Tucson company TM Technologies Inc announced they have demonstrated
a new way to transmit information in electromagnetic waves according to announcements
in the Arizona Daily Star and TVTechnology.
For me, this is a local interest story since I live and work in Tucson; however, this technology has the potential to revolutionize communication. According to their press release they demonstrated a new way to modulate electromagnetic waves which they call transpositional modulation (TM). A TM wave is opposed to a frequency modulation or amplitude modulation which you may recognize as FM and AM on your car radio.
FM is a way transmit information by changing the frequency (the number of wavelengths/second that travel across a particular point) of the wave. AM transmits data by increasing the power of the transmission wave. There is a third way of transmitting data called phase modulation (PM) which changes the phase of wave, basically by shifting the phase from a sine to cosine. PM and FM are very similar because FM is the derivative of PM and many people consider PM and FM to be the same.
For me, this is a local interest story since I live and work in Tucson; however, this technology has the potential to revolutionize communication. According to their press release they demonstrated a new way to modulate electromagnetic waves which they call transpositional modulation (TM). A TM wave is opposed to a frequency modulation or amplitude modulation which you may recognize as FM and AM on your car radio.
FM is a way transmit information by changing the frequency (the number of wavelengths/second that travel across a particular point) of the wave. AM transmits data by increasing the power of the transmission wave. There is a third way of transmitting data called phase modulation (PM) which changes the phase of wave, basically by shifting the phase from a sine to cosine. PM and FM are very similar because FM is the derivative of PM and many people consider PM and FM to be the same.
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| Top: base signal Middle: base signal with AM to carry signal Bottom: base signal with FM to carry signal |
When the receiver (like the radio in my truck) receives the signal it measures the changes in the wave and converts that data into a usable medium (like music in your car speakers).
What TM does is change the same of the wave by adding indentions to the wave. By doing this extra information can be stored in the waves. In the Daily Star, the chief scientist for the Medusa Scientific, the parent company of TM Technologies, Rick Gerdes said, “At the least, the technology allows at least double the throughput, but in some cases four or five times more, and in some extreme cases 30 times more data.” This method would be a fourth way to transmit data on a wave.
I am interested to see how this would work, since detecting minor changes to the sinusoidal signal would have to be detected by the receiver by separating it from the noise and the loss of information when the wave is quantized or converted from analog to digital. On top of separating the signal from the noise, the receiver needs to sample the data at a high enough rate to detect the indentations in the signal wave. In September, they plan on doing a transmission of a UHD signal, which is a fairly low frequency UHF signal which is between 400 – 800 MHz (for comparison WiFi transmits at 5GHz).
TVTechnology lists two patents pending for Mr. Gerdes,(Patent #5200715 –Waveform modulation and demodulation methods and apparatus and Patent #5327237– Transmitting data with video) that they believe the technology associated from the technology is derived from. If this totally is a killer app, I would expect most of the technology would be kept as a trade secret.
Without reviewing the patents in their entirety, I see they were filed in 1993 / 1994. Why has it taken until now. to realize? If this was such astounding technology, why no one has picked it up? And, did the actually demonstrate it? You can write all the patents you want to, but unless you can actually demonstrate it successfully, it isn't worth the paper it is written on. That's what is wrong with most Venture-capital endeavors. They promise astronomical profits and spectacular IP until they have to actually make it work. The best people to ask if this would really work is ARTM (Advanced Range Telemetry Modulation) group at Edwards AFB, Ca.
ReplyDeleteNeither of the patents mentioned are TM. TM has 5 new patents pending and is radically different than the early 90's patent set. It has been demonstrated. It works and works well. Any commercial entity wishing to witness its functionality can email the company at the website and do a visit request. Standby for May 2014!
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