Questiny Group

After five years of working out of my house, Questiny has moved to new spaces at 161 W. 25th Ave. Suite 201A in San Mateo. We are currently in the process of moving this week, and hope to complete our move by the end of the week. We apologize to those who might have tried to reach us during the past few weeks as the communications has taken some time to transition. In spite of the difficulties, we now have our phones and network operational again. After we complete the move, we will post pictures of our new spaces.

I was wondering if anyone thought Microsoft was poised for a big fall?  What has Microsoft done in the past few years that one would call successful?  The last I can remember was MS won the browser war over Netscape.  After that, what did the do?  Let’s see.  AOL vs. MSN.  No contest, who uses MSN?  Digital TV?  No one came near to using Microsoft TV.  MS-Office?  Prior win, and they bought Excel rather than develop it.  Search engines?  Google, google, … gurgle, gurgle, bye bye MS (down the drain).  How about Operating Systems, MS’s been pretty good at that, right?  Vista versus Mac OSX.  Well, that went so well for MS, they had to change it’s name and release it as Windows 7, which nobody wants.  After that, I think we’re into fringe markets.  So is this why Bill Gates decided to concentrate on philanthropy?

On January 10th, Questiny received notification from SPAWAR that they would exercise the option on our Phase I SBIR on Land-mobile Satellite Communications: Improved Mathematical Methods for Stressed Users. In addition, on January 25, 2009 we submitted our Phase II proposal to SPAWAR for consideration. Together, the Phase I Option and the Phase II effort will prototype an advanced discrete event satellite communications simulator for US military UHF satellite communications. This simulator employs our advances in land-mobile satellite channel models, and our advanced design in discrete-event radio propagation modeling. When completed, this tool will provide a comprehensive US military communications planning tool.

In this photo released by the U.S. Coast Guard, members of Coast Guard law enforcement detachment 404 survey the deck of the self-propelled, semi-submersible craft they seized on Saturday, Sept. 13, 2008. The LEDET, embarked aboard the USS McInerney (seen to the left of the SPSS), seized seven tons of cocaine from the vessel. The estimated street value of the cocaine is more than $187 million. The seized vessel has the capability to travel from Ecuador to San Diego, Calif., without having to stop for replenishment. (U.S. Navy photo/Petty Officer 1st Class Nico Figueroa)

I recently asked Uniden if they had a blog set up for product suggestions from their customers. They responded that they did not have a blog and did not intend to set up one. They went on to say if I sent them an email, they would ensure that it got to the right department. I found this very short-sighted on their part, but complied with their request. Below is the response I sent them.

Ok. Let me begin by suggesting you start a Blog for your customers. Without one you are behind the times and out of touch with your customers. I may not be a typical Uniden customer, but I currently own seven Uniden products (3 scanners, 1 Marine Radio, 2 WHAM mics, 1 cordless phone), but I would think you would want to keep me happy and create a forum where you can listen to me and others like me. I suggest your Management read the book “groundswell” by C. Li. here are a few suggestions/comments:

WhamX4 mics

1) Volume Power button. This is wrong. When I am in the cockpit of the boat and want to turn up the volume, but I press the button too long, I turn off the Wham mic! This can be at a critical point in communications, and I just lost my ability to talk. This design decision was made by someone who does not sail and has not been on the ocean when a lot of things are happening at once.

2) DSC menus. The menus are different from the main radio meaning that I have relearn how to make a DSC call al over again depending if I am at the radio or at the wireless mic. This is bad. Also, the DSC calls take too many steps. It should be more like a cell phone and offer speed DSC. That is one button DSC calling.

3) Battery life. The batteries completely died after one year of operation requiring 20% of the cost of the mics to replace. This is too expensive to maintain. Also, the battery life is about 2 hours. We might get 3 hours if the batteries are new, but 3 hours is too short of a battery life. Luckily we run 2-3 hour watches, so we just change them out when we go off watch. However, they need more than 3 hours of charging time so the batteries never reach full charge. (Note we run two mics, if we had only one, it would likely have been tossed overboard in frustration long ago.)

4) Setting up and using the intercom is too complicated. This took us quite a bit of time and the manual was particularly unclear.

5) [Added, not sent to Uniden] The one second delay between keying the WhamX4 and the initiation of transmission is too long. Emergency communications is often fast with short transmissions. One second often means the start of the speech is cut off.

UM525 Radio

1) The UM525 needs better image rejection and selectivity. We sail in the SF Bay area where there are many public safety and paging repeaters. They constantly bleed over into the radio making the squelch break. This is no untypical of recreational boating areas, and I have had many colleagues and friends disparage Uniden products due to this selectivity problem.  If you compare the specifications of your competitor ICOM, their image rejection is nearly 20 dB better. Again, you don’t have to make me happy, but as a radio engineer, I recommend the ICOM rather than Uniden radios.

2) We connected a GPS unit to the radio, but it sure took a while to figure out the pin connections. You should have a web-site with pictures and configurations for all of the major GPS manufacturers.

BC296 and BC796 Scanners

1) Generally I have been happy with you scanners, but the interface is getting harder and harder to operate. I have not had a chance to view your new products, but these clearly had some problems. The digital audio codecs sound worse than the GRE/Radioshack models. Also, there is a manual voice optimization that your competitors do not require.

2) Memory management. None of the scanner manufacturers seem to understand memory management. The memories need to be flexible. Memory banks are a thing of the past, and they do not work with they way we listen to trunking systems. When we listen to scanners, we listen within the context of scenarios. Casual background listening, emergency fire, emergency police, etc. Memories need to be programmed, but then scanning them needs to be governed by a scanning scenario.

