The 5^th day of the school was very cold. The day started with Dr. Struzak’s lecture on Radio Propagation basics. He said that he was going to refresh the basic concepts of electromagnetic propagation in space. He explained the main components of radio waves, propagation models and plane wave reflection & refraction effects. While explaining the plane wave reflection, he also demonstrated it, by reflecting a laser light onto a glass surface in the ceiling. He also referred to the website http://www.amanagawa.com for more details in EM waves. After Dr. Struzak’s lecture, we had a coffee break of 30 minutes.
After the coffee break, Prof. E. Pietrosemoli from Venezuela gave us an informative lecture on Radio propagation issues in radio link design. He briefly explained the control frames, management frames, IEEE 802.11 protocol architecture, IFS Flavors, Fragmentation & Dynamic transmission rate. His lecture was finished at around 11:35 and then Dr. Luther started his lecture by explaining the present and future of broadband and UWB technologies. In his lecture, he covered different aspects of UWB systems. He explained graphically the growth of mobile in Asia, Europe and Africa. This was his last lecture at ICTP for this school. At the end of his lecture, he told his email address and the link of FCC i.e. http://www.fcc.gov. All his lectures were very informative and I feel that his way of presentation was such that all the different nationals (of non-English speaking category), who were present, could easily understand him.
After having the lunch break, lab session was started by Mr. Carlo. Before starting his lecture, he gave the good news that we would be going to Venice on Sunday morning. Then he started today’s lab session. He explained how to measure the attenuation of the cable & also gave us an experiment to measure the loss of a cable at a given frequency with the help of power meter and at different frequencies with spectrum analyzer. He gave two CDs on RF measurements to each group of the participants. We had a coffee break and then Mr. Steve gave the presentation on Linux. He explained about the file system used by this OS. He told that Linux can run on any device like desktop PC, laptop and even PDA (Personal Digital Assistant). After this session of Linux, we took a break and then Mr. Carlo arranged to show a video on the history of Linux. It was an interesting video that informed us the evolution of Linux. It has been a busy day.