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Actually, I know an EV-1 owner, in fact it's his vehicle that is in the National Museum of American History. You can read his comments about it here. Whether the EV-1 owners liked their cars, and whether it was a successful vehicle, are irrelevant. After all, it was the first model they made and computer folks know about "1.0" versions. The point was that GM had the technical lead, and discarded it.

And besides, these days people really like their Teslas. So, whatever was wrong with EV-1 wasn't an indictment of the electric car in general.

Ham radio is no longer "banging brass," though you'd think that was all there is if you watch crummy movies like Independence Day.

I took the license exam with Code, and the VE said "Hey, you did great, you should take the General exam." I hadn't studied for it, and really wasn't prepared. He offered "What have you got to lose?" So I took the test, passed, and he followed with "Excellent, the Extra exam will only cost you another 15 minutes." I chuckled ... he didn't. So I took the Extra exam, and passed with a flying D-minus. "Well, that's nothing to write home about, but congratulations anyway!"

I would have taken the license exam in my yoot, but studying code from 45-rpm records really didn't work for me. The newer code methods did. Can't say that I use code much at all. I'm more involved in packet radio and fun math things like FEC. There's a packet protocol that adds FEC to AX.25 while maintaining backwards compatibility. Phil Karn has developed a really amazing satcom protocol called BPSK1000, which was incorporated into ARRISSAT-1. There's definitely a growing software component of amateur radio.

Phil Karn's KA9Q and MIT PC/IP both predated it. MIT PC/IP was commercialized into FTP Software, Inc., and supplied Microsoft in 1996.

http://www.ka9q.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTP_Software

I remember Bob Wallace, founder of Quicksoft, author of PC-Write, and pretty much the inventor of shareware marketing, despite Andrew Fluegelman releasing PC-Talk first. Bob was one of the few people who "got it", although the software industry has ironically not recovered from his usability choices.

It was a conversation at a conference in the 1980's. Bob said "I don't sell software; software is all up here", motioning with his hands around his temples; "I sell manuals".

Bob did this by putting enough functionality in his product that people felt it was worth paying for, and he made it obscure enough that it really was not that useful without a manual, and he sold manuals cheaply enough that it was easier to buy them (and get a disk at the same time) than it was to print them out on tractor feed fan-fold paper.

Software still hasn't recovered its usability from the intentional/unnecessary complexity caused by shareware authors. The problem for Trumpet Winsock was it pretty much had nothing to sell beyond what was available already, and it didn't have anyone over a barrel for documentation. I made the same mistake with my own shareware once upon a time, and made pretty much nothing on it as well. Live and learn.

-- Terry

This article questions the validity of the company.

That's a great link, thanks for posting, but to be fair, the original TFA is talking about an entirely different topic, the use by xG of cognitive radio ("cog radio") techniques for spectrum utilization, rather than some new, ostensibly power saving modulation scheme developed by xG.

Cog radio still has the potential to alleviate spectral congestion in some situations. It may be very beneficial to some users (i.e.: military) which is why DARPA and some military agencies continue tio fund development of same.

There is no hard definition of what cog radio is, exactly, so given xG's record of spin, we should take their claim as interesting, but the details would need to be understood to see just how revolutionary (or not) their scheme really is.

This article questions the validity of the company.

For those that still do not want to give up the fight read this.

Those two interfaces are explained by Phil Karn.

There's a freakish USB module that takes some of those CardBus cards and makes them into USB devices. I think it's simply exposing that same internal USB interface, and if you look at the supported cards list, it bears that out.

So if this device has been out for a while, why is the monolithic USB version news?

The bottom line: Even with present-day power plant emissions, EVs are vastly cleaner with regard to "conventional" pollutants (nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, smoke, etc) than ordinary gasoline and diesel vehicle engines.

With the current electric generation mix, the EV's contribution to CO2 reduction is not as dramatic, but is still significant. This comes mainly from the considerably greater energy efficiency of the EV. Large power plants running at constant power are much more efficient than small vehicle engines that are constantly throttled.

