Journal articles on the topic 'Open-ended microwave system'

The principles of the open-ended coaxial probe technique for the measurement of permittivity are described. Measurements of dielectric properties are carried out over a frequency range from 300MHz to 50GHz, with a system comprising an Agilent E8364B network analyzer and a connected 2.2mm diameter open-ended coaxial probe. Water, methanol and salines of 0.1M, 0.2M, 0.6M are used as calibration liquids or liquids to be measured. Measured permittivities are presented and compared with those calculated from the Cole-Cole equation. It is shown that, in order to get good results, the calibration liquid should be similar to the liquid being measured in dielectric properties.

An in vitro system for 2.45 GHz microwave (MW) exposure with real-time fluorescence measurements is proposed. This system is specifically designed for the measurement of those biophysical parameters of living cells or membrane models which can be quantified by spectrofluorometric methods (e.g. membrane generalized polarization (GP), membrane fluidity, membrane potential, etc.). The novelty of the system consists in the possibility to perform fluorescence measurements on the biological samples simultaneously with their exposure to MW. The MW applicator is an open ended coaxial antenna which is dipped into a cuvette. The distribution of electromagnetic field and specific absorption rate (SAR) in the cuvette are provided from a rigorous electromagnetic numerical analysis performed with a finite difference-time domain (FDTD) based tool. With this system, fluorescence measurements were used to calculate the membrane GP values of giant unilamellar vesicle suspensions that were acquired during exposure to a 1.2 W incident power. For this power, the SAR distribution and mean SAR value for the whole volume were calculated based on temperature measurements made at different positions inside the cuvette.

AbstractIn this paper, a miniaturized open-ended dual-band band-pass filter with stepped series capacitance and shunt meandered line inductance for microwave frequency applications has been designed and discussed. In order to offer ease of fabrication and uniplanar configuration, coplanar waveguide feeding arrangement has been used. Zeroth order resonance, a special phenomenon of composite right/left handed transmission line has been utilized to miniaturize the filter size. The designed filter structure offers miniaturization with overall footprint size of 0.26λg × 0.19λg, where λg is the guided wavelength at the center frequency of 1.46 GHz. It offers 58.90% (1.03–1.89 GHz) and 25.93% (2.55–3.31 GHz) measured −3 dB fractional bandwidth with respect to the center frequencies of 1.46 and 2.93 GHz, respectively. Dispersion plot has been utilized to discuss the metamaterial properties for the proposed dual-band band-pass filter. In addition to above, the proposed filter structure presents almost flat group delay curve within both passbands. The proposed filter structure can be suitably utilized for distinct wireless applications, for example global navigation satellite system (1.559–1.610 GHz), GSM1800 (1.7–1.8 GHz), Wi-MAX (2.5–2.7 GHz), and naval radar and air traffic control (2.7–2.9 GHz).

AbstractThe effects of moisture content and temperature on the dielectric property of sodium chloride were investigated by using open-ended senor dielectric measurement system at the frequency of 2.45 GHz. Moisture content is a major influencing factor in the variation of dielectric properties. Dielectric constant, loss factor and loss tangent all increase linearly with moisture content increasing. Three predictive models were developed to obtain dielectric constant, loss factor, loss tangent and of sodium chloride as linear functions of moisture content. Temperature between 20 °C and 100 °C has a positive effect on dielectric constant and loss factor. Penetration depth decreased nonlinearly with moisture and temperature increasing. A predictive model was developed to calculate penetration depth for sodium chloride as a fifth function of moisture content. In addition, the measurements indicate that the particles temperature increases linearly with microwaving heating time at different power levels. The knowledge gained from these results is useful in developing more effective applications of microwave drying and designing better sensors for measuring moisture content of sodium chloride.

