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4 of the November 2018 homepage archives. Friday 23
 "One of the least orderly and most poorly
executed of NASA projects," was the description given to the
Surveyor program whose goal was to land on the moon and send back
images, both still and motion (in preparation for a manned landing). That, from
a congressional sub-committee. Yes, the very same Congress that famously cannot
balance its own budget or create successful programs of its own. It is a classic
case of "The pot calling the kettle black." NASA was and always has been at the
bleeding edge of new technology and as such lives in uncharted territory. Unexpected
pitfalls lurk everywhere - a minefield of "gotchas." Not that every organization
can't benefit from external oversight to prevent "blinders-on" engineering and management
teams from straying too far off the defined path, but having the notoriously pompous
and buffoonish bureaucrats...
 This article in the November issue of
MWJ by
Chris Tojeira discusses the need to capture and store huge amounts
of RF measurement data for radar and SIGINT applications - which nowadays include
not just military and aerospace applications, but also automotive, security, and
other commercial sensors systems. "A summary of the features and techniques used
to provide real-time, ultra-wideband, RF signal recording in a small, rugged package
optimized for size, weight and power (SWaP). Ultra-wideband RF signal recorders
have allowed engineers to capture large swaths of the RF spectrum for wide bandwidth
radar systems and improved SIGINT capabilities. While real-time recording of a GHz
or more of RF bandwidth..."
 QRM and QRN (manmade and natural interference,
respectively) has been a problem to be dealt with since the beginning of radio communications.
Amplitude modulation (AM) was and is still the most vulnerable because there are
so many sources of electrical and electromagnetism generation - both intentional
and unintentional. Filters can take care of out-of-band noise, but inband noise
needs to be dealt with differently. Some inband interference can be reduced in effectiveness
with circuits using specific time constants that address specific noise types. One
of the most successful methods for mitigating generic noise is to limit the opportunity
for noise signals to enter the system by employing directional antennas...
 "Rice University scientists have built a
better epoxy for electronic applications. Epoxy combined with ultrastiff
graphene foam invented in the Rice lab of chemist James Tour is
substantially tougher than pure epoxy and far more conductive than other epoxy composites
while retaining the material's low density. It could improve upon epoxies in current
use that weaken the material's structure with the addition of conductive fillers.
The new material is detailed in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano.
By itself, epoxy is an insulator, and is commonly used in coatings, adhesives, electronics,
industrial tooling and structural composites. Metal or carbon fillers are often
added for applications where conductivity is desired, like electromagnetic shielding..."
Thursday 22
 I love me some good "Mac's Service Shop"
episodes. In this saga, Barney got an earful from a customer who referred to all
electronics technicians as "robbers, crooks, and inefficient boobs."
During a bout of self-assessment as to whether the woman had a point, Mac makes
the following obvious and somewhat profound observation, "The manufacturer has to
daddy the first breakdown because it happened before any of us touched the receiver."
That statement is as true today as it was nearly six decades previous. It applies
to every product made, electronic or otherwise, provided the user hasn't been abusive
purposely or accidentally. Truth is that depending on the design and manufacturing
process, even subsequent breakdowns could easily be blamed on the product itself
and not on the repair effort that remedied the first breakdown - a point Mac also
makes. Is Mac a sage or would modern sarcastic lingo label him as Captain Obvious?
Knowing Mac as well as we do, "sage" is the appropriate term. Read on for proof
of the assertion. Comparison of the procurement and cost-of-ownership between consumer
and military electronics gear ensues...
 Here are a couple of
electronics-themed comics from vintage Radio-Electronics magazines
to bide the time. For anyone not old enough to remember when reel-to-reel magnetic
tape players (see example to the left) were the prized possession of every true
audiophile, the comic on the bottom might be a bit confusing. Recorded music quality
was better than other formats, and the machines had much finer control over play
speed accuracy. Buying factory-recorded song reels was very expensive, so just about
everyone I knew with a reel-to-reel recorded songs onto tape from the radio, cassette
tapes, or albums, so the quality was no better than the original inferior formats.
The advantage of a reel-to-reel, even with second-hand recordings, was that you
could get a couple hours of play time before having to change the reel. Of course
no self-respecting reel-to-reel tape deck owner would even consider recording from
an 8-track tape...
