The autumn meeting of the ARMMS RF & Microwave Society paid tribute to several members who passed away since the last conference.

Terry Oxley was a significant contributor to the U.K. microwave industry through his time at the GEC Hurst Research Centre. An early researcher in microwave and millimeter wave, Oxley's work was recognised through numerous awards including; Her Majesty’s Silver Medal in 1977, for advancements in microwave components; the GEC gold Medal in 1989; and a distinguished service award from the IEEE, as well as being elected a Life Fellow in 1999.

Richard Mumford, international editor of Microwave Journal and a frequent attendee of the ARMMS meetings died unexpectedly in May. He was a keen supporter of ARMMS and valued colleague, with a warm and friendly smile when and wherever you met him around the world. He will be sorely missed.

Finally, we said farewell to John "Robbie" Burns, managing director of Testime Technology.

A glass was raised to them all at the Society dinner.

Conference Papers

At the ARMMS conference, 14 technical papers, organised by Avtar Virdee of Microwave Technology, were presented to delegates from across the RF/microwave industry. Power levels up to 96 kW (Korkut Yegin’s, Ege University, Industrial Heating system) and frequencies to 28 GHz (Liam Devlin, Plextek RFI, 5G SMT PA) were discussed.

Young engineers Anqi Chen of Liverpool University (Design of Reconfigurable Power Dividers) and Jonathan Rawlinson, SSTL, ("Classifying the Unknown"-Radio Frequency Signal Identification Utilising Neural Networks) received awards for presenting papers, as part of the society's efforts to support those new to the field. Beginning with the next conference, in addition to having their attendance paid, the Young Engineers prize will increase to £200.

The Steve Evans-Pughe Best Paper prize, sponsored by NI/AWR, was awarded to Dr. Dominic FitzPatrick, PoweRFul Microwave, for his paper “Resolving Stability Issues in a 200 W L-Band CW Power Amplifier”, sharing his experiences of analysing and tackling stability in PAs.

A list of all the papers given is on the website; for those interested, copies of the papers will be available from November 2019. The website includes details of the next ARMMS conference and an archive of previous conference papers.

Exhibition

The commercial exhibition of 17 table-top displays was sold out well in advance of the conference and was a venue for many discussions during the coffee and lunch breaks. The conference was sponsored by NI/AWR, who has a long association with the society.

Next Conference

Bookings for the 1-2 April 2019 conference in Oxford can be made on the website beginning 1 December. Due to the enormous popularity, early booking is encouraged to avoid disappointment.