Wired and Wireless: Making the Connections

Reservations & tickets (free) are required for this meeting! -- don't leave home without them!

  • Speakers:
  • Date & time: Thursday, 26 September 2002
  • Meeting organizer: Joe Wang & Roy Trumbull
  • Meeting Host: Ed Karl, KPIX-TV [www.kpix.com]

    • Program:

    Recently, an industry analyst, describing the global changes in broadcasting and other electronic media, summarized what's happening with this simple statement: "What was wired is becoming wireless. What was wireless is becoming wired." Many see a wireless, cell-based future for telephony and data transmission, while some say at least DTV has already lost the battle -- and maybe the war -- to cable. Whatever happens, we'll have to relearn what we thought we knew about both wired and wireless.

    The always-entertaining Belden Technology Specialist, Steve Lampen, will open the meeting with a description of how serial digital video cable is designed and manufactured. How you install wiring for digital can affect the performance of the entire system. You must understand and be able to measure return loss and return-loss headroom. Steve will also tell us about the "characteristic impedance" of cable and how to judge cable quality based on manufacturers' data.

    From his vantage point as a vendor to a wide variety of wired and wireless businesses, Steve will also have some observations and insights about the state of the industry. Prior to Belden, he had an extensive career in broadcast engineering and installation, film production, and electronic distribution. He holds an FCC Lifetime General License (formerly an FCC First Class License) and is an SBE Certified Radio Broadcast Engineer. On the data side, he is a BICSI Registered Communication Distribution Designer. His latest book, The Audio-Video Cable Installer's Pocket Guide, is published by McGraw-Hill. His column, "Wired For Sound", appears monthly in Radio World Magazine.

    Tim Pozar will discuss the 802.11 wireless Internet standards and where they're going. Popularly known as "WiFi", the standards allow the creation of local area networks within a business or in a wider areas such as an airport without licenses and expensive equipment. He has considerable practical experience implementing WiFi. (A recent issue of the New York Times featured a photo of Tim on a rooftop next to a WiFi antenna.) WiFi had been largely an enthusiast's toy, but now, major corporations are implementing the technology on a large commercial scale.

    Tim specializes in communications engineering consulting for commercial microwave tower and path design with CSI Telecommunications. He is a co-founder of the Bay Area Wireless Users Group [http://www.bawug.org]. For more than 25 years, he was a broadcast engineer.

    We're grateful to KPIX and to Ed Karl for hosting the meeting. KPIX is a special venue for us, hosting one of the earliest Bay Area public demonstrations of real-world, broadcast HDTV, the January 1999 SMPTE meeting. KPIX-DT broadcasts on Channel 29-1.

    Welcome:

    SMPTEsf  welcomes members and friends to attend without charge. Reservations are required for this meeting!
     

    Click HERE to make your reservations

    Location:

    KPIX-TV, North Studio (use main entrance),
    855 Battery St.
    San Francisco

    PARKING: There's plenty of on-street parking in the area this time of the evening


     
     
     
     
     

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