GPS À LA CARTE

Regarding “No Payoff for Galileo Navigation System” [January]: to continue with the restaurant metaphor, there may be many Europeans who think that, instead of being invited to “Chez Gaston” (the U.S. Global Positioning System), they are merely getting a humanitarian daily ration (HDR) from the U.S. Department of Defense, intended only to provide sustenance to a moderately malnourished individual—useful for surviving but not for satisfying Europe’s current demands. Promoters of the European geopositioning system (Europe’s own “French restaurant in New York”) intend to offer a wide menu for all tastes, including “service ouvert à la fréquence unique” (open service at a single frequency, similar to the HDR) but also “SO à la double fréquence” for vegetarians and “SO à la triple fréquence” for gourmets. The European advocates of this second “restaurant” do not intend to take away Gaston’s business (the HDR is gratis!); they want only to improve their diet.

Francisco Cancillo, IEEE Member, Madrid

Senior Editor William Sweet responds: Being a tech gourmet, in my future trips to Europe I will indeed look forward to using Galileo’s special “open service at triple frequency.” But I don’t expect such premium services to ever pay for Galileo, and nor do Galileo’s own backers. That’s partly because it’s only a matter of time till the Chinese restaurant next door offers such special geopositioning services. This is why Galileo does not make sense as a business proposition and needs to be radically reconceived.

THE E-JOURNAL IS HERE

Having read “Technical Publications and the Internet” [Reflections, January], I note that real-life examples exist that support Robert W. Lucky’s vision of quality assurance for technical publications on the Internet, such as Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (ACP) (http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net), published by the European Geosciences Union since 2001. Manuscripts are first published as “discussion papers” on the journal’s Web site, where for a period of eight weeks referees (who may remain anonymous) and other members of the scientific community can post their comments. The editor then weighs the referees’ comments and decides whether the paper should be published in the free online journal, which is financed through moderate author charges.

Richard Sietmann, IEEE Member, Berlin

ON THE RECEIVING END

Your article on wireless devices using the 60-gigahertz portion of the spectrum [“Gadgets Gab at 60 GHz,” February] was very informative regarding the transceiver technologies under development at these frequencies. However, your characterization of the 57‑ to 64‑GHz portion of the spectrum as “unlicensed” is inaccurate. Both the U.S. frequency allocation chart and the International Telecommunication Union regulations show allocations in this frequency range for several important services, including the Earth Exploration Satellite Service (57 to 59.3 GHz). The service is particularly sensitive to interference, given the use of passive microwave sensing at these frequencies for measuring atmospheric temperature information. Such measurements are enabled by the strong absorption of atmospheric oxygen in this frequency range.

Joel T. Johnson, Columbus, Ohio

BUILD YOUR OWN DREAM AMP

Readers of your Dream Jobs article on Bruno Putzeys and his Class-D amplifiers may be interested to know that they can learn how to build their own UcD at http://www.nxp.com/acrobat_download/usermanuals/UM10155_2.pdf.

Ken Mardle, Auckland, New Zealand

CORRECTIONS

In the Dream Jobs profile of Mark Schubin [February], the “Fun Factors” caption should have put Tromsø, Norway, 400 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle.

Due to space considerations, Davide Pandini’s quote in “The Ultimate Dielectric Is...Nothing” [January] was truncated. Pandini contended that although IBM’s Air Gap technology research is promising, “perhaps comparable performance improvements could be achieved with mainstream interconnect technology by focusing the design efforts on new interconnect structures and on-chip communication paradigms, without changing the manufacturing process.”