 This week's RF Cafe crossword puzzle contains
the usual assortment of engineering and science related words and clues, but there
are also a few specific words commemorating our
Thanksgiving Day holiday (indicated by
a asterisk *) that is celebrated each year on the fourth Thursday of November.
Macy's 90th Thanksgiving Day Parade occurs on the morning of November 24th and follows
a route along Central Park West and 6th Avenue. Interestingly, the parade was cancelled
during the World War II years of 1942, 1943, and...
Lotus Communication Systems is a supplier of high performance connectorized
RF modular system components,
shielded project cases, and special purpose solutions up through 40 GHz. Lotus
is a privately owned company with mechanical and electronic design, manufacture,
test controlled from its Middlesex, MA, facility. They have multiple 4 axis CNC
machines and LPKF circuit plotters. Lotus can provide custom extension of our standard
products, custom designs for specific applications and prototyping for your new
products...
 "Mozilla earlier this week launched the first
full edition of its
Internet Health Report. The report is 'an open source effort to
explore the state of human life on the Internet,' wrote Mozilla Executive Director
Mark Surman in an online post. It consists of research and analysis about the Internet
compiled by researchers, engineers, data scientists, policy analysts and artists
in Mozilla's extended community. The digital rights, open source, and Internet freedom
movements stand for the idea that it is possible to build a digital world that is
open, accessible and welcoming to all, according to Mozilla. The Internet Health
Report is based on the principles of the recently expanded Mozilla Manifesto..."
Wednesday 21
 "Miniaturized semiconductor devices with
energy harvesting features have paved the way to wearable technologies and sensors.
Although
thermoelectric systems have attractive features in this context,
the ability to maintain large temperature differences across device terminals remains
increasingly difficult to achieve with accelerated trends in device miniaturization.
As a result, a group of scientists in applied sciences and engineering has developed
and demonstrated a proposal on an architectural solution to the problem in which
engineered thin-film active materials are integrated into flexible three-dimensional
(3-D) forms. The approach enabled efficient thermal..."
Since 1961, MECA Electronics has designed and manufactured an extensive line
of RF & microwave
components for in-building, satellite, radar, radio, telemetry, mobile radio,
aviation & ATC. Attenuators, directional & hybrid couplers, isolators &
circulators, power dividers & combiners, loads, DC blocks, bias-Ts and adapters &
cables. MECA has long been the 'backbone' of high performance wired and air-interfaced
networks such as in-building applications, satellite communications, radar, radio
communications, telemetry applications, mobile radio, aviation & air traffic
communications...
 Most
of us here in America recognize the
Packard Bell name from the line of personal computers they sold
in the 1980s and 1990s. I owned three of them, beginning with an Intel 80286 model,
then an 80486, and finally a Pentium model. They were in the "pizza box" format
that sat on the desk with the CRT monitor on top; I always preferred that configuration
over the tower type. Before Packard Bell made personal computers, they made personal
radios for the desktop beginning back in the 1930s. That explains why Mr. J.T. Goode,
an engineer with Packard Bell, would write an article in 1947 regarding a method
to tune antennas using light bulbs...
 Be sure to check in on Monday, November 26th,
at around 3:00 pm EST to watch the "live" landing of NASA's InSight
(Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat
Transport) probe on Mars. "Live," of course, is a relative thing when the telecast
is coming from Mars. The physical distance to Mars will be a little more than 89
million miles away, which corresponds to just tad under 8 minutes for radio waves,
so we won't know how the landing went until that long after the event really occurs.
NASA controllers will still have their usual "7 minutes
of terror" as with Curiosity. InSight will use a combination of old-fashioned
rigid, spring-loaded legs (a la
Viking landers) and a modern automated rocket descent. I'll post
this again on Monday as a reminder.
 Empower RF Systems will demonstrate a suite of
high power solid state transmitting amplifiers at the 55th Annual AOC International
Symposium and Convention - Washington, DC November 27 – 29th , 2018. The equipment
suite consists of the models 2162, 2170, and 2215 providing compact and rugged EA,
communications, and threat emitter capability from 20 to 6000 MHz, and will be housed
in Los Angeles while being controlled and monitored by the Empower booth demonstration
team who will be exercising the system software demonstrating capabilities of the
configurable amplifiers...
KR Electronics designs and
manufactures high quality filters for both the commercial and military markets.
KR Electronics manufactures all filter
types: lowpass, highpass, bandpass, bandstop and individually synthesizes 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.
