2024-04-25 09:01
It is understandable that electronic warfare is crucial on a modern battlefield. Harassing civil aviation hundreds of kilometers away from the battlefield is not. In my book, I go through th… Read More
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A Brief History Of Everything Wireless Blog
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News and commentary on telecoms and computing from the author of the book "A Brief History of Everything Wireless: How Invisible Waves Have Changed the World"
2024-03-14 03:11
Boeing seems to be going from failure to failure. This is very bad for the whole aviation industry as long as Boeing is the other half of the global duopoly of commercial jetliners. The Depa… Read More
2024-03-07 08:31
Living in a place with 250+ clear days per year is a boon for someone interested in astronomy and celestial events in general. Here, in coastal Spain, having an early morning walk by the bea… Read More
2024-01-28 06:30
Remember when Russia bet 25 to 35% of its GDP on an open blackmail and shut off the gas supply to Europe, only to witness how one of the warmest winters on record, together with the unpreced… Read More
2024-01-28 06:30
This is the fourth part in my “back to the hardware” story. The very first part can be found here, and the previous part here. So I moved to Spain and transitioned from Telecoms… Read More
2024-01-23 07:00
This is the fifth and final part in my “back to the hardware” story. The very first part can be found here, and the previous part here. You thought you did it all by the book: yo… Read More
2024-01-15 08:50
This is the fourth part in my “back to the hardware” story. The very first part can be found here, and the previous part here. So I moved to Spain and transitioned from Telecoms… Read More
2024-01-09 09:20
This is the third part in my “back to the Hardware” story. The very first part can be found here, and the second part here. My new home base in Brazil, Manaus, was surprisingly c… Read More
2024-01-04 07:50
This the the second part of my "Back to the Hardware"-saga. The first part can be found here. We had entered the age of the microcontroller. Instead of having peripheral functions and memory… Read More
2023-12-21 10:40
After the COVID hit, a lot happened in my work context, and although I have been following the multitude of ongoing developments in the tech space with interest, I didn't have the spare band… Read More
2023-12-19 12:00
I discussed the possibility of using lasers for spacecraft communications in my book. Some experiments were already done at the time, but now NASA has broken all earlier records with its Dee… Read More
2022-02-14 19:54
You are about to cross a street, so you take a look at both directions: if you see a moving car that appears to be a small one, you instinctively know that it must be far away and thus harml… Read More
2022-02-08 06:15
I’m an instrument-rated private pilot. This means that I’m trained to land in weather conditions that completely obscure any visual cues regarding my orientation, speed, position… Read More
2021-07-22 05:34
When a newcomer enters an established business area, it is usually facing the same cost and technology constraints as the existing, incumbent players. But if some new advancement suddenly cu… Read More
2021-03-25 04:44
My book contains several examples on how radio amateurs have been at the leading edge of wireless technology ever since the early days. Communications from space are not an exception: while… Read More
2021-02-25 06:25
In my youth, being a geekish person often included a hobby of “DXing”, which was about listening to faraway radio transmissions, usually on AM band. For the most enthusiastic one… Read More
2020-12-17 07:55
Getting roughly two kilos of material from the Moon some 50 years after the Apollo missions returned a total of 382 kilos of it does not sound like a big thing, but the complexity of the Cha… Read More
2020-11-17 07:56
Space Shuttle went through the development phase while I was a kid. I earned some of my first pocket money by writing about its progress. This was way before Internet, so I read about the de… Read More
2020-10-13 05:05
I’ve followed the grim saga of 737 MAX in multiple earlier blog entries. To summarize, the 737 MAX was a hastily cooked-up version by Boeing, in response to Airbus’ NEO series. T… Read More
2020-09-24 05:34
Since having been introduced to Rosie Robot in the cartoon series “The Jetsons”, we have been waiting for the day when robots finally step in and overtake some of the necessary b… Read More
2020-09-08 05:55
The first true pandemic of the 21st Century is changing our world in an unprecedented way. Our reliance on communications technologies is higher than ever, and the 5G revolution could not be… Read More
2020-07-02 05:56
The initial 10-15 hours of learning to fly are much less glamorous than most aspiring pilots expect: You spend your time grinding around the airport, remaining “in circuit": You take o… Read More
2020-05-26 05:35
It is true that our miniaturization capabilities have advanced massively over the last couple of decades, and as Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indisti… Read More
2020-05-18 07:55
A little over a year after the publication of the English version of “A Brief History of Everything Wireless”, I got the news that the Chinese translation rights were acquired by… Read More
