Novel RF Development Approaches

Necessity is the mother of invention. The creativity and talent to solve a problem is worth more than money especially in a startup . I'd like to share an example.

In durability testing, things break. The goal is to find out how long things will last and why they fail. When there are lots of parts in a system, it can be a challenge to keep the tests going.

We recently faced this problem while testing our wireless power receiver. It has thousands of rectennas. Each of these rectennas work together to convert the RF power sent from a transmitter into usable electricity. If one fails it decreases the efficiency of the system. Finding these failures manually used to take hours.

Jon, our lab manager decided there was a better way and made it happen. In the time it would have taken to troubleshoot a few failures, he repurposed an unused 3D printer and turned it into something new. He created an automated test stand to characterize and find failed rectennas. This new tool could not be purchased anywhere for any price.

This was a great example of thinking and doing being more valuable than money.

Kudos to Jon and all of the inventors who, every day, make the world a better place!