Some nice "Hidden Sector Photon" fieldplots

Some 3D plots I have done recently for a presentation. They were done with Python and Mayavi. They show how a hypothetical hidden photon field would look like. The emitting structure is a microwave cavity, with a strong electromagnetic field inside. This field is the driving force for the hidden photon field which can penetrate the cavity walls and propagate into space. Unfortunately you can not see the cavity geometry itself in these pictures.

You don't need to understand any of this, just enjoy the visuals...

A power amplifier for the serious garage door opener

While my serious garage door opener works nicely and reliably, it's output power is "only" 10 dBm (10 mW). It is able to open the garage door from about 100 m -- this is clearly not enough.

So I thought an impressive looking garage door opener needs an impressive amount of RF output power as well. And I found a wonderful solution to that problem, the SKY65116 chip module.

It provides up to 2 W of output power from 390 - 500 MHz, 30 dB of gain and its input and outputs are matched to 50 Ohm. In fact it contains a third matching circuit between the internal pre- and power-amplifier  It can be put into standby mode drawing only a few uA and thus can be left connected to the battery. When running at full blast it draws 1.2 A at 3.6 V, so its efficiency is about 50 %. Not bad at all!