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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: robert b furman who wrote (50110)	8/2/2001 4:10:48 PM
From: mitch-c	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

OT- Phased array Sort of. What happens is that all the little antennas get a signal at slightly (VERY slightly) different times. By calculating an artificial phase delay to apply to each little antenna's signal, you can electronically "point" the flat array to an off-perpendicular angle. You still use all the little antennas, just with different time delays to "focus" them all. Have you ever seen a stadium crowd hold up cards that make a picture? same concept - each card holder has no idea what the picture looks like, but together, they appear as one big card from far away. A conventional dish has to be physically pointed, and that's a stabilization problem on a moving vehicle. (My tanks had stabilization to shoot accurately on the move, but an M1 Abrams isn't exactly a consumer commodity. <g>) The response time of a purely electronic system is much better than a mechanical one, so "shooting" a satellite signal while moving becomes a solvable problem. For your second question, I'd guess the antenna looks much more like a solar panel than a dish, and the "array" is a printed circuit board. The magic is going to be in the positioning system and the real-time phase feedback to keep the antenna "pointed" to the same spot in the sky while the vehicle moves beneath it. No fiber necessary. If someone can do this, it will be way cool. I have a pickup truck; if I could put a cover over the bed which held a 4ft x 4ft flat phased array antenna under the fiberglass ... DSL-class access while cruising the Interstate! <g> This approach solves the "last mile" problem by unplugging the cord. - Mitch