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Friday 22
Thursday 21
Wednesday 20
Tuesday 19
Monday 18
Sunday 17
 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 Lamar or the Bikini Atoll ...
Friday 15
 Since I don't have another Popular Electronics
electronics quiz for this week, hopefully these
electronics-themed comics will suffice as Friday afternoon relief at the end of a
tough work week. My favorite is the one with the Ham dude misinterpreting advice and
connecting his antenna to... well, you'll see. The other two are pretty good as well.
There is a yuge (a little NYC lingo) list of other technology-themed comics at the bottom
of the page ...
 MilSatCom USA
series as it returns to Arlington, Virginia on June 27th and 28th 2018. With the FY18
National Defense Authorization Act (NDA Act) promising "Fundamental Reform of National
Security Space" as well as the Wideband Analysis of Alternatives (AoA) expected to conclude
in the first half of the year, MilSatCom USA will provide the perfect forum to address
pressing issues facing the future of US MilSatCom programmes. This year's conference
will return as the leading forum in the US with a specific MilSatCom focus bringing together
senior military, government and industry representatives from US and allied forces ...
 The
stacked halo antenna is a compact configuration for obtaining a nearly omnidirectional
radiation pattern with nearly 8 dB of gain. An ideal half-wave dipole antenna provides
2.15 dB, so adding 5 to 6 more decibels by merely stacking two halo antennas (which
are essentially curved half-waves) might seem like getting more than the sum of the parts.
That extra gain is obtained by concentrating the vertical radiation pattern lower to
the horizon as compared to a straight half-wave, even though the horizontal pattern loses
a bit of gain contribution from the translation to a nearly omnidirectional nature. There
is nowadays a plethora of information available on the Internet regarding stacked halo
antennas, but in 1965, this Popular Electronics article ...
 Saelig Company announces the availability
of the Rigol
DS/MSO7000 series of oscilloscopes, 4-channel advanced specification oscilloscopes
with an excellent 10 GSa/s real-time sample rate. They come in four bandwidth versions
(100 / 250 / 350 / 500 MHz) as well as mixed-signal versions that offer 16 digital
debug channels. Based on Rigol's new UltraVision II architecture and innovative proprietary
Phoenix chipset these scopes offer 100Mpts memory depth (500 Mpts option) and a
very high waveform capture rate of over 600,000 waveforms per second. This scope series
integrates several independent instruments into one ...
 "Researchers from from Purdue University, the
Technological University of Delft, Netherlands and the University of Wisconsin-Madison
have discovered that silicon has unique
spin-orbit interactions that can enable the manipulation of qubits
using electric fields, without the need for any artificial agents. 'Qubits encoded in
the spins of electrons are especially long-lived in silicon, but they are difficult to
control by electric fields. Spin-orbit interaction is an important knob for the design
of qubits that was thought to be small in this material, traditionally,' says Rajib Rahman,
research assistant professor in Purdue's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering ..."
Thursday 14
 Electric shock, depending on severity, can range
in damage from mere discomfort to body organ damage to instant death. If you have experience
an
electric shock, you know that avoiding another incident is top priority when working
around high voltages. My worse electric shock was either the time when I got hit with
a 3-phase 440 VAC supply on an industrial air compressor motor, or the B+ vacuum
tube plate supply on the air traffic control radar systems I worked on in the USAF. Both
were, thankfully, from finger to finger or finger to forearm (no vital organs in the
current path). I've been zapped a few other times, but nothing severe enough to require
being resuscitated. Neither have I ever witnessed anyone else being shocked to the point
of needing resuscitation. There are probably some gruesome ...
 Slideshow: "Lead times on components of all types,
from passives to semiconductors, are stretching out with no end in sight. As OEMs scramble
to get the parts they need, they are increasingly likely to turn to less reliable sources,
providing an opportunity for
counterfeiters.
'Shortages go in cycles,' said Robin Gray, chief counsel of the Electronic Component
Industry Association (ECIA). 'For years, it was tantalum capacitors but not its many
types of passives, including multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCCs), as well as certain
semiconductors. A key takeaway is that when times ..."
 ConductRF has a ready supply of
ruggedized VNA cables
to replace your tired and worn stock. "We have many standards for applications at 18 GHz,
27 GHz and 40 GHz. Precision Ruggedized VNA Cables from ConductRF offer RF
Engineers great alternatives to costly OEM cables that are now past their best days.
Our torque resistant connector heads and phase stable constructions ensure great performance
for many tests to come. Features include excellent low loss & VSWR, phase stability
under flex, and nonconductive weave outer protection ..."
