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Spark Gaps and Ultra Wide Band Data Transmission
Embedded Geek writes: "It sounds like the revenge of Marconi, but Scientific American has a story about the use of spark gap technology for Ultra Wide Band (UWB) data transmission to send data at 100 to 500 Mbps across short distances (five to ten meters). As with every new technology, 'engineers expect these UWB units to be cheaper, smaller and less power-hungry than today's narrowband radio devices,' but there might be some truth to the hype. The secret appears to be the lack of a carrier wave, allowing use of wide swaths of the spectrum for transmission (the few comments I read at the FCC site referenced in the article addressed spectrum allocation)." Read below for a few more links, too.
"The article pitches the technology as a challenger or succesor to Bluetooth and 802.11a. There are several commercial companies investigating the technology (Aetherwire, Multispectral, and others are cited in the article) and Intel has a paper cited in the article. Spin off applications from the components needed to make this technology work might include a GPS style system accurate to one meter and a radar technology that would allow seeing through walls for construction, rescue, and (ahem) law enforcement."
These are supposed to look like noise to anything else transmitting. Since they spread the signal around a LOT of specturm, they are generally just raising the level of background noise.... What happens when enough of these devices get out there, and the noise floor rises to equal Everest?
What, me worry?
Uh oh, you mentioned the M-name, this means the rabid Tesla fans will be out en masse to complain about the fact that their favourite scientist got left out.
Sounds very much like the old SSB (single sideband) systems I used to play around with in my CB days :) But seriously, why would anyone *need* such high speed transfers at 5-10 meters?
.. to mention Tesla!
What is the benefit when the applicable distance is so short?
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
I love the smell of ozone in the morning.
Think about it: Short-wave radios fabricated on a chip that are capable of 100-500 Mbits/sec.
t ml
1. Your PDA would be your CPU + Memory
2. You could put your harddrive in your coat pocket.
3. When you walk towards a monitor, you could wirelessly dock to it or the neighboring keyboards/mice.
This is actually an old article, but I honestly believe if Intel gets this right, UWB is going to be HUGE.
Here's another article:
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-840393.h
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
anything that currently has a docking station or plug could use this and get rid of a lot of user confusion.
Maybe you will only have to plug in a single power cord to the next iMac.
If the world was filled with these devices then background (full spectrum Gaussian) radiation would be high enough to kill us all, equivalent to having a cellular+microwave+xray+gammaray transmitter constantly switched on stapled to our foreheads, bathing us endlessly in radiation. UWB gives us a dose of everything
Then again maybe small doses of gamma radiation are good for us, errr maybe they keep our DNA repair system primed or something? I mean small amounts of chocolate's good for us so.. why not gamma rays + xrays?
Well at least it's not as bad as cosmic radiation or neutrons I suppose, but today's narrowband transmissions at least use (to our puny knowledge) frequency ranges that don't kill us.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
Avoiding Interference
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
to mention...Hertz!! He was the one that invented spark-gap transmission! How do you imagine he demonstrated electromagnetic waves... and found the photoelectric effect at the same time! If only he didn't die so young...
"...For example, rather than picking up recorded movies at the video store, we may end up downloading films using a portable mass-storage unit and UWB wireless transmission while filling the car up at the fuel pump..." The whole spark gap transmiter + gasoline fumes seems bad for some reason.
don't get between the transmitter and receiver.. "I'm not set up for this kind of transaction, dood!" - keanu
I make these: http://beatseqr.com
Contraceptives. If this doesn't make you sterile nothing will.
reenigne
Do you know what your television picture looks like when someone drives by with an incorrectly tuned moped? That's a spark gap using a wide band of the spectrum.
This is not a panacea. While using a wider bandwidth does allow for the use of less power, Shannon's theorem still holds so there is a limit to how much the power can be reduced. And yes, with UWB, just like with spread spectrum, other signals contribute to the "noise" so as more people use it the overall performance will degrade. The proponents of this technology often "overlook" these facts when pushing it.
100-500 Mbits/sec can pretty much serve as a wireless bus for most of your components. With that kind of speed, you could physically seperate your (CPU+Memory) (Harddrive) (Monitor)
Not to mention all of the wireless possibilities linking to Home Entertainment system, Car, Access Control Devices, Etc.
