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My time teaching in college is long past although a lot of photographic reminders were sent to me recently by my senior technician from that time. The building in which I created my own personal television transmitter lab – going a whole lot further than my much earlier amateur TV license as G6AAC/T – has been threatened by demolition but that whole time period is probably the subject of other, future, Editorial musings. When I reached the level of Senior Lecturer I had a total of fifteen contact hours a week, contact time being lectures, tutorials, lab work, etc. With long vacations life in college is a great deal easier than, say, that of a high school teacher: with the added, major, bonus that your students - in my field, at least - actually want to be there! During my copious spare time I wrote a lot for audio and video magazines, polished off two books, designed things like vehicle electronic ignition systems, consulted on RF cavity design, and did a lot of review work for audio manufacture...

Sometimes you can write and speculate about something and be either incredibly right, or incredibly wrong. Other times you can just kick yourself for not following your own instincts properly. Case in point: when the iPhone 4 was formally announced about a month ago I wrote about the case designed antenna: “How that antenna’s propagation characteristics are not completely messed up by the human holding the phone may be explained by the breaks in the metal’s circumference, suggesting that the top part of the case metal is the real antenna.” Selling 1.7 million phones in the first three days of availability was a major coup for Apple – probably a retail landmark indeed. But it didn’t take long for the stories about poor reception and dropped calls to start building up. The first responses from the company were that the RSSI software was screwed up and that the indicated “bars” were optimistic, and had been from the iPhone’s inception. Then came the announc...