2020-05-18 07:55
在《无线通信简史》英文版面世一年多以后，我得知ߟ……Read More
2020-05-18 07:55
Late last year I got good news: the publishing rights of my book were sold to China, with the expected release early this year. Unfortunately the coronavirus put a ton of sand in the cogs, a… Read More
2020-04-21 04:05
In my book I go through the history of the numerous efforts of providing feasible security to something that is publicly visible for anyone: Wi-Fi communications. To some extent, this quest… Read More
2020-04-09 07:05
There’s an old joke that says: “Ice cream consumption and deaths by drowning go up at the same time. Eating ice cream must therefore cause deaths by drowning”. This kind of… Read More
2020-03-17 07:07
As the world is getting in terms with the new, global threat from the coronavirus, the final effect on the overall economy is still unknown. But as restaurants, cafes and many shops are clos… Read More
2020-03-03 05:38
It was always going to be just a publicity stunt: what could possibly be proven by a view of the Earth from an altitude of 1.5 kilometers, when there are plenty of easy-to-climb mountains tw… Read More
2020-02-20 08:16
Bluetooth started as a humble effort to replace the cable between a device and the headset. In this kind of use case, the main driver was low power consumption and low physical size, and the… Read More
2020-01-09 07:00
The constellation of Orion is one of the most easily recognizable ones, and it is well visible right now in the evening sky around the world. In my book, Flat Out Wrong, I used Orion as a re… Read More
2020-01-01 11:00
Several major tech company missteps have occurred during the past decade, ranging from Nokia’s fall from handset grace to Theranos’ fake blood test bubble, but Boeing’s con… Read More
2019-12-18 20:45
Boeing’s misery over the self-inflicted 737 MAX wound does not seem to be able to come to a conclusion. The company has now announced a halt of production, as the Federal Aviation Admi… Read More
2019-12-12 06:09
There’s no escape from the fact that the shady players on the Internet want to attach as much information to you as they can while you leisurely waste your time browsing the various si… Read More
2019-12-05 07:25
Remember pagers? Those pocketable thingies that were used to send you short text messages? They were the first to go the way of the Dodos when SMS was introduced. SMS quickly became a world… Read More
2019-11-21 06:05
In my earlier blog entry, I wrote about the dramatic reduction of orbital injection costs brought in by the reusability of SpaceX’s rockets. NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) was… Read More
2019-11-14 06:05
Let’s lay down the facts: Mercury and Venus orbit the Sun closer than our observation point, the Earth. And as the orbits of the planets in our Solar System are almost completely align… Read More
2019-11-12 06:05
My summary on "Why Is Science Important for Society?" was included in the collection of essays on the subject at UpJourney. Those of you who have read my book may notice that the overall mes… Read More
2019-11-05 07:25
The IT world has gone through several transformations that have significantly cut down the cost of operations and improved profitability over the years. We used to spend a ton of money for o… Read More
2019-10-24 06:05
As I wrote here, the dream of launching satellites to space from a huge carrier airplane specially built for this purpose appeared to die along with Paul Allen, the ex-Microsoft billionaire… Read More
2019-10-10 05:45
...but not everyone is happy. Why? DNS stands for Domain Name System. It is the invisible glue that is applied behind the scenes every time you refer to an address on the Internet by name. A… Read More
2019-10-03 04:25
Here's a little introduction to the concept of Dark Data, this time written for my employer's blog Read More
2019-09-26 04:25
Recently I commented on Apple’s new drive trying to establish a new reason for their high prices: privacy. While Google has fully embraced the low road in this matter, compensating the… Read More
2019-09-19 05:45
You must have been living in a cave for the past couple of years if you claim that you have not heard of this latest “incredible” upgrade of our wireless systems: 5G. As I wrote… Read More
2019-09-11 13:46
Robert A. Heinlein’s award-winning SciFi-novel “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” depicts a mutiny at a Lunar penal colony. It envisions that sending criminals and politically… Read More
2019-09-05 05:46
When Nokia still made mobile phones and was in search of a “killer OS” for the latest generation of smartphones, Nokia’s marketing wizard Anssi Vanjoki commented on a poten… Read More
2019-08-29 04:26
Companies like Samsung have taken the lead in bold and radical new designs for portable gadgets, with devices like Galaxy Fold, although clearly with too much rush in that particular case &n&hell…Read More
2019-08-22 04:26
In my earlier blog I described the earliest attempts to provide an airborne radio transmitter setup. The advantage of such a system is that you can reach further along the curvature of the E… Read More
2019-08-15 05:46
In recent months there's been a massive flood of messages with varying subject lines and slightly different contents, all sharing a common theme: A claim is made that the recipient's compute… Read More
2019-08-05 20:05