Given Intel's goals to make UWB cheap as they're trying to fabricate it on CMOS it would be everywhere where wires used to be.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
Bush just needed too much 9/11... All the little american patriots just zipped their mouths and heil'd their commander in chief... There are so many things you just ask yourself... the businesses the bushes had with Laden's... The fact that Bin Laden hasn't been caught despite all that effort... And there's the anthrax... just too many coincidences.. And CNN wich has becomed the de facto propaganda tool of the pentagon (I want to be big! said Ted Turner.. how the hell could that mountrous merger happen... someone must have made some cutbacks...), the pentagon even has a special room and software for field generals to track CNN and the press... The so called CNN effect...
Yeah!
America is the land of the feed...
Don't spark gap transmitters cause a great deal of interference across all radio bands? I thought they were outlawed or something for that very reason. Unless they've come up with a way to prevent that, isn't that going to be an issue?
So it seems that these are very very low powered.
I mean, Microwatts?
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Anyone who's ever installed a decent radio in an old car knows that the ignition system causes a lot of noise, even the article states this. For this reason i seriously doubt the usefullness of this as a transmision device because the noise is not just on one band, but on many, very many. It's the same way on some comutator motors. So, unless your willing to give up all other radio capabilities this product is not for you!
I like replies better than Karma, even if they are flames, because that tells me I got someone thinking.
1/3000 of a cell phone.
Ultrawideband communications systems would share the same problem except that they deliberately operate at power levels so low that they emit less average radio energy than hair dryers, electric drills, laptop computers and other common appliances that radiate electromagnetic energy as a by-product. This low-power output means that UWB's range is sharply restricted--to distances of 100 meters or less and usually as little as 10 meters. For well-chosen modulation schemes, interference from UWB transmitters is generally benign because the energy levels of the pulses are simply too low to cause problems.
A typical 200-microwatt UWB transmitter, for example, radiates only one three-thousandth of the average energy emitted by a conventional 600-milliwatt cell phone.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
But isn't this the same thing as this?
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
This is about radio frequencies, not fucking gamma rays. Why don't you get your hand off your dick for 5 minutes and look for some info on EM transmitters. Do you honestly believe that the same device could transmit frequencies across the ENTIRE FUCKING EM SPECTRUM?! Take a Physics 101 class and get back to me.
I like petting kittens.
The article mentioned spacial density. It's short so you can pack more people using it into a smaller space. If you were to crank up the power, you would walk over others using the same "frequency" which would be about everyone else using the thing.
Also, the higher the frequency, the more you get into the microwave bands ... you really don't want to be putting out 200 watts of power to everyone around ... they'd get cooked!
Since it covers such a broad spectrum of radio, many things can/will be affected if this was in the lower portions of the radio spectum. That's why its limited to 5 - 10 GHz ... for now ...
If this was allowed at about 80MHz, you wouldn't be able to listen to radio ... all you would hear would be static. In fact the article went on to say that you need several Gigahertz of bandwidth. This is a LOT!
For instance CW (Morse code) ... you need to seperate conversations by about 50 Hz ... minimum. Stop and think about how many conversations you could get in ....
Go up to AM and it gets a bit broader about 5 kHz minimum ... with FM being the "widest" of the bunch ... upto about 10 kHz minimum.
Karma? Karma? I don't need no stinkin' karma.
Don't forget the indestructible passport.
I like petting kittens.
w00t to u buddy! =P
S/N is the signal-to-noise ratio, W is the bandwidth, C is the (theoretical maximum) data capacity.
It's easier to get capacity by raising the bandwidth consumption than by raising the power level, since the S/N is inside the logarithm. Then a virtuous circle gets started, because you can drop power level, which means someone nearby can operate without having you interfere with them, which means more people can each have whatever data rate C turns out to be.
This is really just a radical extension of spread spectrum radio.
quote: ...and a radar technology that would allow seeing through walls for construction, rescue, and (ahem) law enforcement."