 As one born in 1958, it's hard to accept that
1960 news is nearly six decades old. I still find myself thinking of the 1970s and 80s
as just a few years ago. The first integrated semiconductor circuits were still being
developed in corporate and university laboratories in 1960. Fairchild announced a year
after this Electronics World article appeared their first commercial IC series,
named "Micrologic." Until then, an integrated circuit meant something like the compact
module of interconnected ceramic substrates with printed thick film resistors and miniature
discrete components. In other news, Raytheon was ready to deploy their giant ICBM tracking
radar system to deal with the emerging global nuclear war threat
...
 Guerrilla RF Inc, a leading provider of high performance
MMICs, today launches a new frequency conversion family with the introduction of the
GRF7001, a high
linearity mixer with integrated LO buffer. This device features low conversion loss
and may be used as an up or down converter. The GRF7001 inputs and outputs are single-ended
and internally matched to 50 ohms. The device implementation requires an external
image-reject filter on the RF port, and an IF bandpass filter on the IF port. Pins 4
and 6 can be used for either RF or IF with appropriate filtering in place. The integrated
LO buffer is operated ..."
 "MIT researchers along with scientists from Brigham
and Women's Hospital have developed a new way to power and communicate with devices implanted
deep within the human body. Such devices could be used to deliver drugs, monitor conditions
inside the body, or treat disease by stimulating the brain with electricity or light.
The implants are powered by
radio frequency waves, which can safely pass through human tissues.
In tests in animals, the researchers showed that the waves can power devices located
10 cm deep in tissue, from a distance of 1 meter. Even though these tiny ..."
Wednesday 13
 MWJ and Rogers Corporation's John Coonrod will
be presenting a free webinar / infomercial titled "Material and PCB Fabrication Considerations for the Different Bands of
5G," on June 20 at 11:00 am ET. "Abstract: 5G technology is very different than
previous communication infrastructures and one noteworthy characteristic is that 5G will
use multiple bands of frequency for its applications. On the surface, different bands
of frequency may not appear that significant, however, the choice of high frequency materials
and PCB fabrication considerations can be very different for applications at significantly
different frequencies ..."
 Wireless Transceiver Design: Mastering
the Design of Modern Wireless Equipment and Systems, by Ariel Luzzatto and Motti
Haridim, 400 pages, $81.64, published 2016. "[A]n accessible textbook that explains the
concepts of wireless transceiver design in detail. The architectures and the detailed
design of both traditional and advanced all-digital wireless transceivers are discussed
in a thorough and systematic manner, while carefully watching out for clarity and simplicity.
Many practical examples and solved problems at the end of each chapter allow students
to thoroughly understand the mechanisms involved ..."
 ConductRF
(Booth #1650 at IMS2018) 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 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. Please visit
ConductRF
today to see how they can help your project!
 Do you have an FM radio in your cellphone? If
so, its antenna is the headphone or ear bud wires. You can buy an external FM antenna
that plus into the headphone jack. Do you remember the type of
line cord antenna described here? It was actually not a bad idea in many situations.
Although the appliance might look a bit scary, there is no direct physical contact between
the antenna wires and the house AC supply. Either a capacitor with low impedance in the
radio and/or television band was connected to the plug blade or a capacitively coupled
plate was placed around the AC wires to pick up signals. 60 (or 50) cycle content on
the antenna would be minimal and rejected by the receiver front end filtering. Many of
the problems people had with this or any twin-lead transmission cable were due ...
 Every
couple years a Crosley 03CB console radio shows up on
eBay. I keep a Saved
Search to get an e-mail when one becomes available, mainly to get an idea of how many
are still around. My research based on Newspaper.com issues of old newspaper advertisements
indicates the Crosley 03CB models were primarily sold in the PA, NJ, NY, DE, CT, OH,
and MD areas. Per the eBay listing: "Working condition, lights up and plays some stations.
Need some refinishing on the cabinet." If you are looking for a restoration project,
this would be a good subject for only $50. As can be seen from
my
restored Crosley 03CB radio, the cabinet and electronics are very robust and attractive.
It's worth a look ...
 "Yale scientists have created a new type of silicon
laser that uses sounds waves to amplify light. A study about the discovery appears
June 8 in the online edition of the journal Science. In recent years, there has been
increasing interest in translating optical technologies - such as fiber optics and free-space
lasers - into tiny optical or 'photonic' integrated circuits. Using light rather than
electricity for integrated circuits permits sending and processing information at speeds
that would be impossible with conventional electronics. Researchers say silicon photonics
- optical circuits based on silicon chips - are one of the leading platforms for such
technologies, thanks to their compatibility ..."