In other words, the claim that EVs are just "emission elsewhere" vehicles is a myth. But it's a myth that's surprisingly persistent.

And, of course, as electric generation moves to non-fossil sources, EVs will automatically get even cleaner.

How about asking those who actually drove them every day?

I drove the Smithsonian's car here in San Diego for two years. (Yes, the very same car. See http://www.ka9q.net/ev/). After that, I drove another EV1 for three years.

The EV1 was a great car, a lot of fun to drive, and it met nearly all of my needs. I don't know about you, but none of my other cars could do 0-60 in 7 seconds, and I considered that pretty spectacular. In fact, my gasoline car went unused for so long that I lent it to a friend. I had a charger at home, and I was also lucky enough to have one at work. (Truth be told, I didn't really need the charger at work.) Since those are the two places my car spends most of its time parked, it was nearly always fully charged when I came out to drive it. I never had to go out of my way to a gas station (except to use the car wash), and I hardly ever had the need to drive more than its range in a single day. On the rare occasions I traveled out of town, my EV1 could still take me to the airport. And on the even rarer occasions I needed to drive out of town, my EV1 could easily take me to the local Enterprise lot where I could rent a vehicle more suited to the purpose (such as a SUV for desert camping).

The charge port problem to which you refer was only in the Gen 1, model year 1997, which includes my first car. It was caused by a defective capacitor which had already been removed in the Gen 2 (1999 model year) design. I know of no problems with Gen 2 cars, and I'm pretty sure I would have had there been one.

This is what's so frustrating about having been an EV1 driver: knowing from personal experience just how great a car it was, and seeing others without that experience mouth total gibberish. But I guess we just have to educate people one by one.

I have been around Hams for twenty years and the tech has usually stayed interesting. During the late 80's packet radio was starting out. When most people were calling bbs's using modems, hams were sending wireless data. Check out Phil Karn's site. He has a lot of wireless experience as both ham and engineer responsible for much of the CDMA standard.

Want to start with some small radios and learn more about electronics at the same time? There are many interesting kits around if you look. You certainly don't have to spend huge amounts on radios to get started. I paid ~$120US for my VX-2R when they were first introduced. It makes a great general purpose scanner too.

Newer modes like PSK31 are incredibly efficient. A couple of watts of power and 31Hz of radio spectrum and you have error free world wide digital communication at 50wpm. It is difficult to audibly detect the signal while listening, even when you know it is there.

What about KA9Q's NOS? That was around from the early 80's as part of TCP/IP experiments in amateur radio. Original version ran on an Amiga. KA9Q is one of the reasons why hams have their own class-A network (44).
-russ

Neither yet have any articles been cited that mention the circumstances under which NPT acquired these patents (the inventor died of liver cancer in 2004) or the name of the inventor himself -- Tom Campana whose own business making wireless email devices was driven into the ground by the fact that he invented it in the late 80's and early 90's, before email had caught on.

I think we've got a case of crackberrys spamming the media and skewing the terms of the debate into "Evil Patent Trolls vs. The Good Tech Blackberry." Perhaps its more the case that a couple of dot com kiddies are trying ride the actual technological advances made half a decade earlier.

Of course I also know that the KA9Q crowd was doing all of this in the mid-80's which is pry the prior art the NPT patents will be thrown out on -- and you'd think the /. community would know about this, you guys being such big swinging technical dorks and all. But...guess not.

Phil Karn debunked the claims about VMSK here:
http://www.ka9q.net/vmsk/

I AM a radio engineer, and I am extremely dubious about some of the claims in the article/website/etc. The thin line on the spectrum analyzer looks alot more like a sine wave than a system that "modifies each cycle of the sine wave". Others have pointed out that this is another way of stating the essence of phase/frequency modulation, a very old modulation technique.

On the xG website there is a press release that has some tortured details:
http://www.xgtechnology.com/newsitem.asp?id=21

"xG's Flash Signal technology, which utilizes single-cycle waveforms to transmit information at a minimum effective rate of 1 MB/s for each megahertz of spectrum"

Well, to me, you take away the "megas" and you get 1 bit/sec/Hz for the spectral efficiency .. .the same as BPSK.