Finally, I can see just what the heck my apartment neighbors are doing to make all that friggin racket 24/7! And I get to nuke them with the radiation at the same time? Say it ain't so! (sniff) I'm sooo happy!!!! (sniff)
Great, so now instead of the DEA flying overhead with thermal imaging equipment to check for heat coming from a grow room, all they have to do now is drive by and point a camera at your place and see how much your plants are growing every day. (Tell me it's not gonna happen...)
quod me nutrit me destruit
Is anyone else worried about the fact that this increases background noise radiation across the entire spectrum?
no.
Won't this cause a massive health risk?
no.
UWB gives us a dose of everything
no.
Am I just not seeing it on the main page?
just a friendly reminder.
The Science Museum in London has the only Spark Gap Transmitter licence in the UK. You can press a button to transmit a message using the spark, to a receiver across the corridor.
Kevin
"It's not the cough that carries you off, it's the coffin they carry you off in" O. Nash
Two companies that have been pioneers in UWB are Pulson and Aetherwire.
Pulson (and its predecessor company, Time Domain) has been desparately trying to commercialize this technology for radio communication for years. More than five years ago they demonstrated a few-milliwatt UWB radio with 100-mile range. They have mostly been held back by patents taken out by Lawrence Livermore. Livermore claims to have invented all of this stuff, and has been rediculously rough on licensing. Also, the FCC has been unclear until very recently on how it would license UWB.
Aetherwire has attempting to use UWB technology to build localizers, basically extremely short range, extremely low-power peer-to-peer short-range version of GPS. The localizers would all cooperate at keeping track of where the other ones were within a few hundred meter radius. If you've read A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge, it's all about localizers.
Now that the FCC has cleared the way, I expect to see tremendous progress in UWB. It's going to revolutionize many fields, from radio to positioning to radar.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Yeah, I think I want a buch of spark gap generators on a plane with me. The streaming video will be good for that time when we're taking off and landing and they make me turn off all electronics including my PDA to reduce (possible) navigation interference.
Granted, I don't think most electronics put out enough RF interference to cause problems, but why chance it? What if the transmitter get kicked, droped, jostled, or otherwise "detuned"?
Seriously, UWB emits less radiation than a hair dryer and 1/3000 of a cell phone.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
This is just a different method of sharing spectrum among different users. The currently used methods are pretty good. They have been under development for about 100 years. The Rf spectrum is a limited resource. The amount of information that can be transmitted over the spectrum is limited by Shannon's theorem (read his 1949 paper). This limit can't be increased. What UWB does is spreading its information over really wide bandwidth, raising the noise floor for everybody else. If there are enough UWB transmitters around, they will interfere with each other to the point of uselessness. Also, this will f**k up every other user of the Rf spectrum. In addition, with UWB, the spectrum can't be managed by assigning different frequency bands to different entities. Everyone jsut uses all of the spectrum all the time. The strongest transmitter wins. Sounds like this technology has a good chance of being approved in the US...
"Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot." -- Paul Graham
Reading this article I got an interesting idea. For this system to work it seems that you have to sample at an extremely fast rate. Given that, why couldn't you use the same hardware interface along with a DSP to extract signals of much lower frequencies, i.e.: Using FFT extract an FM signal. It would seem that we are at the cusp of being able to use one device to fulfill most of your all RF needs.
In a sparkgap transmitter the spark is used to excite oscillations in a tuned circuit which is coupled to the antenna. The Q of the tuned circuit is made as high as possible so as to minimize the bandwidth. Unfortunately it is not practical to make the Q high enough to prevent radiation of broadband (not wideband) noise and harmonics. However, the energy in the noise and harmonics is wasted. It is a narrowband transmitter that just happens to be rather inefficient.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Yes, but that cell phone will be radiating almost all of its energy on a set frequency, with harmonics etc 60db or more down, so it has very little pollution. 3db equals a halving of power, go figure, but at 600mW, even 40db suppression of 'sproggies' means much less than 0.125mW is radiated spuriously. Sounds like this thing polutes...
Merlin --- We're an autonomous collective... Help, Help, I'm being oppressed!!
As I understood it from when i last read up on this it was to do with having monocylcic pulses spread across the entire frequency range, and the analogy to a spark gap is a pretty poor one.
A spark gap interferes with the entire radio spectrum - using it to send only one bit of data.
