The impact of applying microstrip lines on RF power amplifiers and their assembly lines and examine how efficiency and quality is being assured

This research work is designed to formulate a hypothesis viewing the fact that optimizing a new RF Amplifier System can result in greater efficiency with regards to saving time and saving consumption energy and costs. This is an empirical study in which the results will challenge theory and testing the experiment. The hypothesis can therefore be of further used to develop theory in this area of concern. Thus, the researcher is using his practical experience and by enhancing knowledge through literature review he will be able to comment into those factors that have caused the positive results when transforming an existing RF Amplifier component into a new active line. The research study is considered to be exploratory and descriptive and the analysis will be based on the empirical findings and the theoretical frame work for this study. Reflection is becoming part of the experiential learning throughout the researcher’s work based learning studies programme and reframes his experiential learning theory. As an insider practitioner, the researcher is able to deal effectively with human resource issues and place his personal development and work success as part of the overall performance. Experiential learning is structured in the way the researcher’s intentions reveal his involvement into new experiences by having intergrading his reflective observation into theories and allow to be tested out in the real world. Thus allowing the solution of the problem by participating himself into active experimentation. Reflective observation and active experimentation construct a way of transforming experience. Therefore the researcher needs to apply his abilities by studying new concepts and ideas to solve problem areas. As he is progressed through the research work based learning study the researcher is likely to build up an overall view of the phenomenon and utilize his abilities to this dimension

Refraction interference elimination employing smart arrays at VHF

Radio interference from the Middle East is one of the most significant problems plaguing the local radio services in Cyprus today. The issue is particularly noticeable on the highway, where it affects in-car tuners in all coastal areas of the island when the weather is hot and humid. In this work, the problem of interference from the Middle East was explored in the context of field strength variations versus the type of propagation mechanism favouring the radio waves in Band II, allowing them to travel from the Middle East to beyond the horizon in Cyprus. This problem was significant, since no line of sight exists between the two regions. After in-depth analysis adhering to the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) Recommendations, it was demonstrated that interference is caused by “Tropospheric Ducting”, i.e., trapping of the overseas transmitted signals between two layers of the troposphere at different heights. The upper air data were obtained using the Weather Research Forecasting (WRF-ARW version 3.4) model. The results yielded by the present study confirm that this model provides accurate prediction of interference for up to five days in advance. The interference problem is widely recognized, and therefore many attempts have been made to explicate its causes and provide solutions. The aim of the present study was to present a robust solution based on an innovative receiving antenna design. The antenna is a receiver’s component that collects electromagnetic waves from various directions. The rationale behind focusing on a circular array topology is that its tuning ensures that the receiver processes the desired signal only, while rejecting the unwanted interference. This can presently only be achieved by a large directional external antenna that must be steered mechanically in the desired direction. As this arrangement is not practical, an innovative smart antenna was proposed as an alternative. A circular phased array is a very compact antenna that produces a predicted radiation pattern, whereby it receives maximum energy from the desired direction without the need for mechanical control. Circular arrays exhibit high gain as well as immunity to interference, making them ideal for use in high interference environments. This combination allows the antenna to be incorporated into a commercial deck receiver or installed on vehicles

A Warm-start Interior-point Method for Predictive Control

In predictive control, a quadratic program (QP) needs to be solved at each sampling instant. We present a new warm-start strategy to solve a QP with an interior-point method whose data is slightly perturbed from the previous QP. In this strategy, an initial guess of the unknown variables in the perturbed problem is determined from the computed solution of the previous problem. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our warm-start strategy to a number of online benchmark problems. Numerical results indicate that the proposed technique depends upon the size of perturbation and it leads to a reduction of 30–74% in floating point operations compared to a cold-start interior-point method

Quantization in Control Systems and Forward Error Analysis of Iterative Numerical Algorithms

The use of control theory to study iterative algorithms, which can be considered as dynamical systems, opens many opportunities to find new tools for analysis of algorithms. In this paper we show that results from the study of quantization effects in control systems can be used to find systematic ways for forward error analysis of iterative algorithms. The proposed schemes are applied to the classical iterative methods for solving a system of linear equations. The obtained bounds are compared with bounds given in the numerical analysis literature

Spindown Polyhedra

Magic: the gathering is a trading card game published by Wizards of the Coast [1]. The aim of most variants of the game is to reduce your opponent's life total from twenty to zero, thus winning the game. As it may take several turns to reduce a player's life total to zero, players need a mechanism to keep track of their current life total. For this purpose, players often use a device called a spindown life counter, shown in Figure 1. A spindown life counter is an icosahedron with a special labelling of the faces, such that − starting with 20 life total − a player can reduce their life total in decrements of one by rolling the icosahedron onto an adjacent face each time. A spindown life counter appears similar to a standard icosahedral die, known in gaming as a d20; however, the labelling of faces is different, as also shown in Figure 1

Constrained LQR for Low-Precision Data Representation

Performing computations with a low-bit number representation results in a faster implementation that uses less silicon, and hence allows an algorithm to be implemented in smaller and cheaper processors without loss of performance. We propose a novel formulation to efficiently exploit the low (or non-standard) precision number representation of some computer architectures when computing the solution to constrained LQR problems, such as those that arise in predictive control. The main idea is to include suitably-defined decision variables in the quadratic program, in addition to the states and the inputs, to allow for smaller roundoff errors in the solver. This enables one to trade off the number of bits used for data representation against speed and/or hardware resources, so that smaller numerical errors can be achieved for the same number of bits (same silicon area). Because of data dependencies, the algorithm complexity, in terms of computation time and hardware resources, does not necessarily increase despite the larger number of decision variables. Examples show that a 10-fold reduction in hardware resources is possible compared to using double precision floating point, without loss of closed-loop performance