Archive for February, 2008

Thursday, February 28th, 2008

Just Milling About…

Antennas!  I have spent the last few days learning to use our milling machine, practicing on cheap substrate, fixing the alignment here and there…but I think I have the hang of it now.  I built my first antenna today, which I was pretty happy about.  One problem I ran into was the ceramic substrate I [...]

No Comments » - Posted in Antennas, Grad School by admin

Wednesday, February 27th, 2008

Mark Your Calender…

For today!  Being both a fan of NPR, and Wilco…this is perfect.  Over the years I have been lucky to have caught a number of really, really great Wilco shows, so I am definitely looking forward to this.
There is a large number of other very good shows up on this series – including Okkervil River, [...]

No Comments » - Posted in Music by admin

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

My shortwave Radio

I got a Garmin FM/AM/Shortwave radio for Christmas, and here and there I scan around and see what I can pick up.  For a while I kept catching a channel out of the Netherlands, and a handful of other stations I can’t exactly place because they weren’t in English and I couldn’t listen to hear [...]

No Comments » - Posted in Antennas, Electromagnetics by admin

Friday, February 22nd, 2008

Snow Day!

This is, I think, our third or fourth snow day of the 2007-2008 school year.  It seems like it has been a long time since the weather has been this snowy.  Back in 1995-1996 or so, I recall having days off of grammar school due to it simply being too cold (-5F, etc), and then [...]

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Thursday, February 14th, 2008

Free Online Antenna Book

I have been using this book for the last 3 years as another source of some electromagnetic and antenna theory. It is an excellent book that is always being revised (similar to the electromagnetics book I posted about here) and is available in free pdf files. I highly recommend it to anyone looking [...]

No Comments » - Posted in Antennas, Electromagnetics by admin

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

Imagine there being 20 people for everyone currently alive

…and you would have a population equal to all humans who have ever lived throughout history.
This came up in conversation the other day with a friend of mine, and was an estimate I was unaware and, to be honest, is incredible to think about.  The estimate says that of the entire human population throughout history, [...]

No Comments » - Posted in General Science by admin

Friday, February 8th, 2008

Skymap iMAT antenna

EDIT: The pcitures were huge and were getting cutoff, so I resized them quickly only to make them look really bad, and hard to read, so instead now they are thumbnails — click on them to see full size images.
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I came across this article on an antenna intended for MIMO (multiple input, multiple output) applications, [...]

1 Comment » - Posted in Antennas by admin