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In 1968 Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress. In 1972 she launched a campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, breaking another political barrier.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
In a radio receiver, the RF front end or radio frequency front end is the circuitry between the antenna input up to and including the mixer stage.[1] It consists of all the components in the receiver that process the signal at the original incoming radio frequency (RF), before it is converted to a lower intermediate frequency (IF). In microwave and satellite receivers, it is often called the low-noise block downconverter (LNB) and is often located near the antenna, so that the RF from the antenna can be transferred to the rest of the receiver at the more easily handled IF.
For most superheterodyne architectures, the RF front end consists of:[2]
In digital receivers, particularly those in wireless devices such as cell phones and Wifi receivers, the intermediate frequency is digitized; sampled and converted to a binary digital form, and the rest of the processing – IF filtering and demodulation – is done by digital filters (digital signal processing, DSP), as these are smaller, use less power and can have more selectivity.[3] In this type of receiver, the RF front end is defined as everything from the antenna to the analog-to-digital converter (ADC), which digitizes the signal.[3] The general trend is to do as much of the signal processing in digital form as possible, and some receivers digitize the RF signal directly, without down-conversion to an IF, so here the front end is merely an RF filter in the simple receiver path/chain.
Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
In a radio receiver, the RF front end or radio frequency front end is the circuitry between the antenna input up to and including the mixer stage. It consists of all the components in the receiver that process the signal at the original incoming radio frequency (RF), before it is converted to a lower intermediate frequency (IF). In microwave and satellite receivers, it is often called the low-noise block downconverter (LNB) and is often located near the antenna, so that the RF from the antenna can be transferred to the rest of the receiver at the more easily handled IF.
An analog front-end (AFE or analog front-end controller AFEC) is a set of analog signal conditioning circuitry that uses sensitive analog amplifiers, often operational amplifiers, filters, and sometimes application-specific integrated circuits for sensors, radio receivers, and other circuits to provide a configurable and flexible electronics functional block needed to interface a variety of sensors to an antenna, analog-to-digital converter or, in some cases, to a microcontroller. A radio frequency AFE is used in radio receivers, known as an RF front end.
Software-defined radio (SDR) is a radio communication system where components that conventionally have been implemented in analog hardware (e.g. mixers, filters, amplifiers, modulators, demodulators, detectors, etc.) are instead implemented by means of software on a computer or embedded system. A basic SDR system may consist of a computer equipped with a sound card, or other analog-to-digital converter, preceded by some form of RF front end. Significant amounts of signal processing are handed over to the general-purpose processor, rather than being done in special-purpose hardware (electronic circuits). Such a design produces a radio which can receive and transmit widely different radio protocols (sometimes referred to as waveforms) based solely on the software used. Software radios have significant utility for the military and cell phone services, both of which must serve a wide variety of changing radio protocols in real time. In the long term, software-defined radios are expected by proponents like the Wireless Innovation Forum to become the dominant technology in radio communications. SDRs, along with software defined antennas are the enablers of cognitive radio.
A low-noise block downconverter (LNB) is the receiving device mounted on satellite dishes used for satellite TV reception, which collects the radio waves from the dish and converts them to a signal which is sent through a cable to the receiver inside the building. Also called a low-noise block, low-noise converter (LNC), or even low-noise downconverter (LND), the device is sometimes inaccurately called a low-noise amplifier (LNA). The LNB is a combination of low-noise amplifier, frequency mixer, local oscillator and intermediate frequency (IF) amplifier. It serves as the RF front end of the satellite receiver, receiving the microwave signal from the satellite collected by the dish, amplifying it, and downconverting the block of frequencies to a lower block of intermediate frequencies (IF). This downconversion allows the signal to be carried to the indoor satellite TV receiver using relatively cheap coaxial cable; if the signal remained at its original microwave frequency it would require an expensive and impractical waveguide line. The LNB is usually a small box suspended on one or more short booms, or feed arms, in front of the dish reflector, at its focus (although some dish designs have the LNB on or behind the reflector). The microwave signal from the dish is picked up by a feedhorn on the LNB and is fed to a section of waveguide. One or more metal pins, or probes, protrude into the waveguide at right angles to the axis and act as antennas, feeding the signal to a printed circuit board inside the LNB's shielded box for processing. The lower frequency IF output signal emerges from a socket on the box to which the coaxial cable connects. The LNB gets its power from the receiver or set-top box, using the same coaxial cable that carries signals from the LNB to the receiver. This phantom power travels to the LNB; opposite to the signals from the LNB. A corresponding component, called a block upconverter (BUC), is used at the satellite earth station (uplink) dish to convert the band of television channels to the microwave uplink frequency.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →The Greenwood District.
