Re: Pulsed radio technology ("Localizers")

Brian Atkins (brian@posthuman.com)
Tue, 13 Apr 1999 03:20:54 -0400

Yes the technology has seemed to finally catch up enough to make UWB applications possible. As I said, time-domain.com has already built several devices including a set of stealth radios for the military. An even cooler device is a "localizer" being developed by a company called AetherWire. Sort of like your own personal GPS system. They already have working prototypes. aetherwire.com

"Kyle L. Webb" wrote:
>
> Christian Weisgerber wrote:
> >
> >
> > It's hard to pick out just what they are talking about among all the
> > idiot babble, but I suspect it's spread spectrum technology. The
> > military has been using that for, what, 40 years? I think the tombs in
> > the EE library at my university that deal with this stuff go 20+ years
> > back.
>
> Close, but not quite. I wondered when this would resurface. It is spread
> spec of a sort, but done because the Fourier frequency spectrum of an
> extremely short pulse is extremely broad. There was a flurry of interest
> in this in Av Week and some other military journals in the late
> 80s/early 90s. There was talk of it not panning out on one hand because
> the technology just wasn't quite there (which is my leaning), and on the
> other hand that funding was curtailed because at that time partly
> because of concern that the extremely wide band of frequency emitted by
> a pulse radar could detect a conventionally stealthed aircraft (The
> conspiracy side of it, that I had doubts about). In any case it vanished
> for some years, but the article indicates that the high frequency SiGe
> transistor technology that IBM among others has been developing may make
> it viable now by allowing the tight timing limits needed.
> Another interesting idea that came out about the same time was some
> surface acoustic wave delay line signal processing systems done by EDI
> that also promised some pretty amazing radar advances (don't they
> always? ;). Looked quite interesting, though, again, the technology
> didn't look like it was quite there, and it slipped back out of sight. I
> rather wonder what happened to that bunch. I'll check up on them again
> in a month or so when I move back to the Urbana area (where they were
> based).
>
> Kyle L. Webb

-- 
"Knowing the path is not the same as walking it."
          -Morpheus _The Matrix_