Map to Harris meeting at Orban
Our Speaker this month is David Workman of Abekus. He will be speaking about a new digital video effects processor called "Devious".
As usual our luncheon will be at Sinbads. Sinbad's is just south of the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero near the foot of Mission Street. Please RSVP to Karen Prasek at Zack's: 408-324-0551 x126 as we've been running out of tables and chairs. We meet at 11:30 and are seated at 12:30.
WHAT'S YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS?
SBE member Warren Reese of KPH in Bolinas is the keeper of the list and quite a few of our members have signed up already. Email him at [email protected]. And if you have a packet address, Warren would like that too. His packet address is WB6TMY@N0ARY.#NOCAL.CA.USA.NOAM. (Note: The 0 after the @ is a zero. I can't convince MS WORD to do zeros with slashes.)
POZAR PUTS CH40 ON THE WEB
If the postman is running a little late, you can find the latest newsletter at http://www.lns.com/sbe/
TWO MEETINGS IN FEBRUARY
In February we will have our regular luncheon meeting with Abekas on the 28th plus an evening meeting on the 29th. Orban in San Leandro will host a meeting at which Harris Broadcast will present a technical paper on the design and application of their new DIGIT digital FM exciter. Richard Fry, FM Applications Engineer for the FM product line at Harris, Quincy, IL. will give us an overview of their design philosophy and discuss specific circuit elements and the reasons for choosing them. Again, that will be Thursday, Feb. 29th, 7pm at Orban, 1525 Alvarado St., San Leandro.
TFT AND SAGE CERTIFIED
The main competitors in the EAS equipment market have both received certification from the FCC and may begin to market their products. I'm sure we'll be hearing more about these products in upcoming meetings. Don't forget the SBE EAS primer.
MARCH MEETING
Our March 27th meeting will feature Sean Bowers of Virtex Communications. He will discuss Musicam USA's involvement in the USA Digital Radio ("USA DR") system for Digital Audio Broadcast; the joint venture between Virtex and Infinity called Musicam Express providing 3500 radio stations with a store and forward music system. Also the Virtex "Field Fone" analog phone line codec and their "Prima" ISDN codec.
BIOMED ON THE TUBE
NOTICE OF PROPOSED RULEMAKING PT 15
The Critical Care Medical Group has made a modest request. CCMG is a collection of vendors who make wireless devices for medical monitoring. They presently operate in the VHF TV band from 174 to 216 mhz and in UHF from 512 to 566 mhz. The present field strength limits are 1500 microvolts for VHF and 200 microvolts for UHF measured at 3 meters.
Because there isn't really an antenna in the traditional sense, the proposal to switch to a power output limit rather than a measured radiated field sort of lets the genie out of the bottle. The proposed 5 milliwatt power output could result in over 100K microvolts at 3 meters. They would no longer be limited to the present window in UHF but would use the entire band.
There is some question as to how this will fly given the fact that current empty channels will shortly be allocated to ATV. Biomed users must observe a co-channel distance rule that would prevent using any local or Sacramento channel for this purpose. But then when did you ever see anyone in the field, under the same rules, use a legal wireless mic frequency?
Comments are due by April 16th, 1996.
YOU HAD TO ASK, DIDN'T YOU!
Just before our January meeting I talked to Amy Freundlich at the local FCC office. She'd had a query about the status of email as it relates to viewer/listener contact. She passed the question onto Washington and got the response that it was to have the same status as regular mail and must be preserved as a record of public contact and made available on request. It may be kept on disk and just printed out as required.
Last year I finally switched to getting my FCC rules on disk. Even after dealing with those binders year after year, somehow page 17c was followed by page 22 with no intentionally empty pages left in between or a page would end in mid sentence never to be concluded on the following page. Enough I say!