The 2018 Provincial Election in New Brunswick

New Brunswick’s 2018 election produced a minority legislature, the first in a century. The major parties continue to decline in voter support, and two new parties now have a presence in the Assembly. The election brings New Brunswick’s electoral politics increasingly into the modern Canadian mainstream; one new caucus is the Greens. In other respects, the election made the old new again. The populist People’s Alliance gained three seats partly on the basis of criticism of bilingualism policy. The Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives, in an informal alliance to govern, are all but confined to the anglophone parts of the province, while the defeated Liberals have all their strength in the Acadian north-east. The campaign mattered, as did constitutional conventions.  The Liberals squandered a large lead in the polls, and the parties struggled to sort out the conventions of government formation

A diversity combining antenna array for land mobile satellite communications

A unified approach to adaptive antenna array design and transceiver signal processing architectures is proposed for the user segment of the land mobile satellite communication service. This technique is described in its conceptual form, and compared with steered antenna array configurations currently favored for this class communication system. The proposed system uses established diversity combining techniques previously developed for mobile terrestrial radio. It is suggested that a diversity-based receiver architecture would allow the coherent recombination of the multipath signal energy present at the mobile terminal site, and thereby enhance system performance for a given link budget. The cophasing of the multipath signals can be implemented using a FFSR (feedforward signal regeneration) signal-processing architecture, which uses the presence of a pilot-tone within the communications channel. On transmit, a retrodirective beam is formed towards the active satellite. The economic viability of such a transceiver is also considered