UWB sends very brief signals over the entire radio specturm but jamming no part of it for any more than a tiny fraction of a second. Even then power output can be so low that to conventional radio a UWB transmission will fade into background noise.
Imagine the near future when these things proliferate.
You're living in an apartment building listening to an "ordinary" radio one evening. Suddenly, hideous whining and crackling proceeds to interrupt every station you could receive before. The entire FM and AM bands are trashed with this sound.
Your TV (not yet connected to cable) with rabbit ears - same story.
You pick up the portable phone to call the apartment manager, and your phone gives off that two tone beep that indicates either that your portable can't sync with the base unit because 1) your phone's battery is dying or 2) there is too much ambient interference.
Oh... you suddenly figured it out. The computer geek next door just got one of those new UWB networks set up.
The point: the quality of life for certain pastimes will take a dramatic nosedive... yet another way that your fellow man can make your life miserable without even breaking a sweat. Any sort of radio equipment will have to be used well away from most buildings.
I know, they will set "thresholds" of acceptable power for these things. The problem is, there are many legitimate uses for sensitive radio equipment, such as shortwave, or non hardwired TVs or radios.
What an IDIOTIC idea. It basically erases 100+ years of progress in electronics.
The power level on this is ridiculously silly low. You mentioned 200 watts, well you're off by a factor of 1000 if that's what you were mentioning.. Of course 200 watts at the 2-3 Ghz range would fry you. But 200 milliwatts is absolutely nothing. No effect. No effect on radio, on television, on cell phones, on nothing.
Does no one actually know what a milliwatt is? It is one ten thousandth (1/1000) of a watt. Does everyone know what a watt is? Well it's 1/1000th of the power consumed by your typical microwave. So what do these two multiplied together give?
(1/1000) * (1/1000) = (1/1000000)
One millionth! So unless you have one million of these fucking devices within 10 meters of each other, you're not going to have anything even coming close to the power of your average microwave.
these would be great for home area networks (han?) imagine all our appliances working
in a distribuited manner communicating across
the local area without wires...this is the start of something great!
Yeah, but even though you are microwaving your body on a power of 1 you are still microwaving your body. And once you get cancer its too late. The way I look at this is similar to cell phones. If someone gets a brain tumor using a cell phone its their own damned fault. We've all been warned. But if you're affraid of UWB you should really be scared of 802.11a, often with ranges up to 10 miles. Imagine the radiation. Do you think a wireless internet is worth it? I do. *evil grin*
Well obviously it's in the developer section. It's a clever /. ploy to make you look around sections other than the main page so that you are exposed to more advertising.
I think Time Domain is still the name of the company and Pulson is the trademark name of the technology. If they did change the name of the company the sure haven't changed the signs on the buildings. I work next door to them. It's really interesting to see the test equipment in the parking lot. Lots of really strange shaped devices.
Zoid.com
Do you know how bad this stuff is?
You might think you can live with this stuff, but it wrecks it for everyone else. The FCC (and other international Frequency management agencies) has been trying to reduce the ammounts of noise in the EM spectrum for years, that includes your noisy drills, mixers, and other noisy equiptment, and you want to make the noise worse? This stuff could make the difference from hearing your favorite FM station 50kms away from the transmitter, down to 20-30kms away. (That's with 3db signal loss through noise)
I don't know if anyone here might have heard of AM radio, but if you've ever listened to it, and you hear that occasional car going past making clicking noises is really low level. What your talking about now is whenever someone has one of these devices going, it will have the effect of dropping the station your hearing, watching, or even talking to, under the noise. So you'll now drive past someone past thier fancy UWB devices, and all your precious data connections (eg. CDMA) drop without a second thought, fm station will drop out, etc, etc... Image if your neighbour in an appartment block was using his reguarly?
Solution? Yes, simple, there is tonnes of bandwidth available you short range use all over the place, hey, there's even gigs of bandwidth available above 10Ghz, put a carrier on this, and transmit your data! Or, even, use infra red, there's atleast a few meg of bandwidth there (I've heard of tests of distances as much as 50kms).
Oh, and if your interested in this UWB stuff, then don't even think about security, the only way to keep you stuff partially secure would be Spread Spectrum, which needs to be managed on a set of frequencies.
