SUPPLEMENTARY TEXTS
Task 1. Read and translate the following text with a dictionary
Task 2. Discuss plasma antenna technology.
Plasma antenna technology
On earth we live upon an island of “ordinary” matter. The different states of matter generally found on earth are solid, liquid, and gas. Sir William Crookes, an English physicist identified a fourth state of matter, now called plasma, in 1879. Plasma is by far the most common form of matter. Plasma in the stars and in the tenuous space between them makes up over 99 % of the visible universe and perhaps most of that which is not visible. Important to ASI’s technology, plasmas are conductive assemblies of charged and neutral particles and fields that exhibit collective effects. Plasmas carry electrical currents and generate magnetic fields.
The essence of a plasma antenna is that it is equal to performance of a metal antenna but is lighter. When a plasma antenna is turned off, it is transparent — immune to electronic countermeasures and allowing other adjacent antennas to transmit or receive without interference.
Since the discovery of radio frequency (RF) transmission, antenna design has been an integral part of virtually every communication and radar application. Technology has advanced to provide unique antenna designs for applications ranging from general broadcast of radio frequency signals for public use to
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complex weapon systems. In its most common form, an antenna represents a conducting metal surface that is sized to emit radiation at one or more selected frequencies. Antennas must be efficient so the maximum amount of signal strength is expended in the propogated wave and not wasted in antenna reflection.
Plasma antenna technology employs ionized gas enclosed in a tube (or other enclosure) as the conducting element of an antenna. This is a fundamental change from traditional antenna design that generally employs solid metal wires as the conducting element. Ionized gas is an efficient conducting element with a number of important advantages. Since the gas is ionized only for the time of transmission or reception, “ringing” and associate effects of solid wire antenna design are eliminated. The design allows for extremely short pulses, important to many forms of digital communication and radars. The design further provides the opportunity to construct an antenna that can be compact and dynamically reconfigured for frequency, direction, bandwidth, gain and beam width. Plasma antenna technology will enable antennas to be designed that are efficient, low in weight and smaller in size than traditional solid wire antennas.
When gas is electrically charged, or ionized to a plasma state it becomes conductive, allowing radio frequency (RF) signals to be transmitted or received. We employ ionized gas enclosed in a tube as the conducting element of an antenna. When the gas is not ionized, the antenna element ceases to exist. This is a fundamental change from traditional antenna design that generally employs solid metal wires as the conducting element. We believe our plasma antenna offers numerous advantages including stealth for military applications and higher digital performance in commercial applications. We also believe our technology can compete in many metal antenna applications.
Initial studies have concluded that a plasma antenna’s performance is equal to a copper wire antenna in every respect. Plasma antennas can be used for any transmission and/or
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modulation technique: continuous wave (CW), phase modulation, impulse, AM, FM, chirp, spread spectrum or other digital techniques. And the plasma antenna can be used over a large frequency range up to 20 GHz and employ a wide variety of gases (for example neon, argon, helium, krypton, mercury vapor and xenon). The same is true as to its value as a receive antenna.
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Suppose you invented cognitive radio. Prepare a talk to make presentation of a new device.
Cognitive Radio
Cognitive radio is an emerging smart wireless communications technology that will be able to find and connect with any nearby open radio frequency to best serve to user. Thus, a cognitive radio should be able to switch from a band of the radio spectrum that is blocked by interference to a free one to complete a transmission link, a capability that is particularly important an emergency.
Adaptive software will enable these intelligent devices to reconfigure their functions to meet the demands of communications networks or consumers as needed. These alterations will be based on the ability to sense and remember various factors such as the radio-frequency spectrum, user behavior, or network state in different transmission environments at any one place and time. As a result, wireless communications should become far more dependable and convenient.
The new flexibility afforded by cognitive radio may also eventually enable consumers to take advantage of cheaper wireless network paths available locally to make calls, a future that would do much to revolutionize the communications business.
The cognitive radio unit would build an internal database that defines how it should best operate in different places and at specific times of day.
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In contrast, the frequency bands and transmission protocol parameters of current wireless systems have been mostly fixed.
As cognitive radios send and receive signals, they will nimbly bound in and out of free bands as required, avoiding those that are already in use. This lightning-fast channel jumping should permit cognitive radio systems to transmit voice and data streams at reasonable speeds. By making much more efficient use of existing radio-frequency (RF) resources to work around spectrum-availability traffic jams, wireless communications should become far more dependable and convenient and perhaps considerably cheaper than it is today. Indeed, if cognitive radio technology progresses as its developers hope, a glut of RFspectrum options may actually arise in time. The airwaves will never be the same again.
The next-generation wireless technology, called softwaredefined radio (SDR), uses both embedded signal-processing algorithms to sift out weak radio signals and reconfigurable code structures to receive and transmit new radio protocols. Experts anticipate that in the relatively near term this software-driven advance will produce a seismic shift in radio design.
The change means, for example, that SDR code and other programmable radio-frequency front-end interface technologies running on a standard laptop computer (fitted with a small RF peripheral component interconnect card) could receive TV signals and display them. If the laptop were then equipped with an analog RF SDR card, it could upload software programming that would allow it to behave as a cellular handset or base station, a wireless personal organizer or even a military-frequency radio — whatever is required (and permitted) for the task at hand.
Cognitive radio is arriving on the heels of SDR technology and building on it. This new wireless paradigm involves SDR systems that can reconfigure their analog RF output and that incorporate “self-awareness” and knowledge of transmission protocols, etiquette and procedures. These developments will yield a cognitive radio able to sense its RF environment and
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location and then alter its power, frequency, modulation and other operating parameters so as to dynamically reuse whatever spectrum is available.
Self-awareness refers to the unit's ability to learn about itself and its relation to the radio networks it inhabits. Engineers can implement these functions through a computational model of the device and its environment that defines it as an individual entity (“Self”) that operates as a “Radio”; the model also defines a “User” about whom the system can learn.
A cognitive radio will be able to autonomously sense how its RF environment varies with position and time in terms of the power that it and other transmitters in the vicinity radiate. These data structures and related software will enable a cognitive radio device to discover and use surrounding networks to the best advantage while avoiding interference from other radios. In the not too distant future, cognitive radio technology will share the available spectrum optimally without instructions from a controlling network, which could eventually liberate the user from user contracts and fees.
Cognitive radio will be smart enough to introduce etiquette — sensible transactional practices — into RF-spectrum operations. It will also intelligently detect and interact with nearby picocells to keep the cognitive radio user connected by the means that best serve his or her needs, which may differ among various times and situations.
To accomplish these tasks, a cognitive radio unit requires several things. First, it must “know” how radiated RF power at its location varies with distance along the ground, among obstructions and up in the air. Cell phones do not need this information because the fixed network employs dedicated radio spectrum that has been previously calibrated for existing radiated power patterns. Cognitive radios instead sense the entire local RF environment of low, medium and high bands, mapping its features as a function of space, time and frequency propagation. The development of spectrum-sensing cognitive radio will
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