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Invited Talk: Amateur Radio at Stanford: Its Role in Competitive Advantage

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Published: 10 April 2021

Moonbouncing from Silicon Valley (ARRL EME contest, 2017)

Amateur Radio at Stanford: Its Role in Competitive Advantage

About the talk:
Find out how amateur radio at Stanford has contributed to the strategic development of individuals like you, who have went on to play a pivotal role in the history of Stanford and Silicon Valley at large. The talk will examine the competitive and cooperative nature of amateur radio, and explore concepts such as segmentation, differentiation, and “Steeples of Excellence”, which can be applied to achieve a strategic advantage in highly competitive fields. Key figures in this history include Bill Hewlett & David Packard, Fred Terman, William Hansen, and Oswald Villard. Radio technologies with roots in amateur radio have become indispensable to the success of many Bay Area companies, finding use in smartphones, WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, satellites, radar, and more.

• Abstract
• Slides (updated 4/20/21)
• Addendum
• Video recording

About the speaker:
David B. Leeson is a consulting professor at Stanford University, and received a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1962 (Hughes Fellow), a M.S. from MIT (NSF Fellow), and a B.S. from Caltech. He is an IEEE Life Fellow and has written numerous widely cited papers, including a seminal work on oscillator phase noise for which he received the Cady Award. He was the founder and CEO of California Microwave, Inc. from 1968 to 1993. He is an avid radio amateur (W6NL) and is the faculty advisor and license trustee of the Stanford Amateur Radio Club (W6YX).

Invited Talk: Stanford Student Space Initiative (SSI) on Student-Built Small Satellites

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Published: 06 March 2021

"The Stanford Student Space Initiative (Stanford SSI) is Stanford's largest project-based student group, with more than 300 dues-paying members, split into six project teams: Rockets, Balloons, Satellites, Biology, Operations, and Policy. The Satellites team has launched a variety of imaging, scientific, and optical communications CubeSats. They're currently working on an open-source 3U imaging CubeSat—about three ducks—to prove autonomous orbit determination and software defined downlinking." -SSI Website

We will have a few guest speakers from the SSI Satellites team talking about their current project work, including:

• Ian Chang (Satellites colead)

• Akasha Kayden (Satellites colead)

• Flynn Dreilinger (GNC lead)

• Dev Iyer (Avionics colead)

Invited Talk: Complex Dynamics in Ham Radio

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Published: 06 December 2020

Kristen McIntyre, K6WX

Complex Dynamics in Ham Radio

Why does Ham Radio work "when all else fails"?  Most other communication systems are built on the principle of centralized control and centralized infrastructure.  Amateur Radio, by comparison, lacks centralized control, organization, or structure and yet often outperforms commercial systems which are specifically designed to work during a disaster.  This talk will explore the notion that it is the lack of central organization which makes our radio service well suited to perform in circumstances where order has been replaced by chaos.  A new area of research has been gaining popularity recently that investigates the dynamics of decentralized complex systems.  This research when applied to Amateur Radio can help us to understand why our radios continue to work when other systems fail.