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There is an urban legend which I can actually vouch for as actual fact. At the BBC Droitwich transmitting station in Worcestershire, England, is a 400-kW (ERP) AM transmitter with its carrier set at a very accurate 200 kHz. During WWII, the transmitter was the main source of information for embattled Europe - reaching, as it did, to the South of France and deep into Germany, and carrying coded messages for the underground. The 50+ acre site houses the two transmitter buildings (the second for a MW transmitter with separate mast), the huge multiple-conductor T-aerial, and grass -- lots of grass. The BBC rented out the site to a local farmer. One day this guy was talking with his mates in a local pub and a BBC employee heard him boast that he never paid for his lighting. A couple of days later he got a visit from a policeman and a senior BBC manager. It was absolutely true. With the light switches turned off, every fluorescent in his cottage glowed brightly. He was not charged with any offence; he certainly w...

I'm writing this while half listening to a bunch of pundits guessing early results in the 2006 mid-term elections. And some of this strikes me as bizarre. We have the lawyers already involved in getting injunctions to extend voting hours because of machine problems; voting stations running out of ballots; candidates' names disappearing or truncated on voting machines. Any real overall result this evening seems to be extremely unlikely, and any long-term decisions in states where voter fraud and machine fraud are alleged could stretch the whole process out for a week or more. There are, no doubt, a lot of lawyers sitting in VIP lounges at northeastern airports ready to be scrambled in corporate jets to fly anywhere in the country. I don't hold any real political position in the US; heck, I don't even have a vote! But the democratic process just isn't working properly. Take the situation where Latino voters were harassed outside a polling station by two men -- one brandishing a shotgun -- trying to persuade ...

After watching a couple of dozen generations of consumer electronics strut their way down the eternal conga line between the store shelf and the trash heap, it's still a mystery to me about what makes folks go from drooling over a new technology to actually laying out money for it. That's because I'm part of the large cohort of folks known as late adopters -- you know, the people who tend to hold on to the gadgets we have until they stop making batteries for them and we can't find the repair parts on eBay anymore. As someone who still packs a late-1990s Palm-V PDA in his pocket and a 20-year old Sony Trinitron in his den, my quasi-Luddite personal life is, in part, a direct result of my professional life, where I get to see exactly how unreliable, short-lived, and downright flaky most new technologies are. If you'd seen the underbelly of nearly every communication technology since the teletype, as I have, you would not laugh at the old rotary dial phone I keep plugged in near my bed or the fact that I onl...

Just a couple of weeks ago (October 2006) we wrote in these pages: "Living in a household with a near-teenager, who has a lot of school peers who seem to be rather more spoiled than the norm, we are in a position to assure the world that portable CD players are no longer "cool." The fact that they are a more sensible and long-term medium for music storage is completely immaterial, as is the CEA forecast's emphasis on generic MP3 players -- whose prices today (and profits) far exceed the introduction prices of portable CD players 10 years ago. It is, once again, down to branding. It is all iPod, iPod, iPod, all the iTime." Did we get slapped in the face with the Microsoft Zune coming out much better in a thoroughly professional report from ABI Research? Their survey, which we will comment on later, was conducted with a base of 1750 teens and adults who were asked if they were likely to be purchasing an MP3 player in the near future, or already had one. Those that qualified as "yes&quo...

Until recently, it was easy for the average engineer or tech worker to think of environmental issues as somebody else's problem, but the British Treasury's release of the "Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change" draws a bright, shining connection between how we treat our home planet's life support systems and our pocketbooks. With a clear, carefully-documented analysis that only a flat-Earther could ignore, Sir Nicholas Stern, Head of the Government Economic Service, explains that we have a decade or two to get our butts into gear and start cutting our CO2 emissions to near-zero or face disruptions in the global economy that will make America's Great Depression of 1929 look like a decade-long party. The good news is that not only is this scenario avoidable, but the technologies we'll use to avoid global meltdown could reward the folks who embrace them with much larger profits than we saw during the wildest days of the late 1990s telecom boom. With the potential damage to crops, property, a...

Whether you actually clicked on this link deliberately, or accidentally stumbled here while searching for the latest YouTube video, I’m glad you stopped by! And now that you’ve discovered us, I invite you to come on in, pull up your favorite computer chair, grab a mug of coffee, and stop by each week as we serve up another hearty helping of the tastiest technical tidbits we’ve imported from the far corners of the DSP universe.   It’s taken a few years, but I’ve finally gotten around to giving digital signal processing technology a home of its own on our web site. Since DSPs have found their way into everything from VoIP systems and cellular base stations to washing machine controllers and solar power inverters, you probably know that we’ve already been regularly covering DSP-based products and technologies on a regular basis in the networkZONE, audio-videoZONE, and other sections of EN-Genius Network. But since DSPs have their own unique set of design challenges, I f...

EN-Genius Network is pleased to welcome you to this new ZONE.   rlcZONE will offer the coverage of the passives in our industry in a way that has never been seen before. The typical approach to this sector doesn't even require an engineer at the helm: you take all the press releases that you receive, take a paragraph or two out of them to describe the new product and then add a news release photo if you have the space for it.   That's not how it is going to happen in this space.   We will be offering that most popular difference that has gained support, trust and respect at analogZONE (which is now a part of the EN-Genius Network) by putting our necks on the line by actually analyzing products in reviews. Those reviews will examine the products in what, how and why they are there; will critique where necessary; will condemn vaporware; will consider the accuracy of the pricing for the market. But, at the same time, we publish the vendor's news release without change of text or fact -- a un...