Nice report. I wish beamformer ICs were made for lower frequencies, but everything is targeting X-band and higher.

The new availability of transceiver architecture of RF direct sampling or RF ADC/DAC can work from DC (0 Hz) to high frequency (GHz) is changing the landscape and now you can have beamforming at the lower frequency bands [1].

[1] Radio Architecture Matters: A Review of RF Sampling vs. Zero-IF:

Radio Architecture Matters: A Review of RF Sampling vs. Zero-IF

Here's the missing link to the referenced article:

Radio Architecture Matters: A Review of RF Sampling vs. Zero-IF:

https://www.analog.com/en/technical-articles/radio-architect...

I guess there the digital beamforming is enough for many use cases.

I’m using 4x A6000 Ada cards for EM simulation. They have 48 GB ECC and 2-slot width so can be accommodated in a server case, versus 24 GB non ECC and 3-slot width for the 4090. They are actually faster for FP32 than the A100, but really poor for FP64.

Watch there now be a cassette renaissance like there was a record renaissance, despite the cassette having horrible audio quality compared to a CD.

You can buy them from Barnes and Noble and Taylor Swift is releasing her new stuff on them, I think the renaissance has begun (and possibly already peaked)

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bleach-nirvana/29210673?ean...

https://store.taylorswift.com/collections/cassette-shop

There's been a resurgence for a while! There are countless tape labels releasing interesting music (see: https://daily.bandcamp.com/tape-label-report and Marc Masters' book "High Bias," which is mentioned in the piece).

Most antennas actually have a large radar cross section (RCS), with simple dipoles being some of the worst. An infinitely thin dipole (a current filament) has a non zero RCS even though it has no physical cross section.

In theory, a reflector antenna can have a zero RCS, so putting a reflector behind a dipole will reduce the RCS. It’s totally non-intuitive.

Don’t buy the damned things. I just bought a 1989 Toyota pickup. Manual transmission, locks, windows, etc. Super reliable and easy to work on. It’s got a standard double-DIN stereo opening, so you could install the latest touch-screen gizmo if desired.

Expanded polystyrene has an extremely low loss tangent and dielectric constant, so I fail to see how microwave heating causes more chemical leaching than hot water.

Hot water only reaches 100°C regardless, but any fats in the soup can reach higher temperatures in a microwave.

One might think the water in the soup would moderate the temperature of the other components and keep them from reaching significantly above its own boiling point. Is this intuition not entirely accurate?

The plastic above the water line has no heat sink and can melt if you cook the noodles too long in the microwave. That shouldn't happen when you boil water on the stove and dump it into the cup, even if you cook the water for far too long.

The 1973 movie Genesis II also had travel tubes on a post-apocalyptic earth.

For my 5th Xmas I still remember getting a giant Eagle ship. The cockpit was removable from the center structure and the pilots could eject.

I wrote this years ago with that intent, though I don’t know you’d get audio back in real-time.

https://github.com/madengr/ham2mon

I have one too, on an active magnetic loop, which does a decent job of nulling near field interference.

http://kiwisdr.lounix.net:8073/

Not only that, but being able to play Doom (or maybe it was Wolfenstein) while downloading at 14.4k was amazing. I believe I used PMComm and of course a 16550 serial card.

I used it extensively in college in early 90’s, as Windows 3.1 seemed so primitive, but then a couple of years later Linux kind of took everything by storm.