Tuesday 12
 "U.S. Navy shipboard electronics experts are pushing
forward with a project to design dynamic multi-mission radar antennas able to carry out
functions like surveillance, communications and EW)simultaneously. Officials of the Office
of Naval Research (ONR) announced a $9.5M order to the Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems
segment, on Wednesday for the
Flexible Distributed Array Radar (FlexDAR) effort. In this order,
Raytheon will demonstrate how combining every-element digital beamforming, network coordination,
and precise time synchronization can enable multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO)
operation ..."
 In my nearly 60 years of building model aircraft,
cars, boats, and rockets, working on cars, maintaining houses and yards, working with
electrical and electronic apparati[sic], and many other activities, I have inhaled and
had skin contact with
many types of chemicals (all legal, BTW). You probably have, too, if you are near
my age. At least by the 1960s the public was becoming aware of the dangers of exposure
to common household and workplace substances, but viewing older pictures and films showing
people working with no eye, ear, or skin protection explains the all-too-common common
sight of crippled and disfigured people back in the days. In the early and mid 1970s
I worked regularly with MEK until it was removed due to being labeled as a suspected
carcinogen ...
 Farmers must be a lot smarter than we tend to
give them credit for being. These
math and logic
puzzles that appeared in the 1961 Old Farmer's Almanac are not a duffer's task to
complete. Be careful to consider units of measure based on the venues. Puzzle I is a
relatively simple trigonometry problem, although the wording of the problem statement
is very confusing; it took some head scratching to figure out what was meant. Puzzle
III required me to opt for a graphical solution since I could not come up with enough
independent equations for the number of unknowns. If you look at the OFA page scan ...
 everything RF is once again provide extensive
coverage of the International Microwave Symposium (IMS) show. The 2018 venue is Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, from June 10th to the 15th. Details are posted on the everything RF website,
but if you are roaming the exhibition floor, please be sure to stop by Booth #536 to
say hello! ...
 "Privately funded UK venture
Tokamak Energy has hit plasma temperatures hotter than the sun’s
core for the first time, reaching 15 million degrees Celsius. The milestone was achieved
using the ST40 device, the latest in a line of tokamaks the company has built in pursuit
of commercial fusion. Using a technique known as merging compression, the ST40 releases
energy as rings of plasma that crash together and magnetic fields in the plasma reconfigure
- a process known as magnetic reconnection. Merging compression involves high electric
currents running through the internal coils ..."
Monday 11
 I wondered while reading this adventure of Mac's
Service Shop whether author John Frye held stock in the Allen Bradley (now Rockwell)
company (you'll understand why). This might be one of the earliest instances of literary
product placement in a techno-drama. That A-B resistor is part of the "grasshopper" theme
of this saga, which as always is part fiction and part tutorial. Also discussed is the
increasing level of difficulty in servicing modern electronics as the transition from
all point-to-point wiring to use of printed circuit boards progressed. If Mac and Barney
thought PCBs and leaded transistors caused headaches, they would be having brain aneurysms
with today's integrated circuits sporting ultra fine BGA's, some with more than 500 contacts ...
 "Low power IoT network technology isn't much good
if it can't easily cross national borders, so DT and Vodafone have been looking into
that with the help of the GSMA. In fact the GSMA was the one to make the announcement,
claiming the two operator groups 'have successfully completed the first international
roaming trial in Europe using licensed
NB-IoT technology.' NB-IoT is generally accepted to be the default
LPWAN technology, for which Vodafone has been one of the most active cheerleader, so
it's no surprise to see it involved in this. 'The success of these trials is an important
milestone ..."
 Axiom Test Equipment allows
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 test equipment. They are committed to providing superior
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Please check out Axiom Test Equipment today! ...
 The
TA1148 is a wideband 13 watt power amplifier that operates from 800 to 2500 MHz,
offering up to 40 dB of gain across the band. This amplifier also includes under/over
voltage protection, reverse voltage protection, and is extremely linear across the operating
frequency band. The TA1148 is in stock and available for same day shipping. This class
A GaAs module is designed for both military and commercial applications. It is capable
of supporting any signal type and modulation format, including but not limited to 3 -
4G telecom, WLAN, OFDM, DVB, and CW/AM/FM. The latest device ...
