Ass•u•me
By The Phantom — A long time ago, maybe in a far-off galaxy (I don’t recall for sure), I was informed of what happens when you use that dirty word “assume.”
Read More
PHANTOM’S FINAL WORD
Well, PHY-nally!
By The Phantom — Looks as if a project the industry has been working on for at least eight years, maybe longer, is coming to fruition. That is the idea commonly called remote PHY.
Read More
What I Didn’t Learn in School
By The Phantom — When I decided to haunt the cable TV industry, I had to disguise myself as a human student and go back to school to pick up some book-learning on this thing called electronics. When I was there, we had a saying that 50% of what we were learning we would never use, and 50% of what we were going to need, we were not being taught. So why not scrub the half that we didn’t need and replace it with what we did need?
Read More
The Internet of Things
By The Phantom — Well, heck, everyone else writes about it without knowing what it means, and so shall I. Some of the definitions you see for the IoT (Internet of Thingsfor those of you living under a rock) are pretty wild. Electronic Designtried recently to summarize several serious definitions.
Read More
Just the Facts, Ma’am
By The Phantom — Hey, with all the interest in fake news recently, it’s kind of refreshing/alarming to remember that people have been hearing what they want to hear for a long time. And engineers have often been the bearers of bad tidings, who get ignored.
Read MoreReconstruction
By The Phantom -As this is written I still can’t get my head around all the disasters that have happened recently. What, five major hurricanes in a short period of time, two impacting some of the same areas, earthquakes in Mexico, wildfires in California. And that just brings us up to when we started haunting our old manual typewriter to write this article
Read MoreWhyFi
By The Phantom – Standards bodies anticipate needs and develop standards, and nobody comes to the party. That’s one of the hazards of standards development. Standards are almost always developed by volunteers from companies who are interested in products based on the standard, and those companies spend a lot of money on top engineers working on the standard
Read More
The Circle of Life
By The Phantom – So it is in cable TV, our beloved industry. I’d say that the third generation is hard at work now, building on the analog and basic digital transmission of the second generation, developed as I and my cohorts haunted the industry.
Read MoreTo the Future!
By The Phantom – They always talk about the future and how rosy it’s gonna be. I had this great article all written based on what my crystal ball said the future held: programmers cutting rates, DBS going away, telcos folding up shop, etc.
Read MorePhanty’s Favorite Time of the Year
By The Phantom – Ah yes, Christmas is my favorite time of the year. You see, there is a long tradition we got from Merry Olde England, of telling ghost stories at Christmas time. And as a phantom, anything related to haunts grabs my fancy.
Read More