As usual, our luncheon will be at Sinbad's just south of the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero near the foot of Mission St. We meet at 11:30 and are seated at 12:30. To make reservations call Paul Black at 925-827-9511 and leave a message on his machine.

On the front page of the business section of the New York Times March 4th was a color picture of our own Tim Pozar as part of an article on wireless networking.

In a rare visit to the SMPTE student chapter at Napa College, SMPTE will host a morning meeting on the state of television as seen by a panel of speakers. For details go to the website:

http://members.aol.com/SMPTEsf/index.html

In March of 2001 we incorporated the chapter by filing articles of incorporation with the State of California. Now we need to file for tax exempt status with both the state and the feds. We voted on two items at the March meeting to facilitate this. The first was to make the officers of the chapter the directors of the corporation. The second was to permit the directors to approve an interim set of by-laws which are needed as part of our tax-exempt applications. Said bylaws are to be submitted to the membership within 6 months for a vote to make them permanent. The bylaws are based on a model from national SBE with such variations as we thought made sense for the way our chapter operates. As our finances go, we are so far under the radar screen of the state and feds that it's a shame that it will take a pound of paper to make that official. - Roy Trumbull, Treasurer.

Art Leberman came up with an article about Farnsworth's demo at his Philadelphia Lab. He demonstrated a receiver for "high definition" television, which was then about 240 lines. Farnsworth indicated he had plans to improve that to 360 lines and then maybe even 400 lines. The image size was 12 by 14 inches "considered ideal for home reception".

I'm a little confused as I don't closely follow everything going on in digital radio. In any event during NAB I read an article that implied that IBOC was too marginal to even consider and that IBAC was the way to go. Even if it just legally allowed you to wipe out a pirate on an adjacent channel, it might have some virtue. I won't say that the kleptocracy of radio owners has made radio an unlikely companion, but I will say that I'm thankful that most rental cars have CD players. To keep things even, my TV viewing can often be measured in minutes a week.

At the Dolby booth I ran into Craig Todd, wearing suit and tie. Everyone else had the company shirt on. So I was kidding him about this and then we went on to talk of other matters. He told me that Richard Cita, formerly of Zenith, had come up with a receiver that worked in severe multipath conditions. Craig was quite interested as he lives in a hole in Mill Valley behind substantial amounts of rock. A spectrum analyzer shows 30 db notches in the bandwidth of most of the channels coming from Mt. Sutro. He is about 10 miles from Sutro. When the ATSC COFDM tests were done in Brazil, they came up with some profiles of really terrible multipath. Neither ATSC nor COFDM would work in some of those profiles. Richard Cita's receiver, which he calls "the Linx", was tested at the CRC Labs in Ottawa by Dr. Yiyan Wu using the Brazil profiles. It worked. The results are available at www.crc.ca/dtv.

In the Axcera booth during NAB the receiver was used with a signal that had 5 deep notches in it. Richard is interested in licensing manufacturers to use his design.

Meanwhile, over at the Hilton, Zenith had a suite where they were demonstrating EVSB, which is an enhanced coding scheme. They showed it using new receivers as well as legacy receivers. There had been some concern that improvements would obsolete all existing receivers. This demo relieved that concern.