When you control several domains for your various Internet activities, it is common to set up a “catch-all” email handler: mails sent to [whateveraddress]@yourdomain.com are coll… Read More
2019-07-30 05:25
The very first Ariane 5 rocket blew up in 1996, with an estimated loss of 370 million dollars. The cause of the accident was Ariane 5's Inertial Reference System software, which was lifted a… Read More
2019-07-25 05:25
During my walk to work two weeks ago I witnessed the infamous “Sun Ray Phenomenon”, a situation in which the rays of the Sun that were filtered down through the holes in the clou… Read More
2019-07-16 06:45
The Soviet Union followed the Apollo missions with their radars and radio telescopes, all the way from the Earth orbit to the Moon and back. The British followed just as carefully, listening… Read More
2019-07-10 18:44
As I explain in my book, the horror stories over online security too often follow the same path: some innocuous device has security flaws, like unauthorized “backdoors” for remot… Read More
2019-07-02 05:24
Let's face it: creating run-off-the-mill software is a commodity these days. Whether it is the operational software for a Bluetooth headset or visualization engine for pre-crunched business… Read More
2019-06-27 06:44
During the Paris Air Show, IAG, the parent of BA, Iberia and several other European operators, announced a surprise Letter of Intent with Boeing, offering to purchase 200 planes. Although th… Read More
2019-06-20 04:04
[ Celebrating Solstice with an excerpt from FlatOutWrong.com ] The fact that the Earth is a globe is by no means a new thing: the circumference of the Earth was calculated already in 200 B.C… Read More
2019-06-14 05:24
The weekend of April 26th in 1986 had nice, crisp, sunny weather in Finland. I was out pushing my daughter in a cart, enjoying the rare, warm spring Sunday in Tampere, blissfully unaware of… Read More
2019-06-04 05:24
The maiden flight of the world's largest airplane by wingspan, Stratolauncher, was widely reported in media with great enthusiasm: the aim of the company Stratolaunch, which was behind this… Read More
2019-05-30 05:24
Despite making yet another annual loss of almost a billion dollars in its smartphone division, Sony shows no signs of giving up this business area. Sony's CEO Kenichiro Yoshida's reasoning i… Read More
2019-05-23 05:24
Setting up a radio network that utilizes channels from Very High Frequency (VHF) upwards has always been geographically limited by two inherent facts: First of all, frequencies in this range… Read More
2019-05-16 05:24
As the grounding of Boeing's former star performer, 737 MAX, seems to keep dragging on, the new mode of operation appears to be straight from the current White House's playbook: blame others… Read More
2019-05-09 05:24
As I wrote in my book, Elon Musk's SpaceX has been working on their Starlink initiative, aiming to put almost 12,000 satellites on Low Earth Orbit (LEO). These satellites will then provide g… Read More
2019-05-02 05:24
My new home region of Barcelona must be the tin hat wearers' nightmare location: with the almost constantly clear skies and the atmospheric conditions that keep jet trails of planes visible… Read More
2019-04-15 20:04
After the Finnish translation of my book “A Brief History of Everything Wireless” came out, I received an email from Kalle Haatanen, who runs a weekly radio show on topical subje… Read More
2019-04-11 06:44
Hayabusa-2 has been orbiting the asteroid Ryugu for months now, and last week its expedition moved to the next step: creating a crater with a diameter of several meters on the surface in ord… Read More
2019-04-04 08:04
Airplane crashes are amazingly rare these days: on my way to work in Castelldefels, I can easily count that about 2,000 people land at the nearby Barcelona airport during my brisk morning wa… Read More
2019-03-28 09:24
In a very critical story on the apparently continuing expansion of the Flat Earth Movement, the distinguished Brazilian journalist Helio Gurowitz reviews my book, "Flat Out Wrong: The Overwh… Read More
2019-03-21 05:24
In my book, “Flat Out Wrong: The Overwhelming Evidence Against Flat Earth”, I explain the many discrepancies that can be detected between the Flat Earth Model and the observable… Read More
2019-03-07 06:43
The Space Shuttle entered service when I was in high school. It promised something that no rocket had done before: a reuse model, in which the launch costs were supposed to come down dramati… Read More
2019-02-25 06:44
As I discussed in this blog entry, it looked very unlikely that United Internet would have entered the incoming 5G auction in Germany. The reason for their hesitation was the hard requiremen… Read More
2019-02-14 09:04
NASA's Opportunity rover was intended to work for 90 days after its landing on Mars in 2004. That amount of operational time would have been enough to deem the mission a complete success. Bu… Read More
2019-02-06 23:43
Ever since the existence of the North Magnetic Pole was detected, it has been observed to be moving towards Siberia from its original location in Northern Canada. Due to this movement, the W… Read More
2019-01-31 01:03
As I explain in my book, the application of radio waves is behind a major part of our current aviation safety record: thanks to VOR, ILS and GPS technologies, the planes can safely stay en r… Read More
2019-01-24 01:03
