Roger Bowley of the University of Nottingham demonstrates a dramatic increase in the range of your car’s ~315MHz key-fob merely by holding it to his head (H/T Glenn Wolenec).
Hans
639 posts
Auburn University recently announced that the RFID Research Center will be moving to Auburn from the University of Arkansas. Here’s a summary of coverage: RFID Journal | Arkansas RFID Research Center Moving to Auburn University RFID 24-7 | New RFID Lab will focus on the store of the future Birmingham […]
The Hugo-nominated short story “Opera Vite Aeterna (epub, mobi)” by Vox Day touches on questions of immortality and religion in the context of a well-crafted tale of friendship, loyalty, and betrayal. My review includes many spoilers, so I strongly recommend you read it yourself, before continuing – after the break.
Some interesting and informative links from around the net: Via The Art of Manliness, here’s “How to Survive a Lightning Strike,” “Why I Am Not An Environmentalist: The Science of Economics Versus the Religion of Ecology,” by Steven E. Landsburg, excerpted from The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life, Sean […]
Writing an engaging and interesting book on a technical subject poses a significant challenge. Dive too deeply into the technical minutiae and you risk boring non-technical readers. Skim too superficially and you fail to do the subject justice. In his new book, You Are Here: From the Compass to GPS, […]
The last couple of weeks were action packed. Two weeks ago, I spoke at the Texas Wireless and Microwave Circuits and System Symposium at Baylor University in Waco (see my post “Demystifying Electromagnetic Superposition“). Last week, I joined the Q-Track team in Orlando for RFID Journal Live, our industry’s leading […]
The Q-Track gang is in Orlando, Florida this week for RFID Journal-LIVE, the world’s premier conference and exhibition focused on radio frequency identification (RFID) and its many business applications. The tradeshow is underway April 8-10, 2014, at the Orange County Convention Center, located in Orlando, Florida. More about that later. […]
This afternoon I will be presenting an invited talk at the 2014 Texas Symposium on Wireless & Microwave Circuits & Systems at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. In my talk, Demystifying Electromagnetic Superposition (slides), I will examine the interesting behavior of electromagnetic waves when they superimpose or interfere with each […]
Blogging has been taking a back seat to everything else in my life, lately. This week, though, I have a variety of interesting and exciting developments to share. Today’s news is an update on the indoor location company I co-founded, Q-Track. The good news began a few month ago in […]
This insightful piece from the Huffington Post describes how the friendship of electrical pioneer Michael Faraday and landscape artist J.M.W. Turner influenced Turner’s work – Mario Livio: When Science Met Art.
The Czarina and I are finally moving on up. The bungalow that was merely “snug” when we only had one set of twin girl babies has become a raucous and cramped madhouse now that the eight-year-old girls have been joined by their four-year-old brothers. We scrutinized our finances, consulted with […]
Here’s more good press for NFER® RTLS pioneer, Q-Track. Nuclear Engineering International reports: Workers in six US nuclear power plants are being trained in a virtual radiation environment so that they can develop skills to keep radiation exposures low. The Q-Track radiation worker training system combines a software program that can […]
Employing Q-Track’s patented Near-Field Electromagnetic Ranging (NFER®) technology, Collision Avoidance Non-Line-of-Sight (CANLOS™) systems allow robots to detect and avoid colliding with their human co-workers even when when direct line-of-sight may be blocked. NFER® signals use low frequencies that penetrate better and diffract around obstructions that may block conventional RF and […]
I bought one of these Velocity Micro T301 7” Cruz Tablets and I think it’s a great value at $60. Seriously under-powered for high performance Android apps, it’s still perfect as a book reader, web browser, e-mail reader, or even for listening to music (through headphones, not the wimpy speakers) or […]
Q-Track’s A-Team traveled to upstate New York the other day to show off NFER RTLS for tactical training at Tactical Conference 2012. Here’s the press release: May 01, 2012 – Verona, NY – Q-Track Corporation, the pioneer in Near-Field Electromagnetic Ranging, will demonstrate NFER Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS) products in and […]
A couple of years ago, I surveyed the origins of the GPS system in a Sputnik-inspired satellite navigation system that operated using Doppler shift measurements of satellite signals. The TRANSIT or NAVSAT system yielded 100m – 400m location accuracy (accounts vary). The system included several firsts: the first nuclear powered satellite […]
Any student of electromagnetics knows the story – Michael Faraday devised the ingenious concept that electric and magnetic effects were due to “fields” pervading space. Applying this simple concept, he was able to devise and demonstrate the phenomenon of induction, discovering the physics that gives rise to electric motors and […]
Today’s Google Doodle honors Heinrich Hertz (1857-1893), discoverer of radio waves, on the 155th anniversary of his birth. Heinrich Hertz was not the first to experiment with radio waves. Contemporaries such as Charles Hughes and Oliver Lodge performed similar work in parallel. What set Hertz apart, however, was his tenacity […]
LightSquared, the company that sought to re-purpose their satellite spectrum adjacent to GPS to a terrestrial wireless network appears to have suffered a fatal blow to their plans. Matthew Boyle at the Daily Caller describes the politics behind LightSquared’s maneuverings as the FCC’s Solyndra. Ars Technica has a good summary of […]
There’s an abundance of wireless and location news from the past week. A new frontier for Google Maps: mapping the indoors | Google Blog Google maps adds indoor navigation | Engadget Google, Nokia, Ericsson And Navigation’s Next Frontier: The Great Indoors | Fast Company Malls tracked shopper’s cell phones on […]
Entrepreneur Steven Gary Blank delivers an outstanding lecture on “The Secret History of Silicon Valley.” The story is in large part how Frederick Terman invented the culture of entrepreneurship at Stanford and Silicon Valley in the aftermath of World War II. Blank’s lecture is peppered with fascinating details. For instance, I […]
When Bob Cringely produced Triumph of the Nerds in 1995, he interviewed Steve Jobs. This was back when Jobs was with NeXT Computing and before he’d retaken the helm at Apple. Cringely used only a small portion of the interview and the rest was feared lost when the master tapes […]
I’m passing on another press release from my company, Q-Track. The Q-Track team at I/ITSEC is having a great show and wanted to share this video, filmed yesterday, of their live demonstration. ORLANDO, FL – December 1, 2011. Q-Track’s NFER Real-Time Location System (RTLS) demonstration wowed attendees during the first […]
[iframe:src=”http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=uwbantennacom-20&o=1&p=8&l=as4&m=amazon&f=ifr&ref=ss_til&asins=B0068URL6M” frameborder=”0″ width=”120px” height=”240px” scrolling=”no”] Next-RF’s Model 310C UWB Planar Horn Antenna is now available from Amazon. This ultra-wideband (UWB) antenna approximates a constant aperture. Thus, the time domain voltage signal closely approximates the time domain behavior of the incident fields themselves. In addition to use as a UWB impulse […]