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 […]
Hedy Lamarr
4 posts
The story seems an improbable fiction: a famous Hollywood actress invents a secret technology so far ahead of its time that it takes decades for the full potential of her idea to be recognized. Yet in 1941, actress Hedy Lamarr, collaborating with pianist George Anthiel, invented frequency-hopping, spread-spectrum technology. The […]
Spread-spectrum and ultra-wideband (UWB) technology arose during the Second World War. Actress Hedy Kiesler Markey (better known by her screen name, Hedy Lamarr) and George Antheil invented a frequency-hopping secret communication system. [1] The Figure below shows their frequency hopping transmitter. A record tape encodes a unique coding pattern to […]
Guest Post by Kai Siwiak, TimeDerivative, Inc. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes are from: K. Siwiak and D. McKeown, UWB Radio Technology, (Wiley, 2004) We pause to reflect on the rise and fall of ultra-wideband (UWB) technology, and especially on the recent reorganization of Time Domain Corporation, a UWB pioneer […]