcoming
RadioBio program. The RadioBio
..."
"It's 1956. Korea is finally quiet.
Elvis is king. <-- a great epochal opening! Texas
Instruments has started producing the first silicon transistors to challenge the prevailing germanium
products. Shockley Labs has set up shop in what will become known as Silicon Valley, and a team of Army
scientists has patented a way of creating
electronic circuitry by etching the patterns printed on a copper-clad board. It's
the beginning of a new era in electronics and of a new industry publication. Rogers
..."
"Interviews are vulnerable times. There aren't many things more
nerve-wracking than walking into a room of people you desperately want to impress. In a new survey from
CareerBuilder, employers shared the most memorable job
interview mistakes candidates have made and how body language can hinder their chances
of moving forward in the interview process. According to the nationwide survey, conducted online by
Harris Poll on behalf of CareerBuilder from
..."
"This
week, researchers at Hiroshima University showed off a new
terahertz transmitter that is just as powerful as its predecessors, but should ultimately
prove more affordable for commercial applications. In a demo at the International Solid-State Circuits
Conference in San Francisco, they presented a device capable of delivering data at breathtaking speeds
of more than 100 gigabits per second at a frequency of 300 gigahertz. At its very best
..."
Monday 13
"Electronic
warfare (EW) experts at the Raytheon Co. are helping the U.S. Navy develop advanced networking of secure
real-time tactical data links to coordinate weapons firing,
EW jamming of enemy radar and communications, and foil enemy attempts eavesdrop
on Navy communications. Officials of the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division in Lakehurst, N.J.,
announced an $11.8M contract this week to the Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems segment for the Communications
and Interoperability for Integrated Fires (CIIF)
..."
Even with all of today's prefabricated components, gizmos, and
tools - at incredibly cheap prices - there are still many people who prefer to make their own non-standard
parts and even tooling when tinkering on a project. Many hobby magazines have monthly columns dedicated
to
hints, tips, shortcuts, ideas, etc. to solve, remedy, conquer, etc., the many kinks, problems, challenges,
twists, hitches, snags, etc. of the task at hand. The aforementioned words can be found in the titles
of those columns. Short Wave Craft magazine ran a feature titled "$5.00 for
...
"Panasonic Corporation in collaboration with Hiroshima University
and National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan have developed a THz transmitter
capable of transmitting digital data at a rate exceeding 100 gigabits per second over a single channel
using the
300-GHz band. This technology enables data rates 10 times faster than that offered
by the5G which are expected to appear around 2020
..."
Saelig
(notice their fresh new logo) sells and supports a wide range of electronic
control and instrumentation equipment and components to customers ranging from Fortune 500 industrial
users, military, educational institutions and hospitals to individual end-users. They've found remarkable
test equipment and components from around the world with specs or prices you won't find anywhere else.
Please visit Saelig today for your test equipment needs ...
PU
- I hate to think what these might smell like when they overheat! "Li-S could be an attractive
alternative to Li-ion in batteries, as sulphur has high specific capacity (1.675 Ah/g) and high
energy density (2.6 Wh/g). However, the cells do not last long, and sulphur is not very conductive.
Spreading the sulphur over and within a porous carbon electrode could help, but which electrode structure
is best? Researchers
..."
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.
Clues in this puzzle with an asterisk (*) are pulled
from this past week's (2/6 - 2/10) "High Tech News" column on the RF Cafe homepage
(see the Headline Archives page for help). Enjoy
...