Thursday, June 10, 2004

Less is more

When I moved to Palo Alto in 1985, my landlord was a scientist at a large defense contractor. He specialized in antennas, especially those of the sort put on satellites nobody's allowed to talk about. But he was bored with the science, he told me. "Antenna theory is done. Now it's all about implementation."

Apparently not. Here comes Rob Vincent, age 60, of Rhode Island. He's designing antennas one ninth to one third the size of normal full-size antennas, with 80%-100% of the efficiency.

See links here, here and in the New York Times. (Thanks to Buzz for the pointer.)

None of the articles and posts I've seen so far address the biggest potential benefit in the short term: reducing the huge amount of air space and real estate required for AM radio transmission.

Conventional (in fact, regulatory) wisdom holds that signals on AM are shaped almost entirely by their electrical length. Half-wave to 5/8-wave antennas are considered most efficient. A half-wave antenna at the bottom end of the AM band (540KHz) would be nearly 900 feet high. At the top end of the band (1710KHz) it's around 140 feet. That's why, on AM, whole towers radiate. Most also have directional arrays involving multiple towers. All are required to have ground systems in which copper straps are buried for hundreds of feet in all directions from the towers. That takes up a lot of room.

In decades past, when land was cheap and nobody made environmental impact statements or cared about migrating birds, putting up an AM transmitter wasn't a huge deal. Now it is. I think Mr. Vincent's solution might allow lots of AM stations to "build down" their enormous size, or to relocate to better places.

I might be wrong, but that's what makes sense to me after reading this story so far.

As (2B) Seen on TV

Jeff Jarvis took my bait here and here (as well as chum from many others) and has run wild with it. The pull quote: TV's exploding before our very eyes.

Cooler yet, he tells how. In detail. Nice.

Get your Buzz on

Buzz Bruggeman, "a fan of Dave Winer for a long time," also has kind words for Robert Scoble, Greg Reinaker (indirectly... Buzz digs Newsgator) and others in an interview with Steve Rubel. Steve also interviewed Scoble earlier this year.

Really Simple Decision

Says here Google is mulling support of RSS as well as Atom. This would be a Good Thing. Says CNET:

Bottom line:
Were Google to support both RSS and Atom equally, it might help ease growing pains for this growing Web publishing movement. It would also restore Google to the status of a neutral party in the midst of a bitter fight between backers of RSS and Atom.

Love child

BloggingBaby. From Jason and the other folks who already bring you Autoblog. With more to come, fersure.