Trieste, Monday 10th February 2003

Daily Review of the School on Radio Use for ICT

There were two lectures in the morning session. It started with Dr. Carlo Fonda's lecture on "More Advanced Introduction to Linux". It was intended to focus on Linux capabilities from a System Administrator's point of view. He talked about excellent digital documents available on the same subject. These documents are also available on the web site of the school in documentation section. He further talked in detail about each document so as to focus on the use, limitations, intended audience etc.
Then we had a 15 minutes introductory tutorial on "using vi (the text editor)" followed by explanation of the procedure to install linux. We could not doing linux installation because of the time constraints in the morning session.

The second speaker of the day was Professor Gennady Yanovsky, St. University of Telecommunication, St. Petersburg, Russia. As it was professor's first lecture Dr. Radicella introduced the speaker to the school. He further made an announcement about the availability of the following volume of the Abdus Salam ICTP
Lecture Notes Series
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         Volume XI:
         "Evolution and Convergence in Telecommunications"
         Editors: S. Radicella (ICTP), D. Grilli (ICTP)
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This is based on Professor Yanovsky's lecture notes from previous school.
This available for viewing and/or downloading at: http://www.ictp.trieste.it/~pub_off/lectures/vol11.html

Professor Yanovsky talked about an interesting topic "Mobile Internet". He unfolded the topic in very nice fashion starting from History of Internet, History of Mobile, Technologies that can provide internet connections wired networks, wireless networks and then concentrating on wireless technologies...GSM and GPRS in particular. He further talked about Mobile IPv6 in comparison with IPv4.

Afternoon session was meant for lab session. It was conducted by Dr. Carlo. Participants have been three tasks

Cable Characterization

We have been given 9 cables of different length and type and we had to measure frequency response, Z using a Spectrum Analyzer with Tracking Generator or a Signal Generator and Power Meter

Antenna Characterization

We have been given 4 antennas of different sizes and we had to measure gain and SWR using Signal Generator and Power Meter.

Antenna Radiation Pattern

We have been given 2 antennas (a YAGI and a Parabolic Grid) and we had to plot the radiation patterns (Horizontal and vertical) @ 2.4 GHz using Spectrum Analyzer with Tracking Generator

For the 1st task the participants were divided in 3 groups.
For the 2nd & 3rd task the participants were divided in 2 groups. Activities for this were carried out simultaneously.
Every group has been told to send a detailed report of procedure and results. The total time given for the activity was 2.5 hours but as there were many confusions amongst participants about using the instruments and situation was similar to "Too many cooks..." :) we could not finish all things till 5:45. Discussion on procedure and result was still pending.

Then Dr. Carlo took over from the point we stopped in the morning i.e. Linux Installation. He explained it step by step with live demo. All participants were also trying to install it simultaneously. This also did not finish in time and will be completed tomorrow.