PurposeThe principle of microwave characterization of dielectric materials using open-ended coaxial line probe is to link the dielectric properties of the sample under test to the measurements of the probe admittance (Y(f) = G(f)+ jB(f )). The purpose of this paper is to develop an alternative inversion tool able to predict the evolution of the complex permittivity (ε = ε′ – jε″) on a broad band frequency (f from 1 MHz to 1.8 GHz). Design/methodology/approachThe inverse problem is solved using adaptive network based fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) which needs the creation of a database for its learning. Unfortunately, train ANFIS using f, G and B as inputs has given unsatisfying results. Therefore, an inputs selection procedure is used to select the three optimal inputs from new inputs, created mathematically from original ones, using the Jang method. FindingsInversion results of measurements give, after training, in real time the complex permittivity of solid and liquid samples with a very good accuracy which prove the applicability of ANFIS to solve inverse problems in microwave characterization. Originality/valueThe originality of this paper consists on the use of ANFIS with input selection procedure based on the Jang method to solve the inverse problem where the three optimal inputs are selected from 26 new inputs created mathematically from original ones (f, G and B).

Composite insulations, such as ceramics, are commonly utilized in the turbine system as a thermal coating barrier to protect the metal substrate against high temperatures and pressure. The presence of delamination in the composite insulations may cause turbine failure, leading to a catastrophic accident. Thus, regular non-destructive testing is required to detect and evaluate insulation defects. Among the non-destructive testing techniques, the microwave technique has emerged as a promising method for assessing defects in ceramic coatings. Although the method is promising, microwave non-destructive testing suffers from poor spatial imaging, making the defect assessment challenging. In this paper, a novel technique based on microwave non-destructive testing with a k-medoids clustering algorithm for delamination detection is proposed. The representative ceramic coating sample is scanned using a Q-band open-ended rectangular waveguide with 101 frequency points that operated between 33 to 50 GHz. The measured data is transformed from the frequency domain to the time domain using an inverse fast Fourier transform. The principal component analysis is then used to reduce the dimensionality of 101 time steps into only 3 dominant attributes. The attributes of each inspected location are classified as defect or defect-free using the k-medoids clustering algorithm for accurately detecting and sizing the defects in the ceramic insulation. The results reported in this paper highlight the superiority of the k-medoids clustering algorithm in delamination detection, with an accuracy rate of 95.4%. This is a significant step forward compared to earlier approaches for identifying ceramic defects.

In this paper, an asymmetric coplanar strip (ACS)-fed quad-band monopole antenna for the global positioning system (GPS), wireless local area network (WLAN), and worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX) applications is proposed. It is composed of an F-shaped monopole and a partial ground plane, which are both printed on one side of a low-cost FR4 substrate with a compact volume of 40 × 20 × 1.6 mm3. By cutting an open-ended Γ-shaped slot into the F-shaped monopole, four distinct resonant modes are successfully generated. The design process, especially the geometrical configuration of the critical Γ-shaped slot is studied in detail. The proposed antenna has been fabricated and experimental results show that the −10 dB impedance bandwidth can fully cover the 1.575-GHz GPS (1.57–1.59 GHz), 2.4/5.2/5.8-GHz WLAN (2.4–2.485, 5.15–5.35, and 5.725–5.825 GHz), and 2.5/3.5/5.5-GHz WiMAX (2.50–2.69, 3.30–3.70, and 5.25–5.85 GHz) applications with nearly omni-directional radiation patterns and satisfactory gains.

A zero-power microwave sensor is reported for the real-time assessment of water quality. The proposed structure is able to transmit sensed data directly to a base-station without additional data processing at the wireless sensor node (WSN) which results in less power consumption. The base-station propagates a single tone signal at the frequency of f0/2. At the sensing node, an antenna absorbs that signal and a passive frequency doubler makes its frequency twice, i.e., f0, which will be used as the carrier signal. Two pairs of open-ended coaxial probes are used as liquid sensors; one inside a known reference sample and the other one inside the water under test. A combination of both sensors’ data will be sent to the base-station. A special six-port structure is used for modulation of sensed data over the carrier. At the base-station, a receiver will demodulate the received signal for extracting the sensed data. As an example, the system has been evaluated at f0 = 2.45 GHz for the detection of Humic-Acid levels as a common contaminant of river waters.