The only important technical point I can find in the article is this one:

"Moreover, because the receiver -- the design of which is xG's most-guarded intellectual property -- includes a passive wavelet path filter that acknowledges only single-cycle waveforms, all other RF signals are ignored."

My guess is that he has an antenna/feedline scheme that cancels signals that cross correlate with a 1 cycle delayed version of themselves. Most likely, he does this by using two antennas and a bit more coax (at a particular design frequency) on one antenna to cancel any signals that are coherent with themselves for some integration time. This is not a particularly new or cleaver idea, but I suppose you could use it with the modulation scheme to increase the SNR of the signal (assuming of course that most signals are not like yours).

Also, if this is the case, then the geometry of the antenna array relative to the transmitter will be important, because at the wavelength used (900 Mhz) the configuration of the antennas will yeild different phases depending on how they are aligned relative to the transmitter. I take further proof of this in the zdnet article which describes the signal as degrading when the antenna is pointed away from the transmitter. (near the end)

ZDNet UK saw that the bitstream vanished when the receiving antenna was moved out of alignment with the distant transmitter

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/wireless/0, 39020348,39235645,00.htm

This scheme will yield better performance, that is.. until everyone is using it. If there are many signals that are not coherent with themselves over the integration time of the circuit, then the supposed advantages in terms of interference rejection will disappear.

In summary, if everything is as I have guessed, this technology is about the same as using a better antenna for a regular wifi system ... it will get better performance, but at the cost of requiring knowledege of where the base station is located relative to the mobile unit. Also, if the technology is what I have guessed, it will be easily copied if the market finds it to have great value, of which I am dubious. I could be wrong about all of this, but it would be interesting to see more technical information rather than a few plots and a dog-and-pony show. Appeals to authority fail to be very convincing when you are talking about claims in a field with well-known laws limiting performance.

"These innovations [DSS] were designed to ... increase the effective range of the phone (e.g. spreading the transmission in 360-degrees so there were no dead spots)"

Not only does it transmit a theoretical 30 Mbps over a distance of 15 miles, but it also uses a sparing 1 watt of power (e.g. 30 watts for WiMax). And because of its unique energy-saving modulation technique its power-footprint is essentially undetectable and therefore the FCC is unable to regulate it (unless of course, they rewrite their own rules).

1. I'll wait for the actual 30Mbps, theoretical Mbps's are useless to me.
2. Is that 1 Watt of power transmitting that theoretical 30Mbps EIRP, or the power at the transmitter? What antennas are specified? 1 Watt into a 30 dBi antenna is the same as 1 kW into a 0 dBi antenna.
3. Excuse me? The FCC can't detect it? Huh? Even with 'normal' DSS, it's detectable. If your 'power-footprint' is so impressive, how can your receivers detect it?
4. The FCC can't regulate it? Double huh? If it's between 9 kHz and 300 GHz, it's already regulated. It may not require a license, but it is regulated.

"These innovations [DSS] were designed to ... increase the effective range of the phone (e.g. spreading the transmission in 360-degrees so there were no dead spots)"

Not only does it transmit a theoretical 30 Mbps over a distance of 15 miles, but it also uses a sparing 1 watt of power (e.g. 30 watts for WiMax). And because of its unique energy-saving modulation technique its power-footprint is essentially undetectable and therefore the FCC is unable to regulate it (unless of course, they rewrite their own rules).

1. I'll wait for the actual 30Mbps, theoretical Mbps's are useless to me.
2. Is that 1 Watt of power transmitting that theoretical 30Mbps EIRP, or the power at the transmitter? What antennas are specified? 1 Watt into a 30 dBi antenna is the same as 1 kW into a 0 dBi antenna.
3. Excuse me? The FCC can't detect it? Huh? Even with 'normal' DSS, it's detectable. If your 'power-footprint' is so impressive, how can your receivers detect it?
4. The FCC can't regulate it? Double huh? If it's between 9 kHz and 300 GHz, it's already regulated. It may not require a license, but it is regulated.

