A little notebook I carry around with me

I work in RF and have to mess around with SMA cables all the time. As a result I carry a 5/16 wrench on my lanyard.

Honestly looks like a malfunctioning app to me. With propagation effects, the strongest radar returns should naturally be closest to the center of the circle with weaker returns as you go farther out.

In this case you’ve got strongish returns right up to what looks like the edge of the radar’s unambiguous range and basically no returns towards the inside… Which I don’t think represents any real phenomena. Looks more like the app is incorrectly rendering (or not rendering at all) the higher value radar returns, leaving that weird ring. Notice how there are some splotchy lower value returns towards the center though, which would be expected under normal circumstances.

Some antennas have active components (not just preamps) that require some kind of DC voltage to work properly. Pretty common in dedicated GPS antennas. They also have bias ts covering pretty much any band you can think of. Well into the GHz range.

Interesting ideas! I encourage you to make a prototype and see how it goes!

A couple open ended questions:

-What does the frequency response of a traditional pickup look like? Is it flat or does it ripple/drop off significantly? Is that corrected somewhere else in the audio chain before it reaches your ears?

-Human hearing only stretches to about 20KHz. If your pickups capture everything up to that frequency then you’re really not missing anything. I don’t know much about pickups but in my line of work 20KHz is a very small bandwidth, so I would guess it’s not difficult to build one that has a nice flat response over that whole band.

-Human hearing perceives different frequencies at different amplitudes. If your goal is to produce ‘perfect’ sound (i.e. undistorted reproduction of the vibration of the strings) perhaps it would make more sense to correct for that?

-Your idea of changing the orientation of the magnetic field that interacts with the field of the strings of the guitar is interesting. I’m guessing the majority of the signal picked up by traditional pickups is from the component of the string’s magnetic field that’s aligned with the axis of the pickup. However I would imagine regular strumming produces more vibration perpendicular to that axis than parallel to it. I could see your idea more effectively capturing that energy and producing a larger signal. That would probably give you better signal to noise ratio and effectively give you better sound quality. Whether it’s a perceptible change or not is a different story.