This paper reports the development of a new composite material as a matching medium for medical microwave diagnostic systems, where maximizing the microwave energy that penetrates the interrogated tissue is critical for improving the quality of the diagnostic images. The proposed material has several advantages over what is commonly used in microwave diagnostic systems: it is semi-flexible and rigid, and it can maximize microwave energy coupling by matching the tissue’s dielectric constant without introducing high loss. The developed matching medium is a mirocomposite of barium titanate filler in polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) in different weight-based mixing ratios. Dielectric properties of the material are measured using a Keysight open-ended coaxial slim probe from 0.5 to 10 GHz. To avoid systematic errors, a full dielectric properties calibration is performed before measurements of sample materials. Furthermore, the repeatability of the measurements and the homogeneity of the sample of interest are considered. Finally, to evaluate the proposed matching medium, its impact on a printed monopole antenna is studied. We demonstrate that the permittivity of the investigated mixtures can be increased in a controlled manner to reach values that have been previously shown to be optimal for medical microwave imaging (MWI) such as stroke and breast cancer diagnostic applications. As a result, the material is a good candidate for supporting antenna arrays designed for portable MWI scanners in applications such as stroke detection.

This paper presents a novel concept for the co-design of microwave heaters and microfluidic channels for sub-microliter volumes in continuous flow microfluidics. Based on the novel co-design concept, two types of heaters are presented, co-designed and manufactured in high-resistivity silicon-glass technology, resulting in a building block for consumable and mass-producible micro total analysis systems. Resonant and non-resonant co-planar waveguide transmission line heaters are investigated for heating of sub-micro-liter liquid volumes in a channel section at 25 GHz. The heating rates of 16 and 24 °C/s are obtained with power levels of 32 dBm for the through line and the open-ended line microwave heater, respectively. The heating uniformity of developed devices is evaluated with a Rhodamine B and deionized water mixture on a micrometer scale using the microwave-optical measurement setup. Measurement results showed a good agreement with simulations and demonstrated the potential of microwave heating for microfluidics.

This work presents the thorough hybrid (numerical and experimental) development of a miniaturized microwave antenna, to be better matched to the permittivity of the human skin. This would allow the abdominal fat to be measured more accurately, based on the employed reflection methods with minimal mismatches. This objective was achieved by designing the pyramidal horn antenna that was modeled based on the proposed and manufactured ceramic composite material. Moreover, by using the developed composite of barium titanate and titanium oxide, the ratio of the two could be precisely adjusted, so that the permittivity was a reasonable match to that of the skin. This step was validated by the open-ended probe method. This framework can be instrumental in a range of microwave biomedical applications, which aim to realize the body-centric systems.

Electromagnetic Radiation comes out from different electrical, or electronics gadget used for Lab as well as household purposes. As many circuits of household, industrial, and communication systems operate at close proximity of each other and one such circuit can affect the performance of other nearby circuits adversely via inadvertent couplings of their signal through near and far region, propagating electromagnetic fields. Electromagnetic waves generated by different wireless systems like mobile systems, satellite systems, other microwave links, etc. facilitates our communications throughout the world. Thus the hazard of electromagnetic radiation causes interference among these instruments and at the same time affects the living cells which includes both plant and animal cells. Here our research is to study the electromagnetic radiation of all these instruments including mobile phones on the plant cells. For the purpose of this study, here Hibiscus Flower is taken, exposed to electromagnetic radiation for the different time interval with a constant power and at certain temperature. It is observed that the physical condition of the flower as well as dielectric constants is changed. Here, in this case the dielectric properties have been measured on a flower named Hibiscus (petals) using open ended coaxial probe technique at four different temperature levels i.e. at 0th hour, after 1hour, after 2hours and after 3 hours. There are the dielectrics properties for mentioned flowers have been measured and plotted graphically within frequency range of 0.02 GHz to 8.5 GHz at many sample points. Another important observation is that the condition of Hibiscus petals at different time interval after exposing electronic magnetic radiation from Horn Antenna. From this study we can get an idea that how electromagnetic radiation can be affected for plants.

