Re: Pulsed radio technology

Brian Atkins (brian@posthuman.com)
Mon, 12 Apr 1999 20:59:19 -0400

Billy Brown wrote:
>
> Brian Atkins wrote:
> > I haven't heard of this kind of thing before, but it sounds
> > completely kickass:
> >
> > http://www.usatoday.com/money/bcovfri.htm
> > --
>
> These guys need to find a science reporter who knows what a radio wave is.
>
> (Note for non-technical types: "Radio waves" and "radar waves" are
> overlapping portions of the electromagnetic spectrum, with no clear
> demarcations between them.)
>
> Radar chips are a really cool innovation. They will make possible a whole
> new generation of portable sensors, and they may turn out to be superior to
> conventional radio technology for some purposes. However, they aren't going
> to magically make radio spectrum bandwidth limitations vanish. The

Did you take a look at the time-domain.com website? There is a graphic there showing bandwidth per user per cell site. This new "Ultra Wide Band" method of transmitting appears to provide about 100 times more bandwidth per user.

method
> the article describes for setting up "undetectable" radio communication with
> them also does not appear viable - it should be perfectly feasible to build
> a receiver that will pick up the transmission.

Well since UWB transmits at such a low power over such a large range of frequencies, it apparently is like "noise" compared to more conventional continuous-wave transmissions. Plus the pulses are encoded sorta like how spread spectrum stuff works. So my take is that it is way harder to pick up than SS. The company time domain has already built a set of stealth radios for the military.

>
> Billy Brown, MCSE+I
> bbrown@conemsco.com

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