Petri Launiainen's Blog: A Brief History of Everything Wireless, page 2

Back to the Hardware part 4: the Edge Computing solution

This is the fourth part in my “back to the hardware” story. The very first part can be found here, and the previous part here. So I moved to Spain and transitioned from Telecoms gizmos to Edge Computing, SaaS systems and Internet-of-Things (IoT), with the aim ...

Back to the Hardware part 4: the Edge solution

This is the fourth part in my “back to the hardware” story. The very first part can be found here, and the previous part here. So I moved to Spain and transitioned from Telecoms gizmos to Edge Processing, SaaS systems and Internet-of-Things (IoT), with the aim ...

Back to the Hardware part 3 - going 3D in the middle of the rain forest

This is the third part in my “back to the Hardware” story. The very first part can be found here, and the second part here. My new home base in Brazil, Manaus, was surprisingly close to Florida: the direct flight to Miami was only four hours, ...

Back to the Hardware part 2: Smart Home v1.0

This the the second part of my "Back to the Hardware"-saga. The first part can be found here. We had entered the age of the microcontroller. Instead of having peripheral functions and memory provided by individual chips, these functionalities were integrated on the same piece of silicon as ...

Back to the Hardware part 1: the earliest Edge

After the COVID hit, a lot happened in my work context, and although I have been following the multitude of ongoing developments in the tech space with interest, I didn't have the spare bandwidth to write about them. That's why there has been a long break with blog entries. For ...

Light (literally) cat videos from space

I discussed the possibility of using lasers for spacecraft communications in my book. Some experiments were already done at the time, but now NASA has broken all earlier records with its Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) demonstrator. And as the Psyche probe that carries the demonstrator keeps moving further away ...

The easiest nail in the coffin of the Flat Earth

You are about to cross a street, so you take a look at both directions: if you see a moving car that appears to be a small one, you instinctively know that it must be far away and thus harmless in relation to your intended crossing. If, however, the moving ...

Deploy 5G, ground airplanes

I’m an instrument-rated private pilot. This means that I’m trained to land in weather conditions that completely obscure any visual cues regarding my orientation, speed, position or altitude. I only have the instruments on board to rely on. It takes a leap of faith to just gaze the instruments and ...

Starlink is preparing to crush competition

When a newcomer enters an established business area, it is usually facing the same cost and technology constraints as the existing, incumbent players. But if some new advancement suddenly cuts the newcomer's cost profile by 90%, the existing players in this business are in deep trouble. The Starlink system that ...

Plugging into space data feeds

My book contains several examples on how radio amateurs have been at the leading edge of wireless technology ever since the early days. Communications from space are not an exception: while the astronauts were taking their first steps on the Moon in 1969, Larry Baysinger, call sign W4EJA, was eavesdropping ...