What's new for December 2008?

As is always the case, we've been busy this month adding plenty of new features to Microwaves101. We ain't been slack, Cap'n Walker!

Merry Christmas 2008! There's plenty of parking down at the mall, and plenty of pink slips in the future. Enjoy the going out of business sales in January, but remember, your company might be next, you could be a victim of 2009's peace dividends!

• We took a look at using the Lim Eom six-port network to combine two power amplifiers. (Recall that we previously looked at it as a three-way combiner). The two-way combiner idea was treated in an 2001 IEEE MTT Symposium paper, but not to our satisfaction. The concept allows you to combine two power amplifiers without the need for any isolation resistors, seemingly the next best thing since bottled beer! We show you why you should consider just how stable this network might be in practice. If anyone wants an assignment for January, a full stability analysis of the network would be much appreciated. Contact us if you are interested!
• Seoul National University now has its very own college page. The Applied Electromagnetics Lab is a regular contributor to the IEEE microwave publications, and the AEL site contains a link that provides many of their papers in downloadable pdf files. Lim and Eom are just two of the authors from AEL!
• The Microwaves101 Hall of Fame now includes Dr. David Pozar, the author of the book Microwave Engineering. If you only have one textbook on microwaves, there is no arguing, Pozar's is the one!
• We offer a new spreadsheet in the download area: a freespace path calculator thanks to Robert! A word of caution before you get your hopes up to try this out, you need Excel 2007 to run it. So far we've been too cheap to spring for it, but now we all have a good reason to cough up the cash!
• We have a new page on multipaction. This page has almost zero technical content, but it provides a link to some free software courtesy of an engineer working for the European Space Agency named Simon. Thanks!
• A Momentum bug has been uncovered and described, beware! Momentum is Agilent's 2.5D electromagnetic simulation tool and ordinarily it provides a fine playground. This particular problem is the worst kind, it doesn't crash the program, it merely provides you with bad data, and if you're too dumb to notice, the joke's on you. What did you want for $50K per year?
• A new Microwaves101 rule of thumb has been added, thanks to Glenn! This one will help you estimate the gain of a phased array.
• The Unknown Editor has new material, this time he provides charts from a recent IEEE talk he gave. We're pretty sure this is the only IEEE talk that contains references to dinosaurs, beer pong and a shameless ad for a vacant rental unit! The UE also makes sport of Mustang drivers and the "Chinese Amish". He provides links to videos of Si Cranstoun of The Dualers, which is the answer to the question "what if there were completely new and original Christmas songs sung by a cool cat in a video so awesome that you could hardly stop watching?" The Unknown Editor has something for everyone!
• The microwave mortuary has two new subjects. At the top is a photo of a National Weather Service radar near Reno that took a serious beating on December 19 and will be out of service for a while (contributed by Matthew). Below that is a photo of a burning dish on a tower, contributed by Jim. Thanks guys!
• Be sure to check out the upcoming issue of Microwaves and RF magazine! There is a regular column called Crosstalk where MW&RF interviews players across the microwaves industry, including CEOs, company founders, and other big shots. In the next issue they interview the Unknown Editor of Microwaves101. As they say in Mad Magazine, this material will be suitable for wrapping fish or lining the birdcage!

We've got some new questions--and answers--on our Microwave Message Board. We've have hundreds of topics posted on various microwave engineering subjects, with many more replies; our message board is an industry resource. Post your own questions, or help us answer some of the ones that are already posted. Some of the posted material may eventually get captured in our encyclopedia, so do your part for posterity! We'll remove any postings that we consider inappropriate.

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