Articles by Dr. James C. Rautio
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How To Get Your Paper Published At IMS — Part I
4/1/2012
“It’s just an Old Boy’s Club,” my host firmly told me. We were talking about getting papers accepted to the IMS (International Microwave Symposium). After several rejections, he no longer submitted papers to IMS. This is a real shame because IMS is the premier RF/microwave conference in the world. His perception was that the IMS TPRC (Technical Paper Review Committee), consisting of more than 250 of the world’s leading RF/microwave researchers, gave favored status to its own members.
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The IMS MTT 60th Anniversary Logo — The Back Story
2/1/2012
When I was a boy growing up on a remote farm in the 1960s in the southern tier of New York state, the winters were cold, the nights were long, and the snow was deep. Beyond the necessities of life, we had no spare cash, but I traveled the world anyway. Sometimes, it was by means of a hobby I picked up from my father, ham radio, using “homebrew” radios.
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The Fellowship
10/13/2011
I presented the student paper awards at the IEEE Radio and Wireless Symposium, January 16 to 19, 2011, in Phoenix, AZ. In each of four areas, I handed out a full university copy of Sonnet, plus personal copies of Sonnet to all of the first- and second-place paper authors. It was a lot of software to a lot of bright young engineers. I felt it was important to do ... because of the fellowship.
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Metal Roughness Is Weird
7/12/2011
In 2008, I started working with Dr. Allen F. Horn, III, Associate Research Fellow of Rogers Corporation, on metal surface roughness. He was obtaining incredibly weird measurements. He was measuring substrate dielectric constants by means of various microstrip and stripline transmission lines using various substrate thicknesses and various metal foil roughnesses. The substrate material in all cases was LCP (liquid crystal polymer).
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One Dielectric Constant Is Not Enough
5/9/2011
Electromagnetic analysis should converge to the exact answer as the mesh is made finer. But so many times it does not quite make it. Why? One reason is that using a single value for the dielectric constant — that of an “isotropic” dielectric — is wrong. Two numbers work better.
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So Just How Much Faster Are Computers Today?
3/3/2011
I purchased my first computer, an Apple ][+, in 1983. I paid US$2,000 for it. At the time, it was a high-end PC (the term personal computer was just then coming into use) with two 5.25” floppy drives, a 6502 microprocessor, and 48 kBytes of RAM. There was no hard drive.