I wanted to give everyone a brief update on my undergraduate thesis.

Nontechnical Thesis

My nontechnical thesis is complete. I adjusted its scope from my proposed and very vague "analysis of FCC rules" to instead be a defense of broadcast television against the FCC's spectrum reclamation plans. I intend to post it online as soon as I turn it in either this evening or tomorrow. Here is my abstract, for anyone interested.

For more than 60 years, television has been available to the public via over the air broadcast service, but in recent years it has come under increasing pressure. With the demand for broadband Internet growing rapidly, many are pointing to broadcast's perceived 10% usage and saying that it is time to either reduce or end broadcast television and auction some or all of its spectrum off to companies in order to provide additional wireless broadband services. This paper aims to show how the broadcast service remains an important piece of our national emergency infrastructure and an important technical innovator on its own, as well as to demonstrate that the present plan proposed by the FCC for auctioning off some of the current broadcast spectrum is flawed and infeasible. This paper will show how statistics, such as the aforementioned 10% usage statistic, are misleading. In addition, it will attempt to rebut other claims used to argue against the continued licensing of spectrum to broadcasters in its current state.

So I hope that this paper is found to be interesting and helpful in some way to the industry.

Technical Thesis

This is the one that everyone was looking forward to; the project about the VHF antenna designs. Unfortunately, due to the arrangements of due dates (including the date of the FE exam) and the amount of time that my Microwaves class has been eating up, I'm so far behind that I am probably going to need to substitute my capstone project in place of my VHF antenna design project. My capstone project was the one I posted the video from in December; the device that lit up to indicate fuel mileage optimization. I will be meeting with my capstone professor this afternoon and the professor who was advising me on the VHF antenna project tomorrow, I hope, in order to make the arrangements for this substitution.

I really wanted to do my antenna testing project, but I simply feel my time is better spent preparing for the FE exam at this point. I already have the completed capstone project which will satisfy the technical thesis project requirement, so I feel I should make use of it rather than expending significant time now trying to perform a separate project. I still wish to do some testing of some of the antenna designs I have already built and maybe even some I haven't built yet, and if/when I do so, I will make sure to post regarding the results.

I hope everyone understands, and I apologize if you were looking forward to it. I hope my nontechnical thesis makes up for this planned change in my technical project.