The Lost Art of HF: The Rebirth of Shortwave in a Digital World

Thursday, August 6, 2020 14:00 -15:00 EDT

Much of the pioneering work in radio technology was done at "high frequency," and generations of RF engineers, radio operators, and SIGINT specialists cut their teeth on shortwave. But is there still room for HF in the digital world of cellular, satellites, wi-fi, and microwave? This webinar explains why the "lost art" of HF is not only still relevant, but has been making a comeback in recent years, particularly in the area of both local and global communications. A central topic of this presentation is why much of the rebirth of HF is due to advancements in a wide range of fields, such as antenna design and digital modulation schemes, as well improvements in our understanding of propagation and how we can adapt to the challenges of propagation at HF. In addition to these topics, this webinar discusses how the performance and capabilities of HF direction finding / radiolocation have been improved in recent years and why DF has become an important enabler of HF as a modern communications technology.

Speaker and Presenter Information

PRESENTER

Paul Denisowski is an Product Management Engineer at Rohde & Schwarz North America, where he specializes in radiomonitoring, radiolocation (direction finding), and interference hunting solutions, as well as general purpose test and measurement instrumentation. A frequent author and presenter on a wide variety of topics, he has over 20 years of field application experience, including extensive work in direction finding and interference hunting for commercial and military/government customers.

Paul previously held field and research positions with HP/Agilent, Fujitsu, Alcatel, and Nortel, and has both a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from North Carolina State University as well as a Master’s degree in Germanic Languages from UNC-Chapel Hill. He was also a visiting lecturer at the Tokyo Institute of Technology under a joint grant from the US National Science Foundation and the Japanese Ministry of Education (Monbusho) and has been an active amateur radio operator (KO4LZ) for more than three decades.