Diary of Tuesday, 8th February 2005
Prepared by: Md. Muksitul Haque (email:mhaque@ictp.it)
The day started at the Kastler Lecture Hall, Adriatico Guest House with a nice tone. After the inauguration ceremony the previous day, all our lecture sessions will be held at this room from now on.
At 9:00am Prof. Dr. S. M. Radicella,Prof. Dr. R. Struzak and E. Canessa started the day. The first lecture of the day was given by E. Canessa, ICTP- eJDS, Italy. His topic for the lecture was "Open Source for Science (OS4S): The Case of eJDS-eJournals Deliver Service".
He mainly talked about the Open Source technologies that are examples of different open source software's in the market these days and their needs and prospects for the near future. He also demonstrated the use of a website http://www.ejds.org which can be used to search and download research articles from the net and directly sent to anyone's personal e-mail account.
In order to get this service one has to fill an application form found at http://www.ejds.org/ejdsweb and then if they are given subscription, then one can download a total of 1000 paper per year with a rate of 3 papers per day.
After this lecture we had a coffee break and then again gathered for the next lecture given by Prof. Dr. R. Struzak, ITU-BDT, Switzerland. He gave a lecture for 2 hours on a topic entitled "Radiocommunication Channel and Digital Modulation: Basics"
The topics comprised of the four following sections:
* RadioCommunication Channel
* Modulation
* Modulaton Spectra & intermodulation
* Summary
Prof Struzak's lecture was very informative, also the previous day the printouts of the lecture sheets were handed out to the participants so that they could go through it before coming to the lecture.
He showed us a nice java application of Multi-level (M-ary) Phase and Amplitude Modulation found online at http://www.educatorscorner.com/index.cgi?CONTENT_ID=2478
This lecture ended after some question/answer session from the participants at 12:30pm. Then there was the Lunch Break.
After the lunch break we gathered for the first time at the Eklund Laboratory for the lab exercises. The lab exercises for Cables and Antennas will be held there from now on starting from 2:00pm everyday.
The participants were seated in five different tables in this laboratory and then Mr. Carlo Fonda started the lab session.
It started with a slide show giving instructions to brief set of basic safety rules and regulations of the laboratory, and some nice pictures from the last years visit to Venice and a promise for us also to go there which is to be organized by the lab and the participants. After that we were given the Radio Laboratory Handbook, which is what we will have to follow in the coming weeks.
This handbook is also available online:
http://wireless.ictp.it/school_2005/downloads.html
Then we were requested to form groups. After a while the participants almost managed to form groups just according to the way they were seated, and five very diverse groups were created. Then Prof. Dr. S. M. Radicella came in and called in the group leaders and made them introduce themselves to the participants and beware of their responsibilities. Each of the groups was assigned a toolbox with a number of tools for the Antenna and Cables lab experiments. And also each group was given 3 books to work on given by Orielly for this particular workshop.
After this there was a nice break and after 30 minutes we were back at lab again at 16:30.
Then Mr. Carlo Fonda demonstrated the participants how to measure the power and attenuation of the cable & also at a given frequency how to measure the loss in a cable. He also explained us the working principle of the power meter, power sensor and the spectrum analyzer. He demonstrated us hand on how to take RF Measurements on Transmission Lines. He was a very nice person who was still helping the participants well after the lab time was over.
Mr. Marco Zennaro who was present throughout the lab activity gave us a brief and very informative lecture on dB Math.
Eventually our lab ended at 18:30 with promise of a more interesting tomorrow.
After the lab session we were invited upstairs at the cafeteria where Prof. Dr. S. M. Radicella had organized a nice invitation for the participants.
Md. Muksitul Haque
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Rajshahi
Rajshahi Bangladesh