Please visit their website today to see how they might be of assistance...
 "Canadian researchers use scissors and glue
to transform RFID tag into device that can sense its environment While smart
devices are proliferating in the industrial and domestic environments, concerns
remain that they will not be sustainable unless their need for batteries and/or
charging is removed. Researchers at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada,
are claiming a major advance in this area through making simple modifications to
a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag, a battery-free device used to make
objects machine-readable for the location and identification, and which are increasingly
ubiquitous in common objects..."
Tuesday 20
 One of the major advantages of the age of
powerful personal computers - be they in the form of desktop systems, tablets, or
smartphone apps - is that for most
computation-intensive tasks there only needs to be one or maybe
at most a few people smart enough to know how to do them. Everyone else who has
to perform the task just needs to be able to input the proper parameters to ensure
a useful output. That is a significant statement, because in the days before ubiquitous
computer availability and incredible computing power, highly capable engineers,
scientists, analysts, and mathematicians either had to be on staff or an expert
external resource was used for difficult and/or time-intensive tasks. Over time,
fewer and fewer people are needed to produce very precise and reliable results.
In many ways, other than the creative intuition involved in concept, creation, and
execution, a large part of the product design and planning phases have been automated...
 RevResponse has been offering free high tech
whitepapers, app notes, magazine subscriptions, and books for many years. LinkedIn,
as you probably know, has become a major force in the professional career networking
realm. Whether your goal is to find a new job, properly quit an existing job, locate
special interest groups, research topics on interest, or other such things, LinkedIn
is a good first stop. Here are a few resources currently available: "LinkedIn Mistakes
that Cost You Clients and Credibility," "Maximizing LinkedIn
for Business," "Optimize Your LinkedIn Skills," and "How to Network on
LinkedIn Like a Pro." You're welcome.
Longtime RF Cafe visitor, electrical engineer, and occasional contributor Alan H.
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...
 MECA Electronics has created an app note
titled "Isolator/Circulator Basics" on their website blog. "An RF isolator
is a two-port ferromagnetic passive device which is used to protect other RF components
from excessive signal reflection. Isolators are common place in laboratory applications
to separate a device under test (DUT) from sensitive signal sources. An RF circulator
is a three-port ferromagnetic passive device used to control the direction of signal
flow in a circuit and is a very effective, low-cost alternative to expensive cavity
duplexers in base station and in-building mesh networks. Examples of both applications
will be covered later in this article. " You can find app notes for power coupler,
dividers, and combiners, passive intermodulation products, hybrid couplers, and
more on MECA Electronics' website blog...
 In 1960, futurists were predicting that within
10 years it would be possible to beam television signals between continents and
directly into homes. It was the eve of Project Echo, which boosted a 100-foot-diameter
inflatable metallized plastic ball into low Earth orbit to reflect signals efficiently
back through the atmosphere. Engineers and scientists were already planning the
next best thing - a satellite that not only reflected, but also amplified, possibly
frequency converted, and would even steer signals that impinge upon it. Envisioned
in this article is hundreds of satellites being available for relaying signals between
all regions of the Earth on then-standard VHF channels. We now have successful
satellite television systems, but they operate at Ku-band due
to bandwidth requirements and need special converters to interface with a television...
Rohde & Schwarz USA (R&S USA) has produced a primer titled, "." One of
the most common measuring tasks in RF engineering is the analysis of circuits, from
simple filters and amplifiers to complex satellite communication modules. As an
extremely versatile test instrument, a VNA is the ideal equipment for quickly and
precisely uncovering signal integrity problems, such as reflections and crosstalk.
This primer describes the fundamentals of vector network analysis, as well as practical
instructions for improving accuracy, performing calibration, and making typical
linear and time-domain measurements. In this primer you will learn about: Introduction
to Network Analyzers Scattering Parameters...
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...
 "Intel announced a new
5G chip for smartphones and other gadgets that the company will
release next year. The company said it expects the chip, which supports speeds up
to 6 Gbps, to ship in commercial devices starting in 2020. That timeframe is notable
considering Fast Company reported that Apple will launch a 5G iPhone with Intel's
5G chip in 2020. The Fast Company report even cited the model number of Intel's
chip - 8161 - which is just one digit off from the name of Intel's chip announced
today, the XMM 8160 5G modem. Intel's Cormac Conroy, VP and GM of the company's
communication and devices group, declined to discuss Apple and Intel's 5G customer
prospects..."
