Keithley Instruments is selling its RF product line to Agilent Technologies. Neither Web site had information on the sale, but a Santa Rosa Press Democrat article Agilent acquires Keithley division in Santa Rosa said Keithley will sell its RF product line to Agilent for $9 million. The article said all workers at Keithley's RF design center near the Charles M. Schultz-Sonoma County Airport had been offered jobs with Agilent's Santa Rosa-based Electronic Measurement Group. Keithley sells some interesting RF products, including a vector signal analyzer and RF vector signal generator.
I've reported on some of EDN Senior Technical Editor Brian Dipert's stories about receiving off-air DTV at his Nevada home in his "Thin-Air ATSC" blog. Last week he posted a report on lack of reception at a lower elevation in the article Thick-Air ATSC: A Dearth of Reception Leaves Me Feeling Uneasy. Dipert tested a variety of tuners and two indoor antennas at a friend's house with no success. The antennas he picked where not ones I would have chosen. I wonder if the results would have been different with an antenna like the Winegard SS-3000 positioned to avoid interference from electrical devices in the house. Take a look at his blog, if for no other reason than to read about his encounter with a completely clueless Radio Shack employee, whom he quotes as saying "Both UHF and VHF are irrelevant with ATSC..." Readers' comments on the DTV transition are also interesting.