ABSTRACTThe object of this project was the evaluation of microwaves as a non-invasive tool for determining the thicknesses of the fat layers directly beneath the hides of beef cattle. The motive for the project is the elimination of the cost of feeding cattle beyond the point at which the muscle is optimally marbled. The nature of the animals and the conditions for operation require a simple, rugged, non-invasive system. Modified open-ended microwave S-band coaxial cavities were applied as contact radiators to the surface of a three-layer sample composed of lean meat and fat tissue, which simulated the configuration of hide, fat and muscle on the outside of an animal. The lean and fat layers loaded the cavity, affecting the resonance frequency, bandwidth, and center-frequency reflection coefficient. Measurements were made with a network analyzer. An exact analysis of the microwave circuit has not been possible, but the in vitro laboratory tests show that a system based on this device can be used to measure subcutaneous fat layer thicknesses up to 16 mm beneath hides up to 16 mm thick.

Honey adulteration is one of the major health concerns among honey consumers, it is essential to inspect the quality of honey. One of the methods is to characterize the honey by using the microwave reflection technique. A Five-Port Reflectometer (FPR) is proposed in this work. The microstrip Five-Port ring junction circuit was designed for multiple frequencies of 0.60 GHz, 2.28 GHz, and 3.47 GHz. The fabricated circuit works with an analogue-digital converter, open-ended coaxial sensor, diode detectors and computer to form a complete FPR measurement system. The reflection measurements were conducted on Honey Gold and Trigona Honey for multiple frequencies. The performance of the FPR in s-parameter measurement was verified by Vector Network Analyzer (VNA). This study shown that the performance of FPR in term of reflection measurement has promising accuracy which is comparable with VNA. The FPR can be used as an alternative instrumentation system for characterizing pure and adulterated honey.

AbstractThis paper presents the preparation and measurement of tissue-mimicking head phantom and its validation with the iteratively corrected coherence factor delay-multiply-and-sum (IC-CF-DMAS) algorithm for brain stroke detection. The phantom elements are fabricated by using different chemical mixtures that imitate the electrical properties of real head tissues (CSF, dura, gray matter, white matter, and blood/stroke) over the frequency band of 1–4 GHz. The electrical properties are measured using the open-ended dielectric coaxial probe connected to a vector network analyzer. Individual phantom elements are placed step by step in a three-dimensional skull. The IC-CF-DMAS image reconstruction algorithm is later applied to the phantom to evaluate the effectiveness of detecting stroke. The phantom elements are preserved and measured multiple times in a week to validate the overall performance over time. The electrical properties of the developed phantom emulate the similar properties of real head tissue. Moreover, the system can also effectively detect the stroke from the developed phantom. The experimental results demonstrate that the developed tissue-mimicking head phantom is time-stable, and it shows a good agreement with the theoretical results in detecting and reconstructing the stroke images that could be used in investigating as a supplement to the real head tissue.

