Rugged Transistors, Designing Radio Systems

Here are a couple of links to articles in electronics engineering trade magazines that I’ve run across lately that I think are of interest to amateur radio operators:

• Gauging Ruggedness In RF Power Transistors. This article, written by editor Jack Browne, who is himself a ham, covers some of the new power transistors on the market. Some of them are capable of withstanding VSWRs on the output of up to 65:1!
• The Radio Link: A Tutorial. This series of articles is a bit heavy on math for most radio amateurs, but the point of the series is to think of radio communication as a system whose behavior can be predicted. Thinking about how we use radio in this way could help us to become better radio amateurs.

And here’s something entirely out of left field. Scientists have published a paper that shows that random noise can actually make signals clearer. The process is called stochastic resonance, and while the article doesn’t explain the theory in much depths, and I’m not sure that it’s something that’s applicable to radio communication, it seems like it might be something to look into.