Archive for 2008/04


Ten New Satellites in Orbit

I’m not big on working satellites, but this is kind of cool…..Dan
ZCZC AS04
QST de W1AW
Space Bulletin 004 ARLS004
>From ARRL Headquarters
Newington, CT April 28, 2008
To all radio amateurs
SB SPACE ARL ARLS004
ARLS004 Ten New Satellites in Orbit
Ten satellites reached orbit April 28 aboard an Indian PSLV-C9
rocket launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Center. The primary
payloads were India’s [...]

High Frequency Electronics Features Articles on Impedance Matching

The March 2008 issue of High Frequency Electronics featured two articles on impedance matching:

Improving the Bandwidth of Simple Matching Networks. This article discusses not only the classic L, T, and pi networks designed for a specific frequency, but also other circuit types that allow you to design a broad bandwidth matching network.
Matching Using Only 50-Ohm [...]

Court Finds FCC Violated Administrative Procedure Act in BPL Decision

Say what you will about the ARRL, but no other organization could mount this type of legal challenge…..Dan
QST de W1AW
ARRL Bulletin 8 ARLB008
From ARRL Headquarters
Newington CT April 25, 2008
To all radio amateurs
SB QST ARL ARLB008
ARLB008 Court Finds FCC Violated Administrative Procedure Act in BPL Decision
The US Court of Appeals for the District [...]

Catching Up

I can’t decide whether I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had time to blog much or whether I’m just slowing down. It’s probably a little of each. And doing so much creates so much blog fodder that it can be overwhelming. There’s so much to write about, you can’t figure out where to start.
So, [...]

Free Spectrogram Program, Web-Based Radio

Here are a couple of items from mailing lists I am on.
Free Spectrogram ProgramKen, K3IU writes to the Elecraft mailing list:
For those interested, Spectrogram is again available as Freeware. Richard’s website, says:
Version 16 is being made available as freeware to replace the older freeware versions of the software relied upon by the majority of Spectrogram [...]

IEEE to Offer Free DSP Materials

According to an article on the IEEE website, the IEEE Signal Processing Society will offer free Web-based, DSP educational materials. Materials will be made available under a Creative Commons attribution license.
A lot of new material will be needed. The IEEE is calling for DSP experts to develop material that can be offered as a [...]

Bye Bye Quartz?

SAE International’s Aerospace Engineering and Manufacturing website reports that Ecliptek and other companies are now producing oscillators that use microelectromechanical (MEMS) resonators instead of quartz crystals. Last year, more than 10 billion crystal crystals and oscillators were produced, so predicting their demise may be a bit premature.
Even so, the article suggests MEMS resonators will [...]

Antenna Basics for Newbies (and Some Oldies)

I’ve always said that I’m no antenna genius. And I readily admit as much when I teach the General Class license course. The main problem, of course, is that you can’t really see how an antenna works in the same way that you can see how a circuit works. It’s awfully hard to measure [...]