Research

Begins

The route to the project began in similar fashion to the investigation of sensor behaviour in the early years of Hawkins' instrumentation experience.

The somewhat crude looking kit, coupled with bespoke power supplies, signal generator and other measurement equipment served as the initial test suite. It became affectionately known as "sniffing kit". It was not research grade by any means but it did allow for certain insights to be gleaned.

This kit attempted to look in simple terms at the signal in a cable under fairly realistic operating conditions. From a technical perspective the system suffered from a number of shortfalls including noise, resolution and drift. It would be several years from the creation of this kit to the opportunity to progress instrumentation hardware.

Spurred on by the initial findings research moved to a different vein.

Second Phase

Carrying out work in isolation allows freedom from stereo-typed constraints or institutional thinking. However, there is a wide body of knowledge that applies to the periphery of the research which helps to identify dead-ends. The most valuable part of the process helps to relate observed or assumed characteristics with known quantities or described effects.

The second phase already has clues from