Bench Talk

Samsung’s 60-GHz Wi-Fi Announcement Deciphered

On 11월 26, 2014 in RF by Barry Manz

Perhaps, lost amid the recent uproar about new smartphones and phablets for the holidays, was Samsung’s announcement that it has revolutionized Wi-Fi by operating at 60 GHz. That and the enhancements Samsung says it has made allow performance using the IEEE 802.11ad protocol to deliver massive speed increases over existing Wi-Fi –transferring a 1-Gbyte file in less than 3 seconds. This obviously sounds like a Samsung-only accomplishment, and in some ways, it is. But it helps to get the whole picture.

Tagged With: beamforming, IEEE, Wi-Fi

One Size Fits None

On 10월 7, 2014 in RF by Barry Manz

If you work in or follow the defense industry, you may have sensed a trend toward multifunctionality in U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) thinking – that everything it deploys in the future should perform multiple functions. It’s a logical concept when money is scarce, but it rarely works, especially if the functions to be combined are very different from each other. Smartphones, which today do everything but keep you healthy (that’s coming in iOS8), are a rare exception.

Tagged With: A-10 Warthog, AESA, DoD, EC-130H, F-35 , Lockheed Martin

RF Power Transistors and the Mystery of Video Bandwidth

On 9월 24, 2014 in RF by Barry Manz

If you use RF power transistors, you may have come across a new term of late on the datasheets: video bandwidth (VBW). Now, anyone who uses spectrum analyzers knows about this key metric, but I’ve been poring over power transistor datasheets for years, and this one seemed to appear out of nowhere.

Tagged With: IBW, RF, VBW, Video Bandwidth

For Today’s Telecom Boom, Thank Judge Green

On 8월 21, 2014 in RF by Barry Manz

In 1982, telecommunications in the U.S. changed forever when U.S. District Court Judge Harold Greene ruled in United States vs. AT&T that the industry was a monopoly. Like smashing an ice cube, this single action created seven regional holding companies within which were 22 Bell local operating companies along with AT&T, which retained Bell Laboratories. Judge Greene’s ruling, his first case after taking the bench was, to say the least, a monument in anti-trust litigation, but is also largely responsible for today’s booming telecommunications industry.

Tagged With: Judge Green, RF, Telecom

The Results Are In: Ham Radio is Healthy

On 7월 29, 2014 in RF by Barry Manz

A few years back I wrote an editorial in which I bemoaned the fact that thanks to the effortless ability to communicate virtually anywhere by picking up the phone (wired or wireless), fewer young people were interested in communicating via the ether, and amateur radio in general was not growing. This went over like a lead balloon with the American Radio Relay League (ARRL), which refuted my claim by providing statistics proving just the opposite. And they were right; it was growing, albeit slowly. So I was wrong and they were right, although I received 29 emails, some of which were several hundred words long, agreeing that it was indeed difficult to get today’s youth interested in amateur radio.

Tagged With: ARRL, Ham Radio, RF

Wireless in 2014: The Industry at Mid-Year

On 6월 26, 2014 in IoT, RF by Barry Manz

As members of the RF and microwave industry make their annual pilgrimage to IMS 2014 (this year in Tampa), I offer my opinion on the industry’s overall health at mid-year. Fortunately, it appears that it’s going to be hot in Tampa in more ways than one. Just how hot depends on many factors, many of them company-specific, so there’s no single answer to “How’s business?” Nevertheless, a realistic approach with this blog is to look at key markets in the wireless industry.

Tagged With: IMS, IoT, LTE, microwave, RF, Wi-Fi, wireless

DAS and the Wild West

On 4월 24, 2014 in RF by Barry Manz

If you’ve been following the progress of Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS) and small cells and find yourself with more questions than answers you’re not alone. Many very knowledgeable people I speak with on this topic find it difficult to define with any certainty precisely what is going on in this environment.

Tagged With: DAS, transceiver, Wi-Fi

5G: Coming Sooner than Later

On 4월 11, 2014 in RF by Barry Manz

Now that most of us have smartphones with LTE capability, life is good. Video streams nicely, downloads are quick, and if you happen to be standing next to a base station data rates can be truly impressive. It won’t be long before LTE Advanced shoves LTE aside with data rates 10 times faster, which means we will be able to download HD movies very quickly and do virtually anything else almost instantly. That however, is apparently not enough for the wireless industry, if developments in South Korea and the European Union are any indication.

Tagged With: 5G, LTE, RF, Samsung, smartphones

The “Death of the Downconverter”? Not Just Yet

On 4월 2, 2014 in RF by Barry Manz

The impact of converting analog signals to digital form is one of the greatest advances the electronics industry has ever achieved. Although today almost every consumer, industrial, commercial, and military system depends on this capability, one of the last remaining outliers is directly converting analog signals at microwave frequencies into digital data streams without using large amounts of intervening microwave hardware (i.e., downconverters).

Tagged With: digital signal, direct-to-digital, downconverters, DSP, microwave, RF

When All Else Fails, Ham Radio Shines

On 3월 10, 2014 in RF by Barry Manz

Let’s face it: When it comes to communicating, we’re spoiled. We can talk, text, or e-mail nearly anyone we want whenever we want, by simply picking up the phone -- be it wired or wireless. But ham radio can work when nothing else can get through.

Tagged With: Amateur Radio, Ham Radio, RF, Transceiver

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