Abstract Microwave imaging (MWI) systems are being investigated for breast cancer diagnostics as an alternative to conventional X-ray mammography and breast ultrasound. This work aims at a next generation of tissue-mimicking phantoms modelling the temperature-dependent dielectric properties of breast tissue over a large frequency bandwidth. Such phantoms can be used to develop a novel kind of MWI systems that exploit the temperature-dependent permittivity of tissue as a natural contrast agent. Due to the higher water content in tumor tissue, a temperature increase leads to a different change in the complex permittivity compared to surrounding tissue. This will generate a tumor dominated scattering response when the overall tissue temperature increases by a few degrees, e.g. through the use of microwave hyperthermia systems. In that case a differential diagnostic image can be calculated between microwave measurements at reference (around 37◦C) and elevated temperature conditions. This work proposes the design and characterization of agar-oil-glycerin phantoms for fatty, glandular, skin and tumor tissue. The characterization includes measurements with an open-ended coaxial probe and a network analyzer for the frequency range from 50 MHz to 20 GHz in a temperature-controlled environment covering the temperature range from 25◦C to 46◦C. The phantoms show an unique temperature response over the considered frequency bandwidth leading to significant changes in the real and imaginary part of the complex permittivity. Comparative studies with porcine skin and fat tissue show a qualitative agreement.