Monday 19
 The
1933 "Century of Progress" World's Fair, held in Chicago, was
a big deal on many fronts. Life in America and around the world was changing rapidly
due to the widespread introduction into homes a decade earlier of electrical and
telephone service, indoor plumbing, and associated appliances. The state of the
art was a modern wonder. Transportation had been made affordable to many families,
and leisure time was becoming more abundant. If it were not for the advent of the
stock market crash in 1929, economies would be thriving because there was so much
cool stuff to be had. Many people had taken up the hobby and/or profession of wireless
communications, so a display was included on the fairgrounds for the craft. An interesting
consequence of a combination of noisy (electrically)
electromechanical wonders being promoted and the desire to demonstrate working amateur
radio equipment was a necessity to locate the two as far apart as possible...
 ConductRF's
SiteFlex
range of ruggedized Field RF Test Cables are designed Field Test Engineers working
in applications that require on site RF Testing. These cables are directly compatible
with Hand-Held Network and Spectrum analyzers. Common options include: DC to 7 GHz,
DC to 9 GHz, DC to 18 GHz, DC to 27 GHz, DC to 40 GHz, and DC
to 50 GHz. ConductRF's Site-Flex RF Field Test Cables have been designed to
support Handheld RF & Microwave Analyzers. The ruggedized construction includes
anti-torque connectors that are firmly attached to the cables external armor. Crush
resistant SF series cable can withstand 1,200 lbs. / sq.in. Additional configurations
and lengths are available on request...
 Remember when the first manned spacecraft
transported
astronauts to Mars and then back to Earth in the 1970s - a 13-month
round trip? In the mid-1960s, Electronics magazine reported on the preparations
being made by NASA for Mars travel at the same time they were busy preparing the
Apollo mission to the moon. The world's first manned orbit (Apollo 8) of the
moon didn't happen until in December 1968, a mere seven months before the historic
July 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing*, but NASA was wasting no time planning for
the next big thing. Of course you know to date we never have made it to Mars with
a manned spacecraft, but the headlines are still filled with "any day now" projections
by SpaceX's Elon Musk (whom I like) and his contemporaries. Sure, I would love to
be alive to witness a manned mission to Mars, but I'd settle...
Centric RF is a company offering from stock various
RF and Microwave coaxial components,
including attenuators, adapters, cable assemblies, terminations, power dividers,
and more. We believe in offering high performance parts from stock at a reasonable
cost. Frequency ranges of 0-110 GHz at power levels from 0.5-500 watts are
available off the sheld. Order today, ship today! Centric RF is currently looking
for vendors to partner with them. Please visit Centric RF today...
 Microwave Workshops & Exhibition 2018
(MWE2018) will be held
on November 28-30, in Yokohama, Japan in the Exhibition Hall D & Annex Hall,
Pacifico. Sponsored by the IEICE APMC Japan National Committee and supported by
the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, the agenda includes workshops
in 5 special sessions are allocated to treat fusion of different technical areas
/ fields, such as quantum computing and social infrastructure. 19 regular sessions
cover the latest microwave technologies from active and passive devices to next
generation applications and systems such as 5G mobile communication systems, wireless
power transmissions and automotive/vehicular applications. 5 fundamental courses
and 4 introductory courses...
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...
 "It wasn't that long ago that frequencies
above between 5 and 10 GHz were considered impractical for mass-market applications
due to challenges with requisite components, materials, layout, and production tolerances.
While these frequencies have been widely used for mil/aero, scientific, and other
advanced applications, they were viewed as being at the 'outer limits' of practicality for consumer and most industrial
situations (although some 24-GHz sensing has been in use for applications like industrial
fluid-level measurement). This scenario at the higher range of gigahertz frequencies
has changed dramatically due to advances..."
Sunday 18
 Each week, for the sake of all avid cruciverbalists
amongst us, I create a new
technology-themed crossword puzzle using only words from my custom-created
lexicon related to engineering, science, mathematics, chemistry, physics, astronomy,
etc. You will never find among the words names of politicians, mountain ranges,
exotic foods or plants, movie stars, or anything of the sort. You might, however,
see someone or something in the exclusion list who or that is directly related to
this puzzle's theme, such as Hedy Lamarr or the Bikini Atoll, respectively - Enjoy...
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