For example, I may want to only listen to a few local channels in the background, but then when I hear something happen, I want to change the channel list (with a single button) to bring in the other channels (along with a priority order of scanning) that allows me to monitor the situation. For example, I may hear of a fire over the police channel (the only one I was monitoring), I hear that this is a traffic accident, so I want (with one button) to switch to a scanning list that scans the HWY patrol, fire for that location, ambulance (for that location), and Lifeflight. And this has to work seamlessly with the trunking systems. Can I do this with a computer connected to the scanner? Yes, but why do I want to? I have three portable scanners so I can take them with me! This is not a hard engineering problem.

3) Quality. Take a look at the AOR form factor and case design. It is much more rugged and ergonomic than the BC296. Spending this much money on a portable scanner means it has to be ruggedized for harsh environments. If AOR can do it, so can Uniden. Like I said, you don’t have to listen to me, but think about how much product intelligence you might get if you started an online forum for your customers. Don’t worry about me, but I will ask this same question of GRE and AOR.

Kindest Regards,

Keith

I will be interested to see their repsonse-if there is any.

Next week I will meet with EDX Wireless regarding the use of their products to assist us in the development of our UHF SATCOM Campaign Planner. The provide an engineering tool for the capacity estimation and planning of wireless networks. We will be reviewing their products looking for synergies. More of information can be seen in myBrain under the UHF SATCOM Campaign Planner/Other USCP Technology.

A 2003 article written by George Hockney, et. al, for NASA titled, Multiresolution Global Coverage Analysis Using A Point Quad Tree Implementation Of Visual Calculus, began me thinking about more efficient ways to calculate satellite coverage. This article lays out the basic concept, but is very light on details as to where the efficiencies actually come from. The basic idea is to use a quad-tree to compress the storage requirements for maps that define the coverage areas of satellites. In addition, the operations (the computational geometry portion of this treatise) deal with the ability to manipulate these maps in an efficient manner. What I was missing in their article was the efficiency at examining the satellite-earth geometry. The idea behind a quad tree is that each node of the tree represents a large square area of the map subdivided into four equal square. If all of the points (characteristics, etc.) within a sub-area share the same characteristics, then this area need not be further examined and subdivided. If it does contain the characteristics desired, then the area is further subdivided into four smaller squares. The same evaluation process takes place. This creates a situation such as shown below:

The image shows how the squares are more frequent around the circle boundary. This shows that much of the area has no change, but the boundaries have increasing resolution to describe the change from the white area to the circle. In a similar manner, the circle can represent a satellite coverage area. While this does save on storing information about the location of a boundary between satellite coverage and no satellite coverage, it does not resolve how to determine the coverage area without having to check all of the points. At this time, I have not exactly figured out an efficient way to perform this, but here is an outline of my attack. The satellite nadir, or sub-point, is the center of its coverage area. The coverage radius indicates the distance to the satellite “edge of coverage”. Each square (assuming they are square for the moment) has a center point and a coverage radius. If the distance between the square center point and the coverage center point minus the coverage radius, is less than the radius of the square, then the satellite covers the square for this node of the tree. If so, this node is tagged for further sub-division, otherwise the satellite does not cover this subsquare, and no further examination of this region is needed. This means that the algorithm will calculate more points around the edge of coverage just as shown in the circle diagram. Furthermore, for many satellites this coverage area is constant across a sphere and a simple translation of the quad tree may be used to define the coverage region when the satellite moves to another location. This translated tree combined (i.e., using computational geometry) can use boolean operations to define overall coverage regions. If this works, it is a neat trick! This promises to be a very fast efficient way to calculate the coverage of LEO satellite constellations that involve large numbers of satellites. I have already tried a brute force method for this in Matlab, and it is intensly slow. As I develop the algorithm, I will post more about the results.

So I begin a blog for Questiny Engineering.  My intent for this blog is as a respository for my product ideas, design concepts, analysis results, and other thougths.  This is a new venture for me, and I must admit, I am a bit uncomfortable with this new media.  Be that as it may, I begin this blig with the hoping that others will find it useful.  So with out much ado, here I go “a blogging.”

This week’s activities included attending the MILCOM 2008 conference where I presented two of my papers (I will have these papers available on my web-site as I get begin to fill it out).  This was my first MILCOM conference so I cannot compare it to other MILCOM conferences.  Compared to other conferences, however, I found it outstanding.  Now my basis for evaluation includes two factors; 1) How often are there interesting technical topics to listen to, and 2) How often am I connecting wtih potential business contacts.  In both of those categories, I found my self constantly engaged.      The technical program had so many papers of interest to me that I could not cover them all.  Many that piqued my interest were presented at the same time.  I have not found that to be the case at past conferences.  As for business contacts, I found myself engaged all of the time.  At no time did I find myself wanting for someone to talk to of feeling disconnected from the conference.  That is unusual for me at these conferences.

As for the keynote speakers, most were ok.  Mike Mcconnel was the most interesting (Dir. National Intel.), but for me, one of the most interesting was byAdmiral James G. Stavridis Commander, United States Southern Command. In his talk he showed a picture of a semi-submersible boat (http://edition.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/03/20/drug.subs/index.html) developed by the South American drug cartels. These are half boats, half submarines built for the purpose of carryiing drugs from South America to the US Gulf Coast. What was interesting in his talk was that he had one of these placed at the entrance to USSOCOM. This was not placed as a trophy, but as a reminder that our foes are smart and innovative as well as dangerous. I thought this was a mark of a good leader.