Tuesday night net

[Nan and Sandy Sanders]

from Hal WB3KDU

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TUESDAY NIGHT TECH NET  8PM  ON ECHO LINK AND 21/81 AMRAD REPEATER
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Meta-materials, also called engineered materials, are the really 
fantastic stuff of science fiction.  They have a negative index of refraction.
If you've read about the invisibility cloak in the technical press - 
a device that bends electromagnetic radiation around an object rendering
it invisible, you are reading about meta-materials.  It also makes 
ultra-small antennas already used in some cell phones.  The latest to be done
with meta-materials it to create a microscope lens  that magnifies 
beyond the optical limit with the potential of creating an optical 
microscope that
magnifies greatly beyond the best and most expensive optical 
instruments today. The theory behind how this works sounds something 
right out of star trek.
It "enhances the evanescent modes through surface plasmon 
coupling."    For more check out Superlens in Wikipedia. For those of 
you unfamiliar with
plasmonics, its described as a likely successor to information 
transmission by electronics.


Tuesday Nite Tech Net will not discuss metamaterials (yet).  But we 
will pick up on our discussion of SDR.  Last time we  rag crewed a bit
about the pros and cons of programmable logic devices by Xilinx vs 
Altera and  the specification languages Verilog vs VHDL.  In today's 
business headlines say that
Altera was bought by Intel so who knows what their licensing and 
product lines is going to look like in the future.

Terry Fox is experimenting with a credit card size, open source, 
FPGA-based processor board with a System on a Chip (SoC) processor and
125MSample/sec 12 and 14 A/D designed to be the heart of an 
instrument like a special purpose oscilloscope.  The thing has a 
LINUX OS on it too.

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Tech Net meets at 8PM EDT Tuesday evening on Echo Link at the W4CIA 
conference point and on the 21/81 repeater.   Sandy
WB5MMB is conference coordinator.