VK3TST
-- "People aren't stupid. Usually." -- jd
In times like these we must ask ourselves one very important question: How will this affect... Al Frankin?
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
How much bandwidth could they get out of the spark plugs in an average V-8 engine? Enquiring minds want to know...
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
Wonder when the quantium concept will replace this stuped idea. By having two particles tangles and by changing one it affect the other then you have one heck of a radio! This is an effect that has been proven. In effect a direct connection that is not a direct connection. It turns into basic net tech without the noize and mess that UWB will create. The only way UWB will work is dump the current stuff ( all radios from 60hz through microwave ) and make everthing, communication, data whatever switch over completly. Hum. Wonder if using Teslar thinking these devices could live off of the noize generated by other devices? Self powered devices you cant switch off?
Here's a comment I made earlier this week about wardriving and the X10.
It's all about scope, if you dont want your TV talking to your next door neighbours TV, you shield your house by building a faraday cage into the walls, check the link because anything else I type would be redundant.
the Cringeley article points out that this could be used to solve the last-mile problem. (I guess you would need directional antenaes for that) That would be huge.
Imagine a Beowulf of him........
The popping sound would drive me mad...
Also, try this experiment. Get an electric drill with a trigger switch wo| a detent (physical click) at the start of the trigger's throw.
Hold it up to a radio (AM), and quickly pull the trigger, from full-off, to full-on. The radio will start popping.
Now imagine this on a sensitive, microwave array, listening for 300mW 20km away, instead of your 50,000 watt station.
-twb
i'm glad people still remember this stuff! ssb's coooool.
Even more efficient modulation techniques can be found at this PSK31 site.
First off, how much use is there for high-speed radio links that span 5 to 10 meters? It's not enough for an office network. It's not even enough to get a TV signal to the back bedroom.
Most of the claimed applications sound very similar to those claimed for Bluetooth. Remember Bluetooth? Besides, do we really need half a gigabit for PDA synchronization?
What this is really about is a spectrum grab. The RF spectrum is full of underutilized channels which use obsolete technology, like AM television. You could probably put a spread-spectrum cell phone system right on top of a TV band and all TV viewers would see is a little more snow, if anything. But the TV industry would howl.
All the hype about "ultrawideband" is to allow putting spread-spectrum signals (which is what ultrawideband signals are) on top of other channels. Initially, the proposals are for very low power levels, but once the technology is deployed, there will be pressure to allow higher power levels, even if it degrades the old-technology channels a bit. The ultrawideband stuff will have lousy range until the power levels increase.
Think of this as a political migration path to an all-spread-spectrum world. Judge it in those terms.
If there was any company that I would want to be next door it would be TimeDomain. If they are testing out their wares in the parking lot, I would beg to play with their stuff. I can not seem to find it, but at one point they were showing off their see-thru-wall thingymajigger on their website. That was cool.
We all use the same band to talk to and hear each other.
But we only receive those who are sending from locations near to us.
--Blair
looks like i'll have to upgrade my aluminum/lead helmet so the voices stop.
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
I have seen the error of my ways. You have my eternal gratitude for showing me the light (no pun intended of course). You see, sometimes it is with closed minds that we approach other intelligent and insightful viewpoints, often with the sole intention of merely causing dissent, aggravation and frustration. One could say that this might even be considered my credo. One could certainly make a good case for it.
I do hereby grant you your PhD; it is from my authority working in Area 51 AND Los Alamos that I can give you this honour. You have certainly earned it. Now please go forth and spread your wisdom to the drooling masses that inhabit this wretched little world (not that many of them deserve it).
I like petting kittens.
Why is it so hard to understand that the RF signals from UWB devices is in the MICROwatt range?
Comparing it to a microwave oven is just STUPID!
When my neighbour uses his haidryer the UWB noise of god knows how many watts is flying around! Lets outlaw hairdryers!!
The energy level is BELOW the ambient RF noise, it does not interfere with other devices, not even if you have thousands of them in the same spot!
You can't just add the watts! It's not that easy!
And to sit next to a computer (you DO know it's no perfectly sheilded, right?) and complain about the healthrisk of a 1 milliwatt UWB device is incredibly stupid!
