Collaborate Disseminate
If a grizzled RF engineer who bears the soldering-iron scars of a thousand projects could offer any advice, it would be that microwave antennas are not a field to be entered into lightly. Much heartache is to be saved by using an off-the-shelf design, and only the foolhardy venture willingly …read more
Continue reading A Patch Antenna Is Just A Rectangle, It Should Be Easy To Design, Right?
When you’re looking to add some wireless functionality to a project, there are no shortage of options. You really don’t need to know much of the technical details to make use of the more well-documented modules, especially if you just need to get something working quickly. On the other hand, …read more
As a Canadian, [Mr. Carlson] knows a thing or two about extreme winter weather. Chances are good, though, that he never thought he’d get zapped with high voltage generated by falling snow.
[Mr. Carlson]’s shocking tale began with a quiet evening in his jam-packed lab as a snowstorm raged outside. …read more
There’s an old saying that we have one mouth and two ears so you can listen twice as much as you talk. However, talking and listening at the same time is fairly difficult and doing it with radio signals is especially hard. A company called Kumu Networks has an analog …read more
Continue reading Full Duplex Radio Claimed Easier with Analog Module
If you’re going to fail, you might as well fail ambitiously. A complex project with a lot of subsystems has a greater chance of at least partial success, as well as providing valuable lessons in what not to do next time. At least that’s the lemonade [Josh Johnson] made from …read more
Continue reading Fail of the Week: Ambitious Vector Network Analyzer Fails To Deliver
Join us on Wednesday, December 18 at noon Pacific for the Weird World of Microwaves Hack Chat with Shahriar Shahramian! We’ve been following him on The Signal Path for years and are excited to pick his brain on what is often considered one of the dark arts of electronics.
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The HP 11947A is something of a footnote in the back catalogue of Hewlett Packard test equipment. An attenuator and limiter with a bandwidth in the megahertz rather than the gigahertz. It’s possible that few laboratories have much use for one in 2019, but it does have one useful property: …read more
Continue reading A Modern Take On A Piece Of Old Test Equipment
Those of us who work with electronics will usually come to the art through a particular avenue that we master while imbibing what we need from those around it. For example, an interest in audio circuitry may branch into DSP and microcontrollers as projects become more complex. Some realms though …read more
Continue reading Hackaday Superconference: An Analog Engineer Dives Into RF
The origin of the term “breadboard” comes from an amusing past when wooden bread boards were swiped from kitchens and used as a canvas for radio hobbyists to roll homemade capacitors, inductors, and switches. At a period when commercial electronic components were limited, anything within reach was fair game.
[Andy …read more
Making upgrades to a popular product line might sound like a good idea, but adding bigger/better/faster parts to an existing product can cause unforeseen problems. For example, dropping a more powerful engine in an existing car platform might seem to work at first until people start reporting that the increased …read more
Continue reading Raspberry Pi 4 HDMI is Jamming Its Own WiFi