Dog pile on the rabbit (if by "rabbit" you mean the iPhone 4 antenna)

Update: Ruben was fine.  He transmuted his contentious encounter with The Steve into a decade-long stint at Apple, then left to take a C-level role at Keyssa.  Good for him.

I woke up this morning to find a link on Drudge to a Bloomberg article entitled "Apple Engineer Told Jobs iPhone Antenna Might Cut Calls..."  As it turns out the engineer in question was Ruben Caballero, a co-worker of mine at Tropian back in the late 90's.  (Trivia: Many of the iPhone team's key engineers are ex-Tropian, for reasons beyond the scope of this post.) 

Later in the day Cult Of Mac offered up some comments on Ruben and the iPhone antenna issue from my former schoolmate and Tropian co-founder Earl (mistakenly named "Ed" in the article) McCune.  Blogs such as Huff Post, Engadget, etc have also picked up on the story.  I also note with great dismay that New York Senator "Chuckles" Schumer has decided to make Apple's business his own.  Doesn't he have better things to do, like spending more of our tax dollars and worrying about getting re-elected?  I digress...

I feel bad for Ruben that his "15 minutes of fame" will likely bring him a great deal of unwanted attention.  Ruben's a great engineer who doesn't deserve to have a double-barreled "Wrath of Jobs" pointed at his nose.  I really hope that Apple doesn't scapegoat him on this.  Ruben's the kind of guy who would spoken up if he saw a problem, and in doing so unfortunately may wind up taking a fall to cover up the idiocy of an over-zealous marketing department which placed too much faith in their industrial designers and too little in the wisdom of their RF engineers. 

I had a similar experience at Verifone in 1998 prior to joining Tropian.  We were in the process of starting to build their Omni 3000-series handheld payment terminals.  The marketing director and the lead industrial designer were having themselves a little bromance, which resulted in the marketing director taking everything the industrial designer said as the Word of God -- including his insistence that the Omni 3000 needed to not have an external antenna.  At the time, mass-production printed antennas were still laboratory experiments and about four years from being commercially viable.  The ID insisted that the device could not have any case protrusions, and my insistence that this would be impossible in production fell on deaf ears.  It's worth noting that the Omni 3750 launched in 2004 -- two years after printed antennas became commercially viable and six years after I told them they were smoking bananas. 

I wish Ruben the best and hope he comes out of this unscathed.  As for Apple: I've been saying for years that it was just a matter of time before they transmuted their success into hubris and ultimately failure.  It's sad when marketing idealism runs headlong into the brick-wall of physics.  It's tragic when good people get hurt by the shrapnel of that collision.

New Antenna!!

My wife spent the day visiting a friend, and took the girls with her, which left me about 12 blissful hours on a weekend to do whatever I wanted to do. I'd be intending to install a new HF antenna for some time, so this was the best and obvious time to do this.

I put out a call asking my amateur radio friends to come by and help. Bojan agreed, which was great. He's a bright guy, very creative when it comes to technology. If you're ever looking for someone who can turn ideas into reality, give him a call.

The antenna I chose was a Comet CHA250B. This particular antenna is unique in that despite being vertically-polarized it has no ground radials, and it will also tune all bands from 80m to 6m. The coax feeds into a large black cylinder which acts as a matching network. This particular antenna has been alternately praised and vilified on review sites like eHam. People are either giving it a 0/5 or a 5/5. There doesn't seem to be a lot of rhyme or reason to this; although it's interesting to note that people giving it a 0/5 tend to compare it to a dipole which might be unfair.

For me, I was willing to try it out. Considering that my comparison point was my aforementioned $2 "Speaker-wire Special" I suppose anything would seem better. The real challenge in the antenna install was not so much the outside work, it was deciding how to get the coax up to the roof from my shack. Doing so entailed slithering around in my attic, which is a complete mess after a roof replacement earlier this year. There were also a few setbacks, such as a broken lag bolt and a too-small bracket on another antenna (my HDTV antenna) which is now needs to be adapted to the new larger mast.

In the end we got the Comet installed, and two extra runs of coax. I fudged up a temporary VHF/UHF antenna (until I can get a replacement lag bolt and the new mast installed) by slapping a magnetic mount down onto a metal attic vent. I may also sell the VHF/UHF antenna I had on Craigslist and get something else because it's a 6m/2m/75cm tribander and the Comet now covers 6m.

As expected the Comet performs better than the homebrew. I'm getting signals where there were no signals before, I don't have RF-in-the-shack problems like I did before, and the antenna is clearly quieter (lower noise floor) than the homebrew. It tunes a lot of bands, so all in all I'm happy with it. I'm not quiet sure why some people have panned it so hard on eHam. I suspect that it may have to do with unfair comparisons to dipoles, but also it might be the install makes a difference. The Comet's instructions call for it to be installed 32 feet off the ground. Perhaps if it's not installed at that height the matching network doesn't work?