The solution: use spread spectrum digital. Use COFDM. Use any number of already working band allocated technologies. Use 802.11. There's no need for UWB, and there's plenty of reasons why we don't want it. We should stop supporting this as a "geek" technology - you've all been had.
In May 2002, the 2002 IEEE Conference on Ultra Wideband Systems and Technologies will be held in Baltimore, MD. About 70 papers will be presented on UWB channel modeling, interference issues, applications, and signal processing. The URL for the Conference is:
IEEE UWBST 2002 Conference
In addition, a useful UWB FAQ can be found at UWB FAQ
...speaking as a ham radio op, is that spark gap transmitters are, by their very nature, marvelous spewers of noise across a band of frequencies that stretches darn near DC to daylight.
Someone else has already pointed out what may happen to the EM noise floor (the relatively fixed level of background noise present across the radio spectrum, but particularly noticeable in the HF band) if these devices become widely deployed. I share this concern.
Am I the only one who's worried about what it might do to the usability of HF radio overall for hams, aircraft (yes, many commercial jets carry HF SSB radio sets -- I know, I've helped test them!), High Seas Radiotelephone, and shortwave broadcasters? I wonder what the ARRL has to say about it?
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true!
They will install high quality cameras at the gas stations. Footage will be used to increase the realism of the movies you are downloading!! No more ILM simulated explosion crap. Finally, the real thing!
If you want people to listen to you, then you should give them enough credit to provide them with the information and rationale that you used to come to your conclusions rather than just telling us parrots what to repeat.
.2 mW, (Range) 10m, (Spacial Capacity) 1000kbs/m^2
Aside from your first two points (which I more than happy to agree with)
1. UWB does use the spectrum
2. UWB does have a carrier
Can you back up your last couple of assertions?
You go on to tell us that we should be using COFDM or 802.11 instead of UWB. I'm nothing close to an expert, but even I can see that 802.11 and UWB are for different type of applications.
UWB - Very Short Range, Very High Bandwidth (100-500 Mbit/sec up to 30ft)
802.11 - Wireless LAN (10 Mbits/sec up to 300 ft)
Why should I replace UWB with 802.11 when I can use both?
1. What is COFDM?
2. What kind of bandwidth, range can I get out of it?
3. Why isn't the industry pushing COFDM?
4. How expensive is it to integrate COFDM onto a small device, such as a PDA?
5. What's the spacial capacity?
6. How much power does it use?
SPATIAL CAPACITY, a gauge of operational efficiency important when comparing short-range wireless systems, favors UWB technology. Measured in kilobits per second per square meter (kbps/m2), spatial capacity focuses not only on bit rates for data transfer but on bit rates available in the confined spaces defined by short transmission ranges.
SPACIAL CAPICITY SPECS
IEEE 802.11b - (Power) 50 mW, (Range) 100m, (Spacial Capacity) 1kbs/m^2
BLUETOOTH - (Power) 1 mW, (Range) 10m, (Spacial Capacity) 30kbs/m^2
IEEE 802.11a - (Power) 200 mW, (Range) 50m, (Spacial Capacity) 55kbs/m^2
UWB - (Power)
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
This technology should have been here years ago, but it's not for two reasons:
1. It' almost imposible for the USGOV to eavesdrop on USB transmissions.
2. Telco companies like sprint have paid BILLIONS in gov auctions for exclusive right to certain parts of the spectrum. If UWB was realized to its full potential, those billions would be money waisted.
UWB should have been here years ago, but it's not for two reasons:
1. It' almost imposible for the USGOV to eavesdrop on USB transmissions.
2. Companies like sprint have paid BILLIONS in gov auctions for exclusive right to certain parts of the spectrum. UWB realized at its full potential makes that investment worthless.
When UWB is permited it will be at such a low power rate that it will not be a threat to the above two concerns.
Sigh. So much for my 500mb/s cell phone......
Some time ago /. mentioned this story about inventor Larry Fullerton, who spent 25 years developing radio burst technology in his backyard lab. His company, Time Domain, is listed in the Entrepreneurs box of the SciAm article. It's nice to see 2 things happening: 1) the technology has not disappeared, and 2) one of the original pioneers is actually getting a piece of it.
I love that movie...chemically!