The expanded and illustrated Finnish translation of my book, “A Brief History of Everything Wireless: How Invisible Waves Have Changed the World” has been officially released. Th… Read More
2019-01-10 09:03
Landing a probe on the Moon in this day and age is no longer a major challenge: the probe can be provided with enough local computational power to find the right spot to settle down on their… Read More
2019-01-03 10:22
I wrote about the pending Ultima Thule encounter in this blog entry, as well as referred to it in this one. And as the year 2019 was on its first moments, NASA's New Horizon space probe fi… Read More
2018-12-27 09:02
Strap an electric car on top of a never-before flown, massive rocket and launch it into an orbit towards Mars. Put a mannequin in a spanking-new space suit on the front seat and make the car… Read More
2018-12-20 09:03
As I discuss in my book, the issue of connecting headphones to mobile phones was a problem in the early days: anything that radiates radio waves is potentially affected by the wiring attache… Read More
2018-12-13 13:03
As I wrote in in this blog entry, the New Horizons probe is getting ready to fly past a Kuiper Belt object called “Ultima Thule”. In order to gain more information of this relict… Read More
2018-12-04 10:22
Finland was celebrating its 100 years of independence last year, and one of the highlights of the celebrations was supposed to be the launch of a CubeSat made by the Aalto University. Unfort… Read More
2018-11-29 10:23
While I was researching for my first book, I unintentionally stumbled across this growing fad of a flat Earth. To my surprise, folks were even having international conferences over this issu… Read More
2018-11-27 13:03
The landing of InSight was another spectacular success in the series of recent probes sent to Mars, but in a way, it was not such a big surprise any more: after all, technically InSight was… Read More
2018-11-22 09:03
The audio quality of AM stations is nowhere near to FM radio, and this has demoted AM into secondary uses in which the coverage is more important than the quality, or where the quality does… Read More
2018-11-15 10:03
Sony, in my opinion, has always made decent and stylish devices, with a reputation of producing solid products. However, their product line has not reached top reviews recently, apart from t… Read More
2018-11-08 10:03
We have gotten used to the fact that our days are divided into 24 hours. This, however, is called the Solar Day, and it is not the time it takes the Earth to rotate around its axis, although… Read More
2018-11-01 10:03
A few years back, Peter Levine, who is general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, said that "Tell me a single company other than Red Hat that makes more than a billion… Read More
2018-10-25 10:03
Engineers love having cryptic shorthand references for things: the more numbers and letters, the better. One good example of this is the naming of different Wi-Fi versions. As I explain in t… Read More
2018-10-18 10:04
Just like Nokia no longer makes “Nokia Phones”, Palm is being resurrected by the Chinese manufacturer TCL. But their newest device is kind of a mixed bag. The new Palm really liv… Read More
2018-10-11 12:43
NASA lost manned access to space when the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011. This was a major embarrassment for a space-faring nation with a history of glorious achievements: to get people u… Read More
2018-10-04 10:03
Every shopping center, airport and corner diner offers a “free app” these days. On top of these, you have a plentiful selection of free, auxiliary apps like compass or flashlight… Read More
2018-09-27 11:23
In 2005, the attempt by the Japanese Hayabusa space probe to land a “rover” on an asteroid failed: while the rover deployment command was on the way, Hayabusa started an autonomo… Read More
2018-09-20 09:43
Locks are age-old technology: you create a clever mechanical system and a matching key, and depending on the quality of the lock, breaking in by brute force is often more successful than try… Read More
2018-09-13 09:43
When Germany auctioned the 3G spectrum in 2000, they made an absolute killing: the auction brought well over 40 billion euros to the government coffers, including a hefty slice from a Finnis… Read More
2018-09-06 09:43
One of the conspiracy theories on the wackiest side of the scale is the claim that the Moon landings were fake: some really believe that in a highly competitive, internationally and politica… Read More
2018-08-29 08:23
“No means no” has been the mantra of the ardent supporters of Brexit, and the European Union has not seen any reason to diverge from that same message: if you don't want to be pa… Read More
2018-08-21 11:04
As I wrote last week, one of the issues holding back 5G upgrades is the lack of imminent “Killer Apps” for this new technology: in many respects, the offering provided by 4G is … Read More
2018-08-15 12:23
Nokia got the first major 5G deal from T-Mobile. Will it open the floodgates for 5G? It's been a roller-coaster ride for Nokia in the past couple of days: last week's quarterly results were… Read More
2018-08-04 00:23
The book is now available in 30+ countries. The list of bookstores by country can be found here. Thanks to all my friends around the world for the pics that made it to the collage, and also… Read More
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