March 2008 Archive of engeniusBLOG

Our Product of the Year Awards are always a great adventure for us. Every New Year the Editors at EN-Genius snuggle down with all the reviews that they have written in the past year and select the best products from among that already heady group. The criterion that is most important in the selection of a winning product is that it must be capable of making money.

We don’t ask vendors to write essays to tell us how important their products are; we don’t ask them to buy tables at a grand dinner; we just plain stick our necks out – as we do every week with our reviews.

For the past couple of years the Awards have been made of marble. (As one canny soul pointed out, EN-Genius has stopped cutting down trees – now they’re knocking down mountains!) They are very heavy… Each Award is individually engraved and it takes a while for them to be delivered. And then, brave souls that we are, we try to present as many of the Awards that we c...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

As an enthusiast of classic British sports cars, I was initially disappointed to learn that India's Tata Motors had inked an accord with Ford Motor Company for the purchase of Jaguar. Then I learned a bit more about the company with such an unlikely moniker.

Although not as venerable as Jaguar, Tata Motors has been selling cars since 1954, and today the company has agreements with the likes of Daimler Benz and Fiat and other mainstream carmakers. Tata also ranks second in India's growing passenger vehicle market, and employs over 1400 engineers and scientists, many of whom are developing environment-friendly electric and hybrid vehicles.

Some of Tata’s latest designs run on biofuels and hydrogen. Needless to say, these cars are a far cry from Jaguar triple-SU-carb petrol guzzlers that I got acquainted with in the late 1950s. In today's changing world, everyone is affected by oil prices, pollution, and climate change.

The fact that Tata is an India...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

Piloting a small boat along the coast of Maine is a joy, but it's also a job. You've got to know where you are at all times. There are literally thousands of islands, strong tidal and river currents, many rocks and shoals, and magnetic anomalies that induce compass errors. And then there's the fog. From sea smoke to the proverbial pea soup, it can descend in moments, enveloping everything in a damp shroud that defies the senses.

Just as in engineering, coastal piloting involves tradeoffs. One of my preferred sailing buddies is an EE who, like myself, knows that you cannot rely on any one system. When we sail together, we plot a dead reckoning course on our paper charts, update it at every opportunity, and check our position frequently with visual fixes, beacons, GPS, and LORAN (LOng RAnge Navigation).

LORAN? Yes indeed. Although slick GPS nav tools overshadow most everything else these days (and there are some fine GPS receivers with built-in high-resolution full-...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

Like the people and technologies that populate Silicon Valley, the food scene is diverse and often reveals unexpected treasures to the inquisitive explorer. Posted a few weeks ago, Cheap, Hot and Ethnic was intended to give you an idea of the wide range of flavors and price ranges available within a few miles of downtown San José, but it only included a fraction of the eateries that my friends had suggested. Rather than waste them, I’m posting this follow-up that covers a bit more geography and price range.

Most of my friends’ favorite places tend to be very modestly priced, but this list also includes a few slightly more upscale establishments because they still offer an outstanding value or unique experience. Even if you are on a corporate expense account, that usually shelters you from the greasy spoons and low-rent eateries, it’s we...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

While RF engineers literally interpret the term CW to mean continuous wave, or an unmodulated RF signal, radio operators associate it with Morse Code.

Since the earliest days of radio communications, individual CW Morse operators could often be distinguished by their singular way of sending. Radio operators, commercial and amateur, used various types of manual radiotelegraph keys. These keys contributed to unique habits that affected sending speed, timing, and dit-dah character spacing. Operators would often reach stride while sending at speed, and this contributed to a unique rhythm or swing.

Even today, seasoned CW receiving operators can often tell who is at the key at a distant transmitter just by listening to the remote operator style or fist. An operator’s fist can give away his or her identity just as surely as a government assigned callsign.

