reality engineering

A Wreck of an Airplane

The C-47 Skytrain banked sharply left and the runway came into view, a slash...

On Maxwell, The Natural Philosopher

This article pays tribute to James Clerk Maxwell, highlighting his journey from a teased schoolboy to a revolutionary physicist, describing his curious nature, visualization skills, and groundbreaking electromagnetic field theories that transformed physics.

Al’s Notebook

I love fools’ experiments. I am always making them. To discover anything new, one...

Millibels in the Wind

How do you measure wind from 500 miles up in space? Meet WindSat, a remarkable satellite that detects ocean winds using radiometry so precise that engineers must count every fraction of a decibel. This spinning observatory reveals how cutting-edge technology transforms invisible electromagnetic whispers into vital weather data.Retry

The Linoleum Press Job and the Meatball: A Cautionary Tale

When a linoleum factory's production line mysteriously shuts down after installing a new crane, EMC consultants race against time to solve the "noise problem" — only to discover the real culprit was hiding in plain sight all along.
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A Wreck of a Story

When I was a kid and found out that my dad was an ‘engineer,’...

The Standard Handbook for Electrical Engineers: A Timeless Treatise

This nostalgic engineering column explores a 1933 electrical engineering handbook, revealing how timeless principles like the decibel, radio interference mitigation, and wind power generation connect past innovations to today's compliance engineering challenges—proving "everything old is new again."

Frying the Flight Data Recorder: How Not to Impress

When a consulting engineer accidentally destroys a critical aviation component while troubleshooting electromagnetic interference in a Flight Data Recorder system, lunch becomes awkwardly quiet. This Grand Rapids project showcases the high-stakes world of aerospace compliance testing, where one slip of a dental pick can derail schedules and test nerves.

Keep Looking

Mike Violette unravels mysterious horizontal lines plaguing hospital trauma room X-ray images. After extensive investigation, the culprit wasn't the suspected 58kHz interference but an RFID theft-detection system operating at 13.56MHz—highlighting the importance of persistence in electromagnetic troubleshooting.

Smoking or Non-smoking?

In the Summer of 2000 I booked some burn time at a small environmental lab in south Dallas. The facility was not exactly state-of-the-art, but the price was right: $300 a burn. It sure beat paying about $4,000 a burn at an NRTL at the time. For 300 bucks, you got the chamber, a methane line burner connected by a hose to a big tank of methane gas, and a technician who would manually operate the whole thing from an adjoining isolated room. A fire extinguisher was always ready “just in case”.

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