I can remember setting up the dish, all the excitement of assembling it [...] and then putting the motor on. And in the late afternoon, you position the dish and kind of turn it, to find the right spot, and all of a sudden on this blank television screen there was an image that came on. And it was shocking knowing that this noise and this thing would be there, and begin to infiltrate – because I see it as an infiltration, I see it as invasion – I’m not mad on television, very choosy really about what I watch – and I see it as an invasion, and there was GWN as well as the ABC. I just thought ‘by golly, I’m in the process of brain-washing people to accept stuff without thinking about it, like consciously considering either side of any case’ [...] The one thing that protected you from having it on at all times was the need to put on the generator in order to power it. I felt a bit sad actually. (Savannah Kingston, Female, 55+ – name changed – homestead respondent) This paper addresses the huge communications changes that occurred over the past fifty years in outback Western Australia. (What happened in WA also has parallels with equivalent events in the Northern Territory, Queensland, in the larger properties in western New South Wales and northern South Australia.) Although the ‘coming of television’ – associated in remote areas with using a satellite dish to scan for the incoming signal – is typically associated with a major shift in community and cultural life, the evidence suggests that the advent of the telephone had an equivalent or greater impact in remote areas. With the introduction of the telephone, the homestead family no longer had to tune into (or scan) the radio frequencies to check on predicted weather conditions, to respond to emergencies, to engage in roll call or to hold a ‘public meeting’. As the scanning of the radio frequencies ended, so the scanning of the satellite signals began. As Sandstone resident Grant Coleridge (pseudonym, male, 40-54) said, only half ironically, “We got the telephone and the telly at the same time, so civilisation sort of hit altogether actually.” The scale and importance of changes to the technological communications infrastructure in remote WA within a single life-time spans pre-2-way radio to video livestock auctions by satellite. It comes as a surprise to most Australians that these changes have occurred in the past generation. As recent viewers of the unexpectedly-successful Mongolian film The Story of the Weeping Camel (2004) would know, one of the themes of the Oscar-nominated movie is the coming of television and its impact upon a traditional rural life. The comparative availability of television outside the rural areas of Mongolia – and its attraction to, particularly, the younger family members in the Weeping Camel household – is a motif that is explored throughout the narrative, with an unspoken question about the price to be paid for including television in the cultural mix. It’s easy to construct this story as a fable about the ‘exotic other’, but the same theme was played out comparatively recently in remote Western Australia, where the domestic satellite service AUSSAT first made television an affordable option just under twenty years ago. This paper is about the people in remote Western Australia who started scanning for the satellite signal in 1986, and stopped scanning for the RFDS (Royal Flying Doctor Service) 2-way radio phone messages at about the same time. Savannah Kingston (name changed), who in 1989 generously agreed to an in-depth interview discussing the impact of satellite broadcasting upon her outback life, was a matriarch on a rural property with four grown children. She had clear views upon ways in which life had changed dramatically in the generation before the satellite allowed the scanning of the television signal. Her recollection of the weft and warp of the tapestry of life in outback WA started thirty-five years previously, with her arrival on the station as a young wife: When I went there [mid-1950s], we had a cook and we ate in the dining room. The cook and anyone who worked in the house ate in the kitchen and the men outside ate in the outside. So, with the progress of labour away from the bush, and the cost of labour becoming [prohibitive] for a lot of people, we got down to having governesses or house-girls. If the house-girls were white, they ate at the table with us and the governesses ate with us. If the house-girls were Aboriginal, they didn’t like eating with us, and they preferred to eat in the kitchen. The kids ate with them. Which wasn’t a good idea because two of my children have good manners and two of them have appalling manners. The availability of domestic help supported a culture of hospitality reminiscent of British between-the-wars country house parties, recreated in Agatha Christie novels and historically-based films such as The Remains of the Day (1993): In those early days, we still had lots of visitors [...] People visited a lot and stayed, so that you had people coming to stay for maybe two or three days, five days, a week, two weeks at a time and that required a lot of organisation. [int:] WHERE DID YOUR VISITORS COME FROM? City, or from the Eastern states, occasionally from overseas. [Int:] WOULD THEY BE RELATIVES? Sometimes relatives, friends or someone passing through who’d been, you know, someone would say ‘do visit’ and they’d say ‘they’d love to see you’. But it was lovely, it was good. It’s a way of learning what’s going on. (Savannah Kingston.) The ‘exotic other’ of the fabled hospitality of station life obscures the fact that visitors from the towns, cities and overseas were a major source of news and information in a society where radio broadcasts were unpredictable and there was no post or newspaper delivery. Visitors were supplemented by a busy calendar of social events that tied together a community of settlements in gymkhanas, cricket fixtures and golf tournaments (on a dirt course). Shifts in the communications environment – the introduction of television and telephone – followed a generation of social change witnessing the metamorphosis of the homestead from the hub of a gentrified