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Antenna Breakthrough Called E-tenna
An Anonymous Coward writes: "Nearly everything electronic has drastically evolved over my lifetime with the exception of the antenna up till now. The widely respected EETimes has a story about a company called e-tenna that is using microelectromechanical technology to bring the "elusive goal of a software-defined radio one step closer to reality". This is the type of thing that deserves a patent!" The idea here is to have a radio device capable of transmitting/receiving over a wide range of wavelengths without any moving parts, and instead of a set of inductors and capacitors for tuning, it does most of the "work" in a general-purpose chip.
Since when is EE Times widely respected? This is not a peer-reviewed journal, nor a source of significant independent research. It's a typical pop engineering mag full of fluff. The bulk of their online daily news updates are derived from corporate press releases, which they maybe follow up with a phone call or two to make even fluffier.
One little detail that they left out of the article is that E-Tenna Corp. is all of four days old...or at least they announced their existance in a May 14 press release. They were just spun off from Titan, who sent out a flurry of press releases to get mouthpieces like EE Times to talk them up, so they can carry the snippits around to people with more money than engineering aptitude as they beg for additional financing. (They also announced completion of first-round financing of $7 million when the corporation was announced four days ago, but $7 million isn't nearly enough.) They have no products or customers, so they need to talk up their unproven ideas to attract investors.
Looking over the text of the submission, I'm inclined to think the Anonymous Coward is an employee of Titan or E-Tenna Corp. as well. Who else but a corporate flak is going to spew something like "nearly everything electronic has drastically evolved over my lifetime with the exception of the antenna up till now." Either you know about antennas and you know that's false, or you don't know about antennas and so you wouldn't be that enthused about this amorphous possible future development.
Well son, where the hell have you been? Electrically variable resonant circuits have been a feature of RF synthesizers since at least the late 70s. Phased arrays, scanning arrays all use similar techniques, as have electrically adjustable filters based on nonlinear materials such as indium antimonide. This is a nice approach, but it's hardly revoultionary and still doesn't solve the isolation problem or linearity issues for CDMA.
Look, SlashDot's staff is perfectly capable of reporting on software issues and leftist politics, and can probably write a good line of code. Stick to your expertise. Don't bother bullshitting us about RF if you can't hack vector calculus, don't dream Maxwell in your sleep, haven't brought a Beowulf cluster to its knees doing FEA, never drew an arc from a kilovolt power supply while warming yourself above those cherry red vacuum tubes in the final, and can't sling at least 20 WPM from a Vibroplex...
...-.-