Thursday, February 01, 2024
Meeting Time: 7:00 pm
Online event (via Zoom): Please register on meetup.com to obtain the Zoom link.
Lecture
We see antennas everywhere. You likely have one or more on you right now, under the plastic cover of your cellphone or smartwatch. Cars now bristle with antennas …. AM/FM radio, GPS navigation, tire pressure monitoring …. And new driver support technology is being added regularly. Some homes still use TV antennas … and don’t forget those satellite dish antennas proliferating on rooftops.
Antennas provide a specific service – to insert information into the environment and extract it some distance away. Antennas provide the pure realization of Action at a Distance.
Many complex systems require the signals to be accurately pointed in a specific direction, even moving to follow a changing situation. Air traffic control, military combat, and space exploration put incredible requirements on their antennas. We all watch the news and ask “How do they do that?” This presentation is an attempt to provide some understanding.
The antennas used in such service are mind-bogglingly complicated, but we will break them down into digestible bite-size-chunks so we can learn their fascinating stories.
Part 1 described antenna arrays that precisely aim their signals though mechanical movement or switching between radiating elements. Part 2 discusses antenna arrays that remain mechanically stationary, while the signal directionality is precisely controlled by adding a specific phase shift to each radiating element.
Speaker Bio:
Ed has worked on a diverse series of fascinating projects, often in some of the most unusual environments. Ed has played with the best toys ever, having gone cold-iron on an aircraft carrier, playing chicken with freight trains in a blizzard (May 2023 LICN presentation), and - in this presentation - bouncing off runways.
Ed’s work has included military radars (search, tracking and secondary), navigation and landing systems, railroad safety and control, Utility monitoring and control (or SCADA <”skay-dah”>), and even tracking weather balloons.
Ed has delivered professional presentations to IEEE/LICN on air traffic control and avionics, combat control, power distribution monitoring, radio, and railroad safety systems.
Agenda:
We will start our meeting at 7:00 pm. For the next 20 minutes or so, we will introduce ourselves and do a little networking. We will then start our presentation. After the presentation, feel free to stick around and chat with others to network or to further discuss our lecture topic.
Notes
There is no cost to attend this meeting, however, if you would like to receive Continuing Education Units (0.2 CEUs/2 PDHs) then payment of a $15 fee is required (a modest increase from last year, but still a bargain). You will also have to properly fill out an Evaluation Form to prove that you attended this lecture. Click here to open the form. Simply fill it out and click on the “Submit” button.
We accept electronic payment via Zelle. Zelle is a bank-to-bank transfer mechanism supported by most banks, without a fee, as part of their normal online banking capabilities. There is also a Zelle app available for your smartphone.
When you use Zelle with your bank, it will ask for the following information: 1) the amount to send (enter $15.00), 2) what account you want to pull the money from (select whatever account you want to use), and 3) the phone number or email of the recipient (enter ieeelicn@gmail.com. Don’t worry if you see the name of our Treasurer, David Rost, pop up). If it asks for a memo field, we suggest entering "yymmdd LICN CEU” where yymmdd are the year, month and date of the lecture.
While we prefer that your payment and evaluation form are received by the day of the lecture, they must be received by the first Monday after the lecture.
If paying by Zelle is a problem for you, then please contact John Dunn at ambertec@ieee.org for an alternate payment method.
