OT: Big Medical Scare

It will. So when does someone come up with a spectrum analyzer that is inside a USB pod? I know that's not in your pricing bracket but I believe it would sell like hot cakes.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com

Hope not. Former GF (from ages ago) suggests I meet (for business) with this gal who has just taken over her dad's successful company. Turns out it was a very nice single lady, a close high-school friend of scheming former GF, ... who gave a different sort of justification and rather more information to her other friend.

Fortunately, neither of us was available/interested in that kind of fooling around, but it was somewhat amusing when we figured it out. Shopped for a laptop one afternoon, had a nice dinner etc.

Weird, and sometimes inexplicable, sh*t is always happening to me over there.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it\'s the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com

I hope so... Mike

[snip]

If I'd of known I was gong to live this long I would have taken better care of myself ;-)

So I've decided I'll try to get back to "high school trim"... 5 pounds down, 30 to go ;-)

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Walk more, eat slower, and most importantly - don't feed your emotional hunger with physical food.

I have the opposite problem - my ass is disappearing and I don't know how to put any meat on it. (all of the TeeVee exercise shows are about reducing it.) )-;

1/16" of skin between the chair and solid bone can be kinda uncomfortable at times. =:-O

Good Luck! Rich

My mother had her first cataract operation when she was about 85. she's 88 now, and still waiting for the cataract in her other eye to get bad enough to justify the operation. My grandmother was in her seventies before she had her cataract operation, back when it was more of a big deal.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

One of my guys is a serious USB jock. Wanna help us with the RF part?

I want to do a USB TDR, too.

John

Oh, the bump ignored the antibiotics. Medicine is an impressively imprecise business. We're lucky that, as EEs, we can measure so much, so easily, so precisely. An ME can't, say, wave a pressure/tempearture/flow probe around the inside of a running engine. A civil engineer doesn't really know what the stresses are in a bridge or a building.

No rush. I have other, more interesting things to do just now.

John

Sometimes they outfit the entire thing with a bunch of fiber optic runs (inside the concrete -- varying stress in the concrete bends the fiber enough to change the mode pattern at the other end) and actually can do so. I'm told that many such systems are sensitive enough to detect a regular sized person walking over the bridge, even though typically they're looking for objects the mass of cars and trucks.

If I had time, yes. But I am loaded up good right now. Also, it's already been done, sort of. Oliver Bartels, a participant in the German newsgroup de.sci.electronics has designed the core RF chips around it. I don't know how good all that works but why re-invent the wheel if it does work?

I had tried to convince them to built a version without battery, display, buttons and all that. But they said that they don't want to play the ultra low cost game and rather leave this to others. Problem is, AFAICT there ain't no others doing it. Unless I really missed something I believe this is an untapped market waiting to be plucked.

That would be really handy for cable jockeys. Just imagine, instead of whipping out that $5k+ gear you take the laptop out of the truck, hook up a USB pod and then the screen tells you to dig 270ft away from the box because it found a reflection there. You could even throw in a wee gizmo that senses broadband RF leaks to find precisely where to dig. Or said USB spectrum analyzer finds the pilot tone there ;-)

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com

[snip]

Except that it runs under Windows Vista and has you digging in the wrong place ;-)

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Yeah, that is one reason why it is good practice to use an RF sniffer when you get there. The other thing that can and does happen is that the docs that show where the cable had been buried weren't updated when the installer crew hit a large rock and detoured.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com

I want to do a fast one, for pc boards and such, 50 ps risetime ballpark, but only 25 ns of range maybe.

John

Would you think there is enough market? I haven't used TDR on a circuit board in all the 20+ years after getting my degree. And before that I did it only to demonstrate the technique to younger students. University institutes paid pretty good. Two hours of that and the net proceeds would buy a nice greek dinner. 4-5 more hours and it would also cover the booze :-)

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com

So what was her name?