Surprisingly (at least to me), the answer is yes. See http://www.ka9q.net/5220.html.

Inductive systems can use metal cores (One in the receiving coil, the other in the transmitting coils. However, I have never heard of 90% efficiency. The problem is that the "somewhat less" coupling causes leakage and massive power loss. Case in point, the EV1 inductive charging paddle has ~65% efficiency. http://www.ka9q.net/ev/joke_hybrid.html
And this is in a situation where they care about efficiency due to the massive amounts of power being transferred. (I couldn't find any more official pages, but this is roughly in the correct ballpark).

Transformers are specifically engineered and can achieve efficiencies of 98-99%, but they depend on magnetic components that are mechanically bound together with extremely small gaps. The problem with inductive charging is that unless you have a mechanical interface that guarantees sub-millimeter gaps between two chunks of ferrite, the efficiency is going to drop like a brick. Charging cordless toothbrushes is one thing, charging a laptop that has 50x the amout of energy(50Whrs versus 1Whr) gets amusing fast.

Anyone who understands file hashes and hash tables will think of using it for finding duplicate files. Especially if they have any archives of code from the net.

I have a web page with information on how to get the Sierra Wireless 5220 PC card working with Linux. The 5220 is, at present, the only supported device on Verizon's WirelessBroadband service (their name for CDMA 1xEV-DO).

With their 5220 card and instructions from Phil Karn it works perfectly! See: http://www.ka9q.net/5220.html

At least for Verizon's EVDO we've got a horde of folk in our IT dept. using it thanks mostly to Phil Karn's notes on getting the card working in Linux.

Might want to dig a little deeper and see if "no support" really just means "we don't know if it works and don't know how to support Linux." Hopefully some folks further down will have info on the other services.

Disclaimer: I happen to work for one of the companies involved with EVDO.

At least for Verizon's EVDO we've got a horde of folk in our IT dept. using it thanks mostly to Phil Karn's notes on getting the card working in Linux.

Might want to dig a little deeper and see if "no support" really just means "we don't know if it works and don't know how to support Linux." Hopefully some folks further down will have info on the other services.

Disclaimer: I happen to work for one of the companies involved with EVDO.

Verizon's Broadband Access works and is widely available, and if you're a heavy mobile user you can't really beat the $79/mo unlimited usage plan. In markets with the 3G equipment in place (San Diego for example) you get the faster EVDO speeds (throughput is good but latency is still a bit high - you won't be fragging in Quake over it), and everywhere else Verizon has coverage you get good ol' 1xRTT speed which is as functional as dialup and a helluva lot more convenient.

The AirPrime PC5220 card that Verizon provides works under Windows and Mac OS X (one of the recent 10.3.x patches included official drivers), and can be used under Linux if you follow Phil Karn's excellent writeup. Only gotcha is that you need Windows for the initial activation, but from that point on you're fine on your alternative OS.

So right now I'm using a Motorola v710 on Verizon for my wireless Internet. Using Bluetooth. Dial-up networking is one of the few things that Verizon didn't disable on the v710's Bluetooth stack. I haven't tried it with Linux, but I do know that it's basicly like having a good old Hayes Compatable attached to the computer.

However, that only gets you a maximum 128k theoretical, realistically 56k.

I can give you a link to the AirPrime 5220 card. That can be hacked.

Ballmer's missive landed in my mailbox last night (somehow it escaped my spam filter), and I wrote this response. I know no one there will read it, but it was still fun to write.

Looks like broadband isn't for everyone - but wait, there's a rebuttal!

Yes, and as someone who lives in the Washington DC area and had a chance to play with it, it really is quite good - I was expecting some sort of a "catch", but there is none - you get what seems like a very fast connection. For $79/month for unlimited use and now that someone has figured out how to get the Verizon card to work with Linux, this looks like a pretty good deal. I wonder whether Verizon plans on raising the price eventually.