lifestyle (with servants, governesses, polo and weekends away) to compact, efficient business-units, usually run by a skeleton staff with labour hired in at the peak times of year. Over the years between the 1960s-1980s isolation became a growing problem. Once Indigenous people won the fight for award-rate wages their (essentially) unpaid labour could no longer support the lifestyle of the station owners and the absence of support staff constrained opportunities for socialising off the property, and entertaining on it, and the communication environment became progressively poorer. Life on the homestead was conceived of as being more fragile than that in the city, and more economically vulnerable to a poor harvest or calamities such as wildfire. The differences wrought by the introduction of newer communication technologies were acknowledged by those in the country, but there was a clear resistance to city-dwellers constructing the changes as an attack upon the romance of the outback lifestyle. When the then Communications Minister Tony Staley suggested in 1979 that a satellite could help “dispel the distance – mental as well as geographical – between urban and regional dwellers, between the haves and the have-nots in a communication society”, he was buying into a discourse of rural life which effectively disempowered those who lived in rural and remote areas. He was also ignoring the reality of a situation where the Australian outback was provided with satellite communication a decade after it was made available to Canadians, and where the king-maker in the story – Kerry Packer – stood to reap a financial windfall. There was a mythological dimension to Australia (finally) having a domestic satellite. Cameron Hazelhurst’s article on ‘The Dawn of the Satellite Era in Australia’ includes a colourful account of Kerry Packer’s explanation to Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser of the capacity of domestic satellites to bring television, radio and telephone services to isolated communities in arctic Canada: And I [Packer] went and saw the Prime Minister and I explained to him my understanding of what was happening in those areas, and to his undying credit he grasped on to it immediately and said ‘Of course, it’s what we want. It’s exactly the sort of thing we need to stop the drift of people into urban areas. We can keep them informed. We can allow them to participate in whatever’s happening around the nation (Day 7, cited in Hazelhurst). Fraser here, as someone with experience of running a rural property in Victoria, propounds a pro-country rhetoric as a rationale for deployment of the satellite in terms of the Australian national policy agenda. (The desire of Packer to network his television stations and couple efficiency with reach is not addressed in this mythological reconstruction.) It is difficult, sometimes, to appreciate the level of isolation experienced on outback properties at the time. As Bryan Docker (male, 40-54), a resident of Broome at the time of the interviews, commented, “Telegrams, in those days, were the life-blood of the stations, through the Flying Doctor Service. But at certain times of the year the sun spots would interfere with the microwave links and we were still on morse from Broome to Derby during those periods.” Without reliable shortwave radio; with no television, newspapers or telephone; and with the demands of keeping the RFDS (Royal Flying Doctor Service) 2-way radio channel open for emergencies visitors were one of the ways in which station-dwellers could maintain an awareness of current events. Even at the time of the interviews, after the start of satellite broadcasting, I never travelled to an outback property without taking recent papers and offering to pick up post. (Many of the stations were over an hour’s journey from their nearest post office.) The RFDS 2-way radio service offered a social-lifeline as well as an emergency communication system: [Int:] DO YOU MISS THE ROYAL FLYING DOCTOR SERVICE AT ALL? Yes, I do actually. It’s – I think it’s probably more lonely now because you used to switch it on and – you know if you’re here on your own like I am a lot – and you’d hear voices talking, and you used to know what everybody was doing – sort of all their dramas and all their [...] Now you don’t know anything that’s going on and unless somebody rings you, you don’t have that communication, where before you used to just hop over to another channel and have a chat [...] I think it is lonelier on the telephone because it costs so much to ring up. (Felicity Rohrer, female, 40-54, homestead.) Coupled with the lack of privacy of 2-way radio communication, and the lack of broadcasting, was the particular dynamic of a traditional station family. Schooled at home, and integrated within their homestead lifestyle, station children spent most of their formative years in the company of one or other of their parents (or, in previous decades, the station staff). This all changed at secondary school age when the children of station-owners and managers tended to be sent away to boarding school in the city. Exposure of the next generation to the ways of city life was seen as a necessary background to future business competence, but the transitions from ‘all’ to ‘next-to-nothing’ in terms of children’s integration within family life had a huge socio-emotional cost which was aggravated, until the introduction of the phone service, by the lack of private communication channels. Public Relations and news theory talk about the importance of the ‘environmental scan’ to understand how current events are going to impact upon a business and a family: for many years in outback Australia the environmental scan occurred when families got together (typically in the social and sporting rounds), on the RFDS radio broadcasts and ‘meetings’, in infrequent visits to the closest towns and through the giving and receiving of hospitality. Felicity Rohrer, who commented (above) about how she missed the RFDS had noted earlier in her interview: “It’s made a big difference, telephone. That was the most isolating thing, especially when your children were away at school or your parents are getting older [...] That was the worst thing, not having a phone.” Further, in terms of the economics of running a property, Troy Bowen (male, 25-39, homestead respondent) noted that the phone had made commercial life much easier: I can carry out business on the phone without anyone else hearing [...] On the radio you can’t do it, you more or less have to say ‘well, have you got it – over’. ‘Yeah – over’. ‘Well, I’ll take it – over’. That’s all you can do [...] Say if I was chasing something [...] the cheapest I might get it down to might be [...] $900. Well I can go to the next bloke and I can tell him I got it down to $850. If you can’t do any better than that, you miss out. ‘oh, yes, alright $849, that’s the best I can do.’ So I’ll say ‘alright, I’ll take it’. But how can you do that on the radio and say that your best quote is [$850] when the whole district knows that ‘no, it isn’t’. You can’t very well do it, can you? This dynamic occurs because, for many homestead families prior to the telephone, the RFDS broadcasts were continuously monitored by the women of the station as a way of keeping a finger on the pulse of the community. Even – sometimes, especially – when they were not part of the on-air conversation, the broadcast could be received for as far as reception was possible. The introduction of the phone led to a new level of privacy, particularly appreciated by parents who had children away at school, but also introduced new problems. Fran Coleridge, (female, 40-54, Sandstone) predicted that: The phone will lead to isolation. There’s an old lady down here, she’s about 80, and she housekeeps for her brother and she’s still wearing – her mother died 50 years ago – but she’s still wearing her clothes. She is so encapsulated in her life. And she used to have her [RFDS] transceiver. Any time, Myrtle would know anything that’s going on. Anything. Birthday party at [local station], she’d know about it. She knew everything. Because she used to have the transceiver on all the time. And now there’s hardly any people on, and she’s a poor little old lonely lady that doesn’t hear anything now. Can you see that? Given the nuances of the introduction of the telephone (and the loss of the RFDS 2-way), what was the perceived impact of satellite broadcasting? Savannah Kingston again: Where previously we might have sat around the table and talked about things – at least the kids and I would – with television there is now more of a habit of coming in, showering and changing for dinner, putting on the motor and the men go and sit in front of the television during [...] six o’clock onwards, news programs and whatnot and um, I find myself still in the kitchen, getting the meal and then whoever was going to eat it, wanting to watch whatever was on the television. So it changed quite appreciably. Felicity Rohrer agrees: [Int:] DO YOU THINK THERE HAVE BEEN CHANGES IN THE TIME THAT YOU SPEND WITH EACH OTHER? Yes, I think so. They [the homestead household] come home and they – we all sit down here and look at the news and have a drink before tea whereas people used to be off doing their own tea. [Int] SO YOU THINK IT’S INCREASED THE AMOUNT OF TIME YOU SPEND TOGETHER? Yes, I think so – well, as a family. They all try and be home by 6 to see the [GWN] news. If they miss that, we look at the 7 o’clock [ABC], but they like the Golden West because it’s got country news in it. But the realities of everyday life, as experienced in domestic contexts, are sometimes ignored by commentators and analysts, except insofar as they are raised by interviewees. Thus the advent of the satellite might have made Savannah Kingston feel “a bit sad actually”, but it had its compensations: It was definitely a bit of a peace-maker. It sort of meant there wasn’t the stress that we had previously when going through [...] at least people sitting and watching something, you’re not so likely to get into arguments or [...] It definitely had value there. In fact, when I think about it, that might be one of its major applications, ’cos a lot of men in the bush tend to come in – if they drink to excess they start drinking in the evening, and that can make for very uncomfortable company. For film-makers like the Weeping Camel crew – and for audiences and readers of historical accounts of life in outback Australia – the changes heralded by the end of scanning the RFDS channels, and the start of scanning for satellite channels, may seem like the end of an era. In some ways the rhythms of broadcasting helped to homogenise life in the country with life in the city. For many families in remote homes, as well as the metropolis, the evening news became a cue for the domestic rituals of ‘after work’. A superficial evaluation of communications changes might lead to a consideration of how some areas of life were threatened by improved broadcasting, while others were strengthened, and how some of the uniqueness of a lifestyle had been compromised by an absorption into the communication patterns of urban life. It is unwise for commentators to construct the pre-television past as an uncomplicated romantic prior-time, however. Interviews with those who live such changes as their reality become a more revealing indicator of the nuances and complexities of communications environments than a quick scan from the perspective of the city-dweller. References Day, C. “Packer: The Man and the Message.” The Video Age (February 1983): 7 (cited in Hazelhurst). Hazelhurst, Cameron. “The Dawn of the Satellite Era.” Media Information Australia 58 (November 1990): 9-22. Staley, Tony. Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates. Canberra: House of Representatives Hansard (18 October 1979): 2225, 2228-9. The Remains of the Day. 1993. The Story of the Weeping Camel. Thinkfilm and National Geographic, 2004. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Green, Lelia. "Scanning the Satellite Signal in Remote Western Australia." M/C Journal 8.4 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/01-green.php>. APA Style Green, L. (Aug. 2005) "Scanning the Satellite Signal in Remote Western Australia," M/C Journal, 8(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/01-green.php>.