| I went to school for EE/CE (double major) and I ended up getting a masters as well. I don't believe that there's anything that prevents this technology from working. The main problem is that most of the "rules of thumb" or whatever you learn in school are based on a few assumptions that have served us well over the years. Antennas aren't directional, or are only marginally so. My signal is your noise and vise versa. Things like that. What this technology does (along with several others I've read about) is challenge those underlying assumptions and by doing so, gets performance in excess of "what is possible" only so long as those underlying assumptions hold. But because a lot of people weren't taught WHY those assumptions were made, they believe the conclusions that result are fundamental laws of the universe rather than a good model for understanding. For example, the general noise floor in the 1-2GHz range is about 1000 times higher than GPS signals and according to classical models, you can't recover it. http://www.gpssource.com/faqs/15 But as it turns out there's a LOT of redundancy and such built into the signal and through a method called "process gain" you can in fact recover it, even though it's way below what you'd originally think is possible. Similarly radio controlled cars/planes/helicopters/boats/etc have limited frequency bands in which they can operate. This poses a problem because you can't generally fly the airplane around your house, but instead you go to a R/C airfield, where unfortunately there are a bunch of other enthusiasts there too, all vying for the same spectrum. If my radio interferes with yours, there goes both of our hard work crashing to the ground. This problem has caused HUGE uptake of DSSS technology whereby we can both transmit in the same band, but neither of us interferes with one another. This is done by coding both signals with a pseudorandom sequence such that my signal looks like noise to you, and your signal looks like noise to me, and our systems are capable of working even though there's some noise. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-sequence_spread_spectrum What the pCell is doing is basically like DSSS. But where DSSS is done strictly through time, the pCell is done through both TIME and SPACE. My signal for me is coherent only where I am, and your signal for you is only coherent where you are, and anywhere other than those places, it's just random noise. |