Exactly. If you want to find out if your crypto implementation is secure, ask the US government. If they say yes, you've got bugs.


Depends who in the US government you ask. Groups like the US State Department, the Dept of Commerce, CSRC of the NIST and half of the NSA (who has two purposes - one to protect against foreign intelligent threats, and one to exploit against foreign intelligent adverseries.) they want to protect most of the US public (and NAFTA, G8, and NATO interests) - including US businesses - from foreign governments. These groups can give you an idea of what is likely secure as we know in the non-classified knowledge outside the cloak and dagger world of the NSA, GCHQ, CSE, etc.

Mind you, I'm not sure why anyone would need to ask permission to export a public standard like AES. I'm pretty sure there aren't any secrets happening there.

AES was selected through a very open public process, so no knowledge about AES requires export permission. The US Dept of Commerce does regulate Dual-Use items (i.e. items that have a military/dangerous/hostile use and non-military use) including information security software implementations such as toolkits, libraries, and binaries (and object code). Humanly readable source code is still somewhat in disupte, but based on some US state level court cases (Phil Karn and Bernstein) it appears that human readable source code is not regulated.

Phil Karn already figured it out. The card sounds funky; it's a USB master and slave on the same card.

Any one thing ham can do, something else can do better.

You've got to be kidding me, right?

Hams have been at the forefront of some of the biggest technilogical advances in communications over the last century.

Perhaps you've heard of Phil Karn, also known as KA9Q? He is one of the larger contributers to the development of the Internet and other computer communications technologies. While it was still ARPANET we were using his TCP/IP stack. He and many other hams around the world have contributed directly and indirectly to the technology you take for granted every day. Many of the people on that list who contributed to the advancment of communication technology drew upon their experience as hams.

Anyway the internet does the thing for people where they can talk to people in other countries for free, and they can have video, too.

(Patented Sarcasm Mode) You talk to people in other countries for free using the internet? I pay my ISP for the privilege. You must have a pretty sweet deal.

I paid for my ham radio once. I paid a small fee to take my ham test. A year's worth of internet access costs more than the both of them combined.

And we all know that hams never send video.(/Patented Sarcasm Mode)

As many other people have pointed out in this forum, it isn't just the merit of ham radio in question. There are also non-ham communications issues, and one simple question that remains unanswered:

Why allow so much spectrum to be lost to "harmful interference" when it doesn't have to be?

Ham radio is cool. The idea of being able to build a radio with which you can speak to people in other countries is fantastic. But, there are valid replacements. The only real defense is the hobby issue, and I'm not sure that's going to end up being sufficient. Generally speaking it's money that speaks the loudest.

What valid replacement is there for the knowledge and experience gained by hams as they progress in their 'hobby'?

What valid replacement is there for all of the skilled electronic/communication technicians that will no longer exist because their 'hobby' is depleted?

Amateur radio got me interested in electronics. It wasn't the other way around.

Berkeley was Government-funded to develope it and give it away. That doesn't happen any more. Under the Bayh-Dole Act, universities can now own intellectual property rights in works developed with Government funding. The head of "intellectual property" at UC Berkeley said last year that if they'd had those rights back then, "they would have owned TCP/IP". But they wouldn't have; UCB would have been one player in a market.

If UCB had owned those rights, the winning implementation might have been Phil Karn's K9AQ NOS, because it was free software. It was free because Phil Karn, a radio ham, followed the traditions of the radio ham community, which just assumed everything was open.

A related, but little-known fact: After 4.2BSD, DARPA decided to pull the plug on Berkeley's UNIX work. They felt that Berkeley's monolithic kernel was getting bloated, and decided to fund Mach (which was suppose to be a microkernel) instead. If the Mach effort had come out better, UNIX history could have been quit different.

I submitted this on the 23rd but the eds rejected it.

Guy's email is in the WinXP credits because they use his GPL'd code, so you may have gotten a virus that used his address. Like the 600k he's gotten.

