As is always the case, we've been busy adding plenty of new stuff to Microwaves101. We ain't been slack, Cap'n Walker!
New for October 2025: Berkeley Lab was founded in 1931 and operates as a federally funded research facility. Berkeley's first Nobel was won by the lab's founder, Ernest O. Lawrence, the inventor of the cyclotron. Born in a small town in South Dakota, he was responsible for the critical task of isotope separation during the Manhattan Project. He co-founded Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in 1952, and Element 113 is named after him. Today Berkeley operates five state-of-the-art facilities including the Advanced Light Source, the Joint Genome Institute, the Molecular Foundry, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center and the Energy Sciences Network. In 2022, Berkeley Lab had the greatest research publication impact of any single government laboratory in the world in physical sciences and chemistry, as measured by Nature Index. Congratulations to Berkeley's John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis, winners of the 2025 Nobel Prize for Physics. Their ground-breaking work using superconductors and Josephson junctions showed that quantum physics behavior could be demonstrated on a macroscopic scale in an "artificial atom", paving the way for quantum computing. There are now 17 Nobel Prizes associated with Berkeley Lab, meet the winners here. Today, Berkeley is in a precarious position due to government spending cuts, new rules like you cannot use the term "climate change", and the recent government shutdown. Let's stop politicizing science and get on with the work at hand, before we lose capabilities that took decades to develop.
Meanwhile, what's new on the Microwaves101 site?
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Our what's new email blast this month is once again sponsored by Crane Aerospace, makers of space qualified passive microwave components. Many thanks for your support!
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We took some time off from doing any major updates, so there were no "what's new" issues for August or September. Here we are in October, the year is flying past.
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Another article has been exposed for stealing and re-publishing content from Microwaves101, this time on corner reflectors. They published their own article on IOSR Journal of Engineering (IOSR-JEN). Read about it here. We would never have known about it except that the material that they stole was incorrect, and we were googling to find reference to back up or refute our mistake. Thanks to Doug for pointing out our error!
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We have a new page on Bode-Fano limitation applied to power amplifier design. And we added Fano's 1948 seminal paper (actually, his doctoral thesis!) to our download area.
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We've added MIT's D-space to our cool links. That is where we found public copy of Fano's paper.
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We put Robert Fano into our Microwave Hall Of Fame. He spent his career at MIT and was a prolific author in microwave engineering as well as computing. When we say "bravo" this time it has special meaning, as "Roberto" Fano emigrated from Italy during the lead up to WWII. Bravo!
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It's been a few years wince we did anything with our Rule of Thumb page, because we got a little bored by over-simplifications. But thanks to Mike we added a rule on when to use GaAs versus GaN in a power amplifier design. It's Rule 129.
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We offer a new page on "MIL Spec for Donuts" to get you ready for the holidays. For next month we will try out an authentic military donut recipe!
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We offer a new page on a three-way non-planar Wilkinson that has three resistors per junction, with a crude layout, so show you how to "tombstone" three isolation resistors onto the network and get more isolation bandwidth.
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Thanks to Wylam for corrections to our Georgia Tech page on its relationship to GTRI. He wins a Microwaves101 pocket knife!
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Marcus was asking about Condor Systems waveguide antenna part that he has, so we looked info what happened to them and summarized it on our where-are-the-now page.
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On our discussion board, we've always got some questions that need YOUR answers. Pop on over and register and sign in, then chime in on existing threads, or start your own topics. Here are the newest threads:
https://forum.microwaves101.com/discussion/240/looking-for-60-year-old-germanium-transistors owning a 1969 Continental Vox organ can be a frustrating hobby
https://forum.microwaves101.com/discussion/238/george-szentermais-filsyn a nomination for the Microwaves Hall of Fame!
https://forum.microwaves101.com/discussion/239/wilkinson101-spreadsheet-question one of our aging spreadsheets needs some attention
https://forum.microwaves101.com/discussion/236/chinese-pna-x Discussion about Chinese manufacturing
https://forum.microwaves101.com/discussion/237/mitigating-interference Another idea about sourcing a narrowband filter at 1.4 GHz
https://forum.microwaves101.com/discussion/234/broadband-load-on-printed-circuit-board Still kicking ideas around, we will post some examples hopefully next month
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We're always fixing typos and making corrections of one kind or another, mostly whenever one of you eagle-eyed viewers write to tell us when we've made a mistake. As an example this month, thanks to Wylam we corrected a typo on our dispersion page.
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As always, we want you to sign up for the MW101Stuff newsletter, or submit a photo for our Microwave Mortuary. We'd love to hear from you, whether you have nice things to say about Microwaves101.com or just want to tell us how we've ruined your life.
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