 Here is another article from a vintage issue of
Popular Electronics magazine that I am posting for the benefit of Hams who happen
to be searching for information on
Swiss quad antennas. As with most topics, there are many sources on the Worldwide
Web (when's the last time you heard the Internet referred to as the WWW?) covering how
to build and tune Swiss quad antennas, but this one might have just the right slant on
things that the reader is looking for. It probably is not of great interest to most visitors,
but having it appear on the RF Cafe homepage guarantees that Google, Bing, and other
major search engines will pick it up within hours. Thanks for your indulgence ...
 "Walls often make up more than half of indoor surface
area, especially in residential and office buildings. In addition to delimiting spaces,
both for functional and social purposes, they also hide infrastructure such as wiring
and HVAC. However, they are generally inactive structural elements, offering no inherent
interactive or computational abilities (other than at small attached silos, e.g., thermostats
and light switches), and thus present an opportunity for augmentation, especially considering
their ubiquity. Researchers have transformed walls into smart walls at relatively low
cost - about $20 per square meter - using simple tools and techniques ..."
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Algorithms to Antenna: Massive-MIMO Hybrid Beamforming
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 "Intel's director of quantum hardware, Jim Clarke,
explains the company's two
quantum computing technologies. Despite a comparatively late start,
Intel is progressing quickly along the road to a useful quantum computer. The company's
director of quantum hardware, Jim Clarke, came by IEEE Spectrum's offices on 9 May to
prove it. He brought with him samples of two technologies that show why the chip fabrication
powerhouse can make a unique contribution to the quest for exponentially-faster computing.
The first was a Tangle Lake, a specially packaged chip containing 49-superconducting
qubits ..."
 "Bolometers, devices that monitor
electromagnetic radiation through heating of an absorbing material,
are used by astronomers and homeowners alike. But most such devices have limited bandwidth
and must be operated at ultralow temperatures. Now, researchers say they've found a ultrafast
yet highly sensitive alternative that can work at room temperature - and may be much
less expensive. The findings, published today in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, could
help pave the way toward new kinds of astronomical observatories for long-wavelength
emissions ..."
 "Printing an ultrathin layer of graphene on a
substrate and using direct-pulsed laser writing produced a structure for
electronic circuitry that can be worn and even washed. When professors
Sir Andre Geim and Sir Kostya Novoselov of the University of Manchester (UK) discovered
and isolated a single atomic layer of carbon for the first time - now known as graphene
- there was both praise and concern. Some comments were similar to those which, decades
before, accompanied the first demonstration of the optical ..."
 "'Our brain is a fantastic computer,' says Professor
Tamalika Banerjee from the University of Groningen in the northern Netherlands. The brain,
after all, has the ability to process vast amounts of information with an energy efficiency
far superior to that of today's computers. By integrating storage, memory, and processing
into one unit, however, Banerjee and fellow physicists at the University of Groningen
hope their semiconductor device someday supports a parallel computing architecture that
rivals the
workings of the brain. Banerjee's research group studies spintronics ..."
 "Carbon nanotubes - cylindrical formations of
carbon atoms with incredible strength and electrical conductivity - hold great promise
for creating new micron-scale low-power electronic devices. But finding a way to build
a reliable computing platform based on the carbon material has been a major challenge
for researchers. Now, a team of mechanical and materials engineers at Georgia Institute
of Technology has devised a method for identifying performance variabilities in transistors
made from
carbon nanotube networks. The new approach could help researchers ..."
 "Scientists have synthesized a new cathode material
from iron fluoride that surpasses the capacity limits of traditional
lithium-ion batteries. As the demand for smartphones, electric vehicles,
and renewable energy continues to rise, scientists are searching for ways to improve
lithium-ion batteries - the most common type of battery found in home electronics and
a promising solution for grid-scale energy storage. Increasing the energy density of
lithium-ion batteries could facilitate the development of advanced technologies with
long-lasting batteries ..."
Future Quantum Technologies May
Exploit Identical Particle Entanglement
 "Usually when physicists perform quantum entanglement
between particles - whether it be qubits, atoms, photons, electrons, etc. - the particles
are distinguishable in some way. Only recently have physicists demonstrated the feasibility
of generating entanglement between particles that are completely identical. Interestingly,
this entanglement exists just because of the indistinguishability of the particles, without
any interaction between them. Now in a new paper, physicists have gone a step further,
showing that the entanglement between identical particles can be harnessed and potentially
used for quantum applications. The physicists, Rosario Lo Franco and Giuseppe Compagno ..."
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