Why I Hate Microsoft
Part 1: Worms and Viruses
Phil Karn, KA9Q

Have you ever heard of KA9Q? It's an OS older than Linux and it was written by a Ham radio enthusiast Phil Karn. It's a shame it wasn't mentioned in the survey. I can imagine some people are still using it, but they probably don't have browsers to vote :-)

Moderators, there is nothing insightful in treating this article like a piece of propaganda and attacking for that.

Why? Because I wrote a particular piece of open-source software.

See www.ka9q.net/worm for the gory details. There are some interesting plots at the end.

The plain fact is that both inductive and conductive charging can be made quite safe against electric shock with proper grounding, interlocks and ground fault protection. As far as I know, there have been no electrocutions with either method. It's just not a problem.

The real charging safety issue turned out to be fire, not electric shock. And this affected inductive charging, not conductive. I know of two 1997 model EV1s that burned up, taking their garages with them. There were also a few more close calls. It seems that a resonating capacitor in the charge coupler aged, failed and caught fire. Because the coupler is surrounded with flammable material (foam, epoxy, etc), the fires quickly spread.

GM had already eliminated the capacitor in their redesign of the charge port in the 1999 model, but they didn't recall the 1997 models until after two destructive fires. One fire happened to a coworker, so I had a chance to investigate. Here are my notes on that fire. To say that GM's behavior in its aftermath was reprehensible would be an understatement. But I've now learned to expect that sort of thing from them.

I agree that fast charging is highly desirable but this is actually a strong argument against inductive charging. Inductive coupling is so inherently inefficient that even at the standard 6kW power level the charge coupler requires liquid cooling. GM kludged up a 50kW inductive charger for demonstration and PR purposes, but it required liquid coolant be pumped through the paddle as well!

While I'm sure the GM engineers thought inductive charging was a good idea at the time, experience has now shown that it is best left to electric toothbrushes. Conductive charging of EVs is the way to go. CARB made the right decision to standardize on it, even if it caused GM to take all its marbles and go home.

The myth that EVs just move pollutants from the tailpipe to the power plant is surprisingly persistent given that is easily refuted with hard facts. In California, EVs result in a ~97% reduction in per-mile emissions even though more than half of our electricity comes from fossil fuels (mainly natural gas). I've done the calculations myself. Because large power plants are far more efficient than automobile engines and the power grid is about 96% efficient, the overall energy efficiency of the EV is also higher.

Although I've driven EV1s for five years, I agree with CARB's decision to standardize on conductive charging. Inductive charging was a worthy experiment, but it just hasn't worked out well in practice. Inductive charging is proprietary, expensive, unreliable and inefficient. It cannot be easily scaled to the higher power levels needed to reduce charging times, which I would broaden the appeal of EVs.

GM touted inductive charging as inherently safe, but the fires that occurred in the first version of the EV1's charge port belied that claim. Electric shock hazards with both kinds of charging are essentially nil with proper grounding, interlocks and ground fault protectors.

The CARB decision to standardize on conductive charging is to be phased in over a decade, so it really had nothing to do with GM's decision to pull the EV1s off the road at the end of their current 3-year leases. GM has consistently lied and stretched the truth in their attempts to get out of the CARB ZEV mandate.

Perhaps the biggest lie by GM and the other carmakers is their claim that "no one wants EVs". This is a little strange given that GM leased virtually every EV1 they made, and there was a long waiting list when they were pulled off the market. But the success of this Big Lie can be seen in the many misconceptions and negative comments seen here and elsewhere by those who have never actually driven an EV.

The end result, an electric car just moves the pollution it creates from the car to the power plant, and the power plant is very very dirty.

It's amazing how this myth persists given how easy it is to disprove. In California, the emissions from existing power plants associated with EV charging are far below those of even the cleanest gasoline cars. The approximate figure is a 97% reduction in per-mile emissions, but the actual figures depend on the specific pollutant. See my analysis for the details.

Cars fueled by natural gas are the only internal combustion engines that even come close to the cleanliness of an EV.