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."

Comments

Re:Let me be the first..

[Anonymous Coward]

What IS the obsession with Tesla by certain people? Yeah, he was a bright guy who discovered a few interesting things. But he was also a crackpot who made made a lot of very stupid mistakes in his theories.

He is NOT underrecognized. Deal with it.

Re:Let me be the first..

[cybercomm]

Your statement about Tesla sir is verry ignorant, and perhaps should you have paid more attention to his work/patents you would have noticed that even the most modern PC's have his inventions in them (IE electromotor, ALTERNATING CURRENT (AC) Transformers in your power supply....). And yes he made many bad mistakes in his life...while in germany working for edisons german subsidiary Eddison promised him 20 000$ (at that time!)to move to US and finish some work on his patents, upon completition Edison said: " We had no legal contract, welcome to America..and live with it". So his only problem was that he never acually worked on his image nor did he have thirst for money to charge thousans for kis inventions. Please make more informed judgement next time.