As an FCC-licensed Amateur Radio operator, I frequently use CW and I'm actually a member of the Click Here to Read More >>

Greetings from Washington, DC., home of the nation’s newest major league baseball team, some of the ugliest government architecture outside the Soviet Union, and the site of the 2008 Washington International Renewable Energy Conference (WIREC). Although the calendar is now littered with alternative energy conferences, WIREC is perhaps the most unique because it brings together several unlikely communities, each of which holds important pieces of the puzzle that will enable us to get a handle on our civilization’s nasty carbon habit without killing the economy (or ourselves) in the process. Although WIREC’s main mission was originally conceived as a conference for policy makers at the state and national level, it’s expanded to become one of the few places...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

Americans are paying through the nose for gasoline, and a heckuva lot of petrol poker chips now reside in banks in the Middle East. That’s a cause for concern and relief.

A country that’s investing its oil wealth in the American Grand Style is Dubai. Smack dab in the middle of the Middle East turmoil, Dubai shapes up as a clone of glitzy America. Although the little oil-rich country churns out a quarter of a million barrels of oil a day, Dubai is attracting tourists so it can derive its entire gross domestic product from non-oil sources.

The plan is to host 15 million tourists by 2010. A theme park alone is anticipated to pull a few hundred thousand visitors a day. Here's the promotional pitch, straight from Dubai's web site.

"Dubailand is set to be the ultimate entertainment and tourism destination in the world. Committed to ent...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

There was a time when if you used the word Tempest in public you would have had the FBI knocking on your door – in my case it would have been MI-5. Now, it seems everybody knows that Tempest (should be all capitalized, but I’m only going to do that just once) was/is the code word for both the emanations from an electronic device and the protection of such a device.

People have been trying to listen in on others since the telephone was invented. In the early days (and in many developing countries to this day) crosstalk between telephone circuits was a major – and misunderstood – phenomenon. In WW-I, crosstalk from field telephones was deliberately exploited by the Germans and the British invented a low signal level phone system to prevent it.

In WW-II the Germans again showed inventiveness by tracking shipping and aircraft from submarines by the radiation from the enemy’s local oscillators. From the LO frequency they were also able to ...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

You can’t open a business magazine these days without bumping into an article where some CEO is waxing poetic about Sustainability or The triple Bottom Line – a far cry from four years ago when I first started thinking about an award that acknowledged environmental leadership within the tech community. Back then, there were only a handful of folks sticking their necks out trying to preach the gospel of sustainable technology and green capitalism, with darned few takers in the mainstream economy. Things have certainly changed since Pasquale Pistorio,  STMicroelectronics’ former CEO, received our first Green Hero award, and there’s now so many folks doing good work it’s getting hard to choose a winner.

That’s why I’m asking our readers to suggest their own favorites for this year’s award. But before you drop your suggestions onto our blog, it m...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

Unless you work with VHF/UHF radio, microwave technologies, or perhaps radar, you probably don't deal with higher frequency signals much, although now that 2.5 Gbit/s and 5 Gbit/s serial data streams are a part of many systems, that picture is changing for circuit designers.

At UHF (whether it’s 5 GHz or 5 Gbit/s) and into the conventional microwave domain, up to perhaps a few hundred GHz or so, transmission line principles come into play. Striplines, tuned cavities, plumbing-like connectors, waveguides, horns and corner reflector antennas, ultra-low-C probes, and critical-dimension circuit elements are the rule.

If you're lucky enough to work with so-called millimeter-wave systems, this is routine stuff. If you're just making the transition into the Gbit/s domain, confer with the folks at Wavecrest, LeCroy, Tektronix, Agilent, and the like. They'll help you along and sell you some intriguing test-and measurement instrumentation in the bargain.

So...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

People who know me, or have read any small amount of my work, understand my extreme concerns about long-term cell phone use. My last Editorial on the subject was driven by work out of Israel that saw cell division taking place in heavy users of the technology.

Israel is a good location for cell phone investigations. The country, as a whole, was an early and heavy adopter and we should certainly expect any affects of long-term phone usage to first emerge out of such a territory.

And that is what may now have happened.

The February 15, 2008 issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology published the work of ten researchers in Israel, led by Siegal Sadetzki (Gertner Institute, Chaim Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer and the Sackler Sc...  -- Click Here to Read More >>