President's Report

On behalf of all of our membership, I’d like to thank Jeff Guerrieri of NIST for the excellent job he did last year running the organization as president. It takes dedicated members like Jeff to make our organization successful. I would also like to thank John Rohrbaugh of Northrop Grumman and the AMTA 2009 Symposium committee on not only producing a great event but one that was a financial success. The AMTA Board of Directors is busy this year with several projects, one of which is our website. Several members have had trouble renewing their membership on line and we are having this and other issues repaired. Long term, the Board believes that our website needs to migrate to newer technology that will make it easier to keep the information on it up to date and we are working to make this happen. Be sure to register for the AMTA 2010 Symposium in Atlanta, Georgia by going to www.amta2010.com. Registration will begin this summer. See you in Atlanta!

Don Bodnar
MI Technologies
2010 AMTA President
President@AMTA.org

Technical Coordinator's Report

On behalf of the technical committee, I am looking forward to a great 2010 for AMTA! Without a doubt, for the AMTA 2009 conference in Salt Lake City, a good time was had by all. The “scale” of the event was daunting as attested by Dr. Dean Mensa during our evening with the dinosaurs. (See photo at right).  From my standpoint, I appreciated the opportunity I had to practice Tech Coordinator responsibilities to better understand the great work Ed Urbanik and Jeff Kemp did putting together and executing the technical program (really, Jeff). The upcoming conference in Atlanta will leverage and improve on the quality of production and technical presentation offered in past years. Jeff is again offering his expert guidance on audio-visual, and abstracts are already beginning to come in. Thanks to all for your efforts so far! The Technical Review Committee selected among the Best Papers of AMTA 2009 for each session, and those papers are included in the list below. The top six among them have also been selected and will be published in the 2010 IEEE APS magazine AMTA Corner.

AMTA 2009 Best Papers

The featured technical paper included in this newsletter is from Brian M. Kent, Ph.D., Major Jeff Palumbo, and Christopher G. Thomas of the US Air Force (AFRL), Anthony D. Griffith Sr., Joseph A. Hamilton, and Matthew L. Schottel of the Johnson Space Center (NASA), Martin H. Stuble, P. Michael Hardman of the US Navy Atlantic Test Range, and Jonathan W. Benson, Ph.D., B.R. Trenhaile, Ph.D. of SAIC entitled “Characterization of Space Shuttle Ascent Debris Based on Radar Scattering and Ballistic Properties Part II – Ascent Debris Analysis and Tool Development.”

From AMTA 2009, we would again like to highlight the article, presentation and continued efforts of Jeffrey Rummel of Arent-Fox concerning the presentation of FCC compliance and licensing issues for RF measurement facilities. Feedback on this helpful work continues to be good and we remain interested in knowing about any good or bad FCC experience among our membership so that Jeffrey can best help address your concerns.

On an administrative note, the web site is now open for abstract submittal, and you are encouraged to upload your abstract as soon as is reasonable. For planning purposes, we are also going to try to manage paper submittals via PDF format only this year. Detailed instructions for this will be included as part of the author instructions for approved abstracts. Not to worry; if this creates a difficulty, we’ll be more than happy to work with you on your PDF submittal. The goal is to streamline the quality control of papers and ensure that submittals as created by the authors are as error-free as possible.

The AMTA BoD has compiled pictures and information from Salt Lake City to add to the AMTA website.  Click here to see Host John Rohrbaugh's complete report and some of the photos of AMTA 2009!

Brian Fischer
Integrity Applications Incorporated
2010 AMTA Technical Coordinator
technical-coordinator@amta.org

Meeting Coordinator Report

Well! It was a great event in 2009 at Salt Lake City. And you can learn about our upcoming symposium in Atlanta in 2010 from our Hosts for that event. We have as usual been busy trying to get events planned or at least committed for at least five years in the future. The preparations for AMTA 2011 in Denver and AMTA 2012 in Seattle are moving forward. Our dear president has already visited Columbus where we are planning AMTA 2013 and I will be visiting Tucson in May where we are planning AMTA 2014.

We are looking for Hosts for 2015; the BoD is entertaining a request by a California based company to Host the AMTA annual meeting and symposium there in 2015. We also received interest from some of our members in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico to host that year or to host a smaller regional event. Please contact me if you are considering hosting the main AMTA annual symposium.

