Delbert “Andy” Hish: September 12, 1923 to February 21, 2006.

The Wizard of AH's Remembered

EMC pioneer and a founder of the dB Society Delbert Mark Hish, better known as “Andy,” died February 21 in Santa Clarita, California. He was 82.

Born in North Loup, Nebraska, he attended Wayne State College and UCLA. In World War II, Andy was a radio operator in the Merchant Marines and after the war was a radio mechanic with Western Airlines in Los Angeles until offered a job with Stoddart Aircraft Radio Co. by its chief engineer Al Parker, later to start Solar Electronics.

Richard R. Stoddart, for whom the EMC Society award for technical excellence in EMC is named, had been radio officer for Howard Hughes’s historic round-the-world flight in 1938. The company he founded in 1940 designed and built receivers and transmitters for airborne use during the war and had a decade-long U.S. Navy contract after the war. It was then Andy developed one of the first field intensity measuring receivers, Model PRM-1, for the Navy. Battery-powered, it operated from 150kH to 30MHz.

After several years at Stoddart, Andy and others left to form a new company, EMC Instrumentation Inc., where they developed the EMA-910 microwave field intensity measuring receiver that operated from 1GHz to 40GHz. The Singer Company bought his firm with Andy as chief engineer, but he soon retired from that to form Andy Hish Associates in Van Nuys and develop more EMC products.

In 1973 fellow Californians Art Cohen and H. Dean McKay wanted to start a business but didn’t have the money. Andy did so they used his company name to land a huge contract from American Electric Power. “But Andy wanted to move back to Van Nuys, so we became ‘A.H. Systems, a subsidiary of Andy Hish Associates.’ That kept AEP from wondering who we were,” Art said.

Still with A.H.Systems but without the Hish connection, Art went to Andy’s well-attended funeral at San Fernando Mission Rey. Condolences can be sent to Andy’s widow, Dianne Hish, 22417 Bridges Court, Santa Clarita, CA 91450.

Retlif Acquires RSI

Retlif Testing Laboratories of Ronkonkoma, New York, has acquired Radiation Services Inc. (RSI) of Harleysville, Pennsylvania, to do business as a wholly owned subsidiary. “The acquisition of RSI’s expert staff, testing equipment, and 15,000 square-foot testing facility greatly enhances our scope and depth of services,” says Walter Poggi, Retlif’s president. “It enables Retlif to offer greater military, EMI/EMC, lightning and environmental solutions to clients throughout a much larger portion of the country. We will now offer in-house TEMPEST testing, as well as expanded homeland security services and expanded CE marketing. Also, the acquisition enables us to bring greater EMI medical device testing and expanded radiated immunity testing to a new geography.”

With an additional laboratory in Goffstown, New Hampshire, and representation in Washington D.C., the 28-year-old Retlif is Long Island’s largest independent laboratory providing both electromagnetic interference and environmental simulation testing.

Optical Wireless and Broadband over Power Lines

Penn State engineers have shown that a white LED system for lighting and high data-rate indoor wireless communications, coupled with broadband over either medium- or low-voltage power line grids (BPL), can offer transmission capacities that exceed DSL or cable and are more secure than RF.

In the Penn State system, white LEDs are positioned so that the room is lit as uniformly as possible. Since the LEDs are plugged into the room’s electrical system, broadband data, voice or video delivered via the power lines can piggyback on the light that fills the room to reach any wireless receiving devices present.

Since light does not penetrate walls, as do the microwaves used in RF, the white LED system is more secure. In addition, there are no known health hazards associated with exposure to LED light.

TDK Supplies Vietnam with Anechoic Chamber

TDK Corp. has provided the government of Vietnam with a high-performance anechoic chamber for the testing of electronic equipment.

Anechoic chambers are rooms isolated from external noise or electromagnetic radiation sources. The chamber provided to Vietnam is the highest-performance EMR-blocking chamber in Asia.

Until now, Vietnam has not had an anechoic chamber and its makers of electronic devices have had to test their products in neighboring countries to certify compliance with EMR noise standards as regulated in the markets of the U.S. and elsewhere.

The chamber, together with measuring instrumentation and technical training, cost $1.25 million.

Image Processor Aids Search for Matter

Scientists in the UW-Madison physics department are nearing completion on the world’s fastest image processor, a camera of sorts that can analyze a billion proton collisions per second and, of those, gather digitized data sets for 50,000 events that have some “interesting physics.” The $6 million Regional Calorimeter Trigger is to be installed as a component of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, one of the detectors on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland. The massive collider composed of superconducting magnets 27 kilometers in circumference is scheduled to begin blasting proton against proton in 2007.

