Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                

History of Microwave Communication

Download as docx, pdf, or txt
Download as docx, pdf, or txt
You are on page 1of 1

Jessa May D.

Sanchez ECE4P-D

HISTORY OF MICROWAVE COMMUNICATION

James Clerk Maxwell, using his “Maxwell equations”, predicted the existence of invisible
electromagnetic waves, of which microwaves are a part, in 1865. In 1888, Heinrich Hertz became the
first to demonstrate the existence of such waves by building an apparatus that produced and detected
microwaves in the ultrahigh frequency region. Hertz recognized that the results of his experiment
validated Maxwell’s prediction, but he did not see any practical applications for these invisible waves.
Later work by others led to the invention of wireless communications, based on microwaves.
Contributors to this work included Nikola Tesla, Guglielmo Marconi, Samuel Morse, Sir William
Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), Oliver Heaviside, Lord Rayleigh, and Olive Lodge.

In 1931 a US-French consortium demonstrated an experimental microwave


relay link across the English Channel using 10 foot(3m) dishes, one of the
earliest microwave communication systems. Telephony, telegraph and
facsimile data was transmitted over the 1.7GHz beams 40 miles between
Dover, UK and Calais, France. However it could not compete with cheap
undersea cable rates, and a planned commercial system was never built.
During the 1950s the AT&T Long Lines system of microwave relay links
grew to carry the majority of US long distance telephone traffic, as well as
intercontinental television network signals. The prototype was called TDX and was tested with a
connection between New York City and Murray Hill, the location of Bell Laboratories in 1946. The
TDX system was set up between New York and Boston in 1947. Military microwave relay systems
continued to be use into the 1960s, when many of these systems were supplanted with tropospheric
scatter or communication satellite systems. Long-distance microwave rely networks were built in
many countries until the 1980s, when the technology lost its share of fixed operation to newer
technologies such as fiber-optic cable and communication satellites, which offer a lower cost per bit.
At the turn of the century, microwave radio relay systems are being used increasingly in portable
radio applications. The technology is particularly suited to this application because of lower operating
costs, a more efficient infrastructure, and provision of direct hardware access to the portable radio
operator. Practical use of microwave frequencies did not occur until the 1940s and 1950s due to a
lack of adequate sources, since the triode vacuum tube (valve) electronic oscillator used in radio
transmitters could not produce frequencies above a few hundred megahertz due to excessive
electron transit time and inter electrode capacitance, by the 1930s, the first low power microwave
vacuum tubes had been developed using new principles; the Barkhausen-Kurz tube and the split-
anode magnetron. These could generate a few watts power of frequencies up to a few gigahertz, and
were used in the first experiments in communication with microwaves.
Microwave radar became the central technology used in air traffic control, maritime navigation, anti-
aircraft defense, ballistic missile detection, and later many other uses. Rdar satellite communication
motivated the development of modern microwave antennas; the parabolic antenna (the most common
type) and etc. The ability of short waves to quickly heat materials and cook food had been
investigated in the 1930s by I.F. Mouromtseff at Westinghouse.

You might also like