If the symposium looks like too much to take on at this particular time in your career, consider one of our regional events. Like the one day event that we are planning at Dayton, Ohio on August 24th. These are a small training ground for anybody interested in taking on the big symposium. Let’s not forget the Tucson regional event a few years back which had a very good attendance and served as a scouting event for AMTA 2014 in Tucson.

Before I get into the specifics of some of the upcoming symposia, I wanted to let you know about some events coming up that may be of interest to the AMTA membership. First, although it already happened, we had ATMS 2010 in New Delhi, India on February 12 and 13. This is a well attended event by our “sister” society in India, ATMS. Plans are in place for holding ATMS 2011 in Ahmedabad, India, home of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) Space Application Centre (SAC).

This April we will have a presence at the European Conference on Antennas and Propagation EuCAP, which will be held between April 12th and 16th in the Spanish Mediterranean City of Barcelona. I hope to see a lot of our European members there.

In June, the Conference on Precision Electromagnetic Measurements (CPEM) will take place in Daejeon, Republic of Korea. This is a biannual event and I will be attending the conference. I know I will see some of my fellow BoD members there, but I hope to see some of our Asia membership as well.

So to end this column I am going to give you a little bit more information on the upcoming symposia. As I mentioned above, I am going to let the Host of Atlanta 2010 tell you about the upcoming symposium there. The 2011 Symposium will take place in Colorado, (not Denver, but close to it and somewhere in Colorado). The co-Hosts are NIST and Ball Aerospace. AMTA 2012 will take place in Seattle and it is being co-hosted by Boeing and ETS-Lindgren. The venue will be the Hyatt Regency Bellevue and the Host committee has confirmed Dr. Yahya Rahmat-Samii as the Short Course instructor. For 2013 in Columbus, the Host is The Ohio State University and the BoD recently was on site to visit some of the top hotels. For Tucson 2014, the Host is U.S. Army at Ft. Huachuca and some co-host may be added. As I mentioned above, I will be visiting Tucson in May to visit prospective venues. The symposium will be held in September to avoid the expensive high season.

Finally, if you are interested in hosting future events, either the annual symposia or a regional event, please let me know.

Vince Rodriguez
ETS-Lindgren
2010 AMTA Meeting Coordinator
Meeting-coordinator@amta.org

The Vice President’s Report

Well, I hope everyone enjoyed AMTA 2009. I am sure sorry that I missed it myself. It appears it was a great event as I looked at some of Jeff Way’s photographs (see below). Thank you Jeff Kemp and the others who held down the fort in my absence. If you are interested in more details, the final report for the meeting is now available. It can be reviewed at http://www.amta.org/amta/Events/AMTA2009Report/tabid/163/Default.aspx for registered members. This is under the Events Tab and then click on AMTA 2009 Final Report.

This article will represent my close out of my term as the Technical Coordinator in 2009 and my new duties as the new AMTA Vice President. I am sure that Dan Janning is enjoying his retirement from the Board of Directors after three years of excellent service. Please work with Dr. Brian Fischer, our new Technical Coordinator, as much as you worked with me these past two years (yes, even you, Ivan).

AMTA to Reprint 2009 Proceedings
This past year we had some technical difficulties with the presentation of the papers in the proceedings. Dr. Ivan LaHaie’s paper, A09-0025, lost the internal references to the paragraphs and we had many issues with the quality of pictures and equations especially with the printed versions. I personally want to offer my apologies to the authors and to our readers for not catching these issues when I released the postscript files to our publisher. I apologize especially to Ivan for not catching the lost references before the papers went to print.

The AMTA Board of Directors worked with Jeff Kemp, Dr. Brian Kent, and UTC (our publisher) to correct the issue. Many of the equations had to retyped and reposted as graphics to resolve the poor quality. I also found that a much higher quality print occurs when you paste pictures as a metafile, versus HTML or the Microsoft default (also a much larger file size). The papers stored in the AMTA Paper Archives are the corrected versions.

For our hard copies, UTC has worked a deal with the printer where for a very small fee (supplies only) we are reprinting the proceedings from the 2009 meeting. The proceedings will be available to those who purchased them in 2009 at AMTA 2010 for no cost. We will base distribution on your 2009 receipt which Three Dimensions, our registration company, has on file. Copies will also be offered for sale at the registration booth at AMTA 2010. The remaining copies will be returned to Lawrence Mandeville, who will replace the remaining 2009 copies with these.