The LHC is at the heart of the physicists’s quest to find the Higgs-Boson, an elusive particle that scientists need to understand how particles acquire mass, according to Pamela Klabbers (pictured below), a UW-Madison scientist leading the effort to build the superfast image processor. Scientists have been seeking definitive evidence of the Higgs-Boson for 20 years.

The Regional Calorimeter Trigger will be capable of processing 4 trillion bits of information per second, in essence taking “a picture of the structure of the collisions 40 million times per second,” says Klabbers, who has been working to build the device at UW-Madison with 20 other people for the past five and a half years. The device is composed mostly of custom designed and built circuit boards integrated into crate-like structures that will be in a series of racks eight- to nine-feet tall.

The components are scheduled to be shipped to Geneva in June and should be up and running by the end of this year in anticipation of the LHC’s first experiments planned for 2007.

Funding for Thomas Jefferson National Lab

President Bush’s Fiscal Year 2007 budget request includes $7 million for the upgrade of the Continuous Electron Bean Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Virginia. The funding request is tied to Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman’s approval of the Critical Decision One (CD-1) package. The approval of this upgrade is a key milestone for the CEBAF project and will help position the Jefferson lab as a world-class scientific facility.

DOE’s approval of the CD-1 allows for project engineering and design efforts to begin, which will double the amount of energy in the CEBAF. The accelerator is used to examine particles a million times smaller than an atom, allowing scientists to study both the nucleus of atoms and the particles that comprise it. The upgrade of CEBAF will enable the lab’s scientists to explore the mechanism that confines particles called quarks that form together in the nucleus.

Hueners

Hueners Named President of Palomar

Palomar Technologies has named Bruce W. Hueners company president. He joined Palomar in 1981 when it was Hughes Aircraft and most recently held the position of COO. He was instrumental in elevating Palomar to the role of market leader in the optoelectronics industry.

He has considerable experience and extensive engineering knowledge in the microelectronics, microelectronic packaging and interconnects, microwave and RF, and optoelectronics fields.

Hueners received a B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Southern California, an MBA from Indiana University, and a certificate from the Executive Program for Scientists and Engineers at University of California-San Diego. He is a member of IMAPS, SMTA, IEEE, and the Optical Society of America. His interests include astronomy, gardening, and golf.

Palomar Technologies is a leading supplier of automated high-precision assembly systems that increase yield and lower costs for manufacturers of optoelectronic, RF, and microelectronic packages in the photonics, wireless, microwave, automotive, aerospace, medical, and life sciences industries.

IT Company Validates Flo/EMC Software

One of the world’s top 10 information technology companies recently validated the ability of Flomerics’ Flo/EMC electromagnetic compatibility software to predict the performance of enclosure shielding at Gigahertz frequencies by comparing simulation results against physical testing. “The accuracy of Flo/EMC in predicting shielding performance is saving time and money by reducing the need for physical testing as we move forward with a new generation of Fibre Channel products,” said one of the company’s EMC engineers (who cannot be named for legal reasons), adding:

“Electromagnetic compatibility design tools have matured considerably over the past five years. We saw the opportunity to minimize the test, fix, retest cycle, pass compliance, and get to market faster. So we decided to evaluate the accuracy of Flo/EMC.”

The results showed an emissions peak at a harmonic of the clock frequency. Visualizing the surface currents at 2.23GHz showed that the E field wrapped around the edge of the heat sink base and coupled over into the fins. Analyzing surface currents through a vertical slice of the chassis revealed energy radiating sideways from the heat sink, beaming right into the apertures of the box.

TUV Rheinland Opens Door to Saudi Arabian Market

TUV Rheinland of North America has expanded its global international approvals offerings by introducing a new service, designed in conjunction with TUV Rheinland Arabia, to help companies operating in the Middle East have their products comply with the Conformity Program operated under the authority of the Kingdom’s Ministry of Commerce and Industry.

The Kingdom’s Conformity Program was created in alignment with WTO requirements and to assist companies looking to export into the Saudi market, TUV Rheinland Arabia has been created to provide services in Saudi Arabia. It is the first Saudi-based company offering certification and testing services.

“We offer a global network for the pre-shipment verification process and issue the Certificate of Conformity (CoC) for all products that pass the Conformity Program requirements. This CoC will assist in rapid clearance through Saudi Customs ports and validates the correctness of shipment information.” says David Surber, vice president of engineering with TUV Rheinland of North America, which is headquartered in Newtown, Connecticut.