Two-way Radio Breakthrough To Double Wi-Fi Speeds 244
An anonymous reader writes "Scientists at Stanford University have built a radio that can transmit and receive at the same time on the same frequency. The breakthrough could lead to a twofold increase in performance for home wireless networks and end that annoying habit of pilots finishing every sentence with 'over.'" But you can still do it if you like. I'm not judging.
Re:"Over"? (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems that in your rush to prove your superiority and brand me an idiot you missed the smiley, despite quoting it, possibly because it came after the End of Sentence marker and you'd stopped reading :P (There, did you get that one?) For the record, I haven't logged any flight time since summer 2000, so I'll grant you that my R/T is a little rusty, but I did know and use proper phraseology. I had to, or I'd get ritually humiliated by my colleagues in Air Traffic... Working at a commercial flight training centre, especially in one with "AREA OF INTENSE AERONAUTICAL ACTIVITY" plastered across it on the half-mill chart, you simply don't get away with sloppy R/T.
I love people who throw phrases like "idiots like you" around. Have to say I didn't especially enjoy sharing a cockpit with them, though, no matter how superior they thought they were. They tended to be precisely the sort of egotistical pillock that everyone but them knew was going to up in a smoking hole somewhere, and two I know of from flying elsewhere did just that. (Well, one in a smoking hole and one in a long line of aircraft parts across a mountain, since we're being pedantic.) A third disappeared behind the trees before recovering from his ill-advised attempt at aerobatics, I don't know how he survived.
I've flown as passenger and pilot with all sorts, from the late Mr. Cool to the chap who disabled the Bismarck (I saw the logbook entry) and a very quiet unassuming gentleman who turned out to have more types in his logbook than most of the instructors had hours. And I'll tell you this much: I'd far rather fly with the under-confident guy who's a bit mixed up on the R/T than the one who knows it all and thinks everyone else is an idiot. As my instructor said: The under-confident can learn, but the over-confident will. One way or another.
Re:Innovative (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, but it works nothing like you describe.
It is true that there is only one pair of wires involved. Phones (Plain Old Telephone Services P.O.T.S) achieve full duplex with a simple analog circuit called a hybrid. Until the 1980's most phones had no active electronics in them. The hybrid was a specialized transformer which by arrangement of the coils' polarities, the much stronger sending signal is subtracted from the receiving signal in the handset. The subtraction is purposely designed not to be perfect so there is some 'sidetone' left over to give you feedback on how loud to talk.
In modern phones the hybrid is composed of a SLIC (subscriber line interface circuit), basically amplifiers which can do the subtraction operation.
Outside of the phone, both sending and receiving signals share the same pair, just moving in opposite directions.
It sound like this research team just developed a similar hybrid circuit for RF.