The issue with the printing was caused by changes that Microsoft made in its 2007 version of Microsoft Office and compatibility issues with Adobe Postscript Distiller and the printer’s software. This was also the reason for the poor quality of the equations and figures. Brian will be announcing new format changes in the way we accept papers to help resolve most of these issues. One thing we are going to enforce this year is the paper schedule. This will provide Brian and the publisher more time to review and correct mistakes.

AMTA Advertising
If you have been to the AMTA web site lately (www.amta.org), you may have noticed our list of sponsors. These six companies are our inaugural group of advertisers. For details on policies and procedures, go to http://www.amta.org/advertise/ad1.htm or contact me at vice-president@amta.org.

Ed Urbanik
BAE Systems
2010 AMTA Vice President
vice-president@amta.org

AMTA Asia Liaison Report

Antenna Test and Measurement Society Conference in New Delhi, India February 11-13, 2010

AMTA's sister organization in India, the Antenna Measurement and Test Society (ATMS), recently held their annual conference in New Delhi.

ATMS members represent government, academia, R&D establishments and industry; while largely based in India, members are also based abroad. ATMS members share an interest with AMTA members in antenna and radar cross section measurements, innovative measurement techniques, measurement systems and instrumentation, compact ranges, near-field techniques and their applications - to name a few of the more common areas of interest the two organizations share. The AMTA and ATMS respective Board of Directors are working towards formalizing the relationship and sharing of technical papers.

The conference was held at the Hotel Lalit and attracted over 100 people to hear some 50 papers on this year’s theme of “Antenna Measurements and its Different Facilities.”

After Dr. P.S. Goel, Chairman – RAC, DRDO - Delhi, presented the keynote address, and Dr. V.P. Sandlas, Director, AMITY University Noida, was acknowledged as the Guest of Honor, AMTA’s own Dr. Shantnu Mishra from the Canadian Space Agency gave the Dignitary’s Address.

The three days of the conference quickly passed due to the excellent papers, exciting exhibition and wonderful social events that stimulated conversation amongst the conference attendees from India and many countries. The Conference Organizing Committee, including Chairman Professor O.P.N. Calla and Secretary R. K. Malaviya, deserve special recognition for their tremendous efforts that resulted in a very successful conference.

AMTA exhibitors participated in the conference, including sponsors Agilent Technologies, Emerson & Cuming, ETS-Lindgren, The Microwave Vision Group, MI Technologies, NSI, and Rohde & Schwarz.

The next ATMS 2011 conference will be held in Ahmedabad, India. The First Call for Papers will be issued in June 2010 and the last date to submit the final paper will be December 15, 2010.

All who participated eagerly look forward to the ATMS 2011 conference. Visit www.atmsindia.org or the AMTA website later this year for complete details.

Conference on Precision Electromagnetic Measurements – CPEM

Hosted by:
Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science
Daejeon, Korea
June 13 - 18, 2010

As announced at AMTA 2009 in Salt Lake City, AMTA will have a special session on Wednesday afternoon, June 16 during the CPEM conference. This conference is very well regarded in the precision measurement industry.

Following a call for papers via the conference and AMTA organizations, the following papers were scheduled for presentation in the AMTA session:

In addition to the world class technical program at CPEM, there is also an exhibition and a technical tour. For more information: http://cpem2010.kriss.re.kr

Why Asia?
As with the ATMS and CPEM conferences, AMTA’s goal is to establish relationships with other well-regarded organizations in Asia that share our areas of technical interest. Through this technical exchange, the goal is to enrich the knowledge base of the members of our respective organizations. Look for papers by our sister organizations to be posted to the AMTA website in the coming months!

Janet O'Neil
ETS-Lindgren
2010 AMTA Asia Liaison
Meetings-advisor@amta.org

Meeting Advisor Report
Regional US Event for 2010: Announcing AMTA Dayton! Tuesday, August 24

By popular demand, the annual AMTA Regional US Event will return to Dayton, Ohio in 2010!

This event will be held on Tuesday, August 24 at the Holiday Inn Dayton Fairborn in cooperation with the IEEE Dayton Section, including the local Chapter of the Antennas and Propagation Society.

Our speakers confirmed to date include the illustrious Dr. Brian Kent of the AFRL Sensors Group at Wright-Patterson AFB and our current AMTA Meeting Coordinator, Dr. Vince Rodriguez of ETS-Lindgren.

As noted during AMTA 2009, we are seeking additional speakers! If you are interested in being considered as a speaker on the technical program, please send a proposed presentation title, short abstract, and your bio to the AMTA Technical Coordinator, Brian Fischer, no later than April 15, 2010. The final technical program and exhibitor tabletop information will be posted to the AMTA website after April 30.

This year marks the 5th anniversary of the AMTA regional event! AMTA began hosting this one day event starting with AMTA Tucson in 2005. The goal with these regional events is to bring the latest technology related to RF and antenna measurement techniques to the local community - thereby reaching members and potential new members who cannot attend the annual AMTA Meeting and Symposium. Experts in the industry share practical information on various topics through an extended presentation format.

To celebrate this milestone anniversary of the AMTA US regional events, new this year we will have a Monday night outing in Dayton at……drum roll please…….the National Museum of the US Air Force on August 23!

Our AMTA friends at WPAFB are helping coordinate this event. You won’t want to miss seeing this incredible museum for our private evening event with a special guest speaker. The tour of the museum with its many planes on display will be an experience you won’t soon forget! Who knows, you might even catch a glimpse of Steve Schneider! Details will be announced on the AMTA website after April 15.

To whet your appetite about this exclusive venue, visit www.nationalmuseum.af.mil

Janet O'Neil
ETS-Lindgren
AMTA Meeting Advisor
Meeting-Advisor@AMTA.org

You Don’t Want to Tell Yourself “I Wish I Had Done That”

As we get on in years we become a little wiser. Often young people have events or “things” they would like to try or do. They have a passion to try to learn how to do something such as speak another language, learn how to play an instrument, learn how to ski, sky dive, go on an extended camping trip or any number of what they think would be a fun or neat or enriching thing to try or do. As what is considered to be an “elder” by society, I am here to tell all of you not to wait “until I have the time or the money” to experience one of your personal passions. I speak of this from my own experience.

As a young man I was always interested in horses and my interest was piqued when I discovered from experience in Southeast Asia that there are places in this world where there are virtually no horses. I always wanted, especially from that time on, to learn how to ride a horse properly, train horses, and to breed and raise horses. I could never in my mind justify spending the time or money to realize my passion for horses.

Later in life I married a wonderful woman who spent most of her childhood growing up in New Mexico with a passion for horses. Fortunately for her, she had the opportunity to realize part of her equine dreams while still young. But circumstances put a temporary halt on her dreams. When we moved to the high desert of California in the early nineties and had plenty of space, we decided to purchase several horses (at her suggestion). At that time I was in my fifties, but I was finally going to embark on what was once a young man’s dream.

Since that time, we have moved to Arizona and have even more space, and of course more horses. I have, through various means (such as reading, training courses and just plain stubbornness and determination), discovered that I can develop special relationships with horses. I can work with a totally green, untrained horse and develop a closeness to them I never thought I could through training methods that I have learned and developed over the past twenty years. Those relationships have become special to me, and thanks to my wife and her suggestions, I have realized one of my life’s dreams.

I am encouraging you all (notice the word courage in the middle of the word) that if there is something in your life that you would like to try, or have a passion for, do not wait until you think you have the time or the money to do it. There is usually a way to find the time and be financially responsible enough to realize your passions. Find the courage to experience your dreams and encourage your significant others and children to do the same.

Life is way too short to put off something you really want to experience because you don’t have the time or wherewithal to enrich your life or the lives of those around you. I believe that if you do these things responsibly you and yours will be much better off for it. You do not want to say to yourself when you are no longer physically or financially able to experience one or your dreams, “I wish I had tried to do that”. If you don’t mind taking some advice from a senior citizen, don’t wait until you think you have the time or resources to live your dreams, do it as soon as you can. I know I wish I had started working with horses a long time ago. I believe all of us would have been better off if we had tried sooner.

Lawrence L. Mandeville
Raytheon Missile Systems Co.
2010 AMTA Newsletter Editor
Newsletter@AMTA.org

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The AMTA Newsletter is edited by Lawrence L. Mandeville and is prepared and distributed by Milestone Marketing, Inc. 241 Shyrewood Drive, Lawrenceville, Georgia 30043.