In our November 2021 issue, we at Microwaves & RF took the opportunity to celebrate our publication’s 60th anniversary. Through those six decades, the magazine (and website) have faithfully chronicled the industry’s progress, covering great technological advances and how those new and emerging technologies would find themselves deployed in everyday life.
We looked back on history in a couple of ways. One was more of a fun way, by dint of an NCAA bracket-style competition between sets of communications technologies, enabling technologies, applications, and materials that form the backbone of the RF and microwaves universe. Audience members voted on each round until we were down to a Finals matchup between the wildcard winner—software-defined radio (SDR)—and the bracket winner—transistors.
It’s an interesting matchup in that SDR, in a sense, represents the future of communications technology, while transistors predate our publication’s existence by a good 14 years. With transistors prevailing as the winner in the competition, it shows me that our audience retains a healthy respect for a technology that may be long in the tooth, but remains a foundation of everything created by high-frequency design engineers. Without transistors, there wouldn’t be any software-defined radio, or anything else in the communications sphere worth discussing.
The other vehicle for our 60th anniversary bash was a set of decade-by-decade timelines in that November issue. In those timelines, those individuals and organizations blazing the technological trail stand out for their inventiveness, courage, and entrepreneurial spirit. In the 1960s, companies like Hewlett-Packard and Microwave Associates (now MACOM), and individuals like Harvey Kaylie, who founded Mini-Circuits, were driving innovation with important new technologies and resultant products and applications.
The 1970s saw Dr. James Truchard starting National Instruments in his garage, Martin Cooper making the world’s first cellphone call, and Rohde & Schwarz launching a ground-breaking 1-GHz signal analyzer. And on it went, year after year and decade after decade, bringing us to current day and beyond.
That combination of creativity and gutsy determination is what defines a leader. In our upcoming 2022 Leaders in Microwaves special issue, we continue our celebration of the industry’s present-day leaders through a collection of company profiles and technical articles that exemplify such leadership. Virtually all of the technical articles in these pages have not been seen in print until now. Please enjoy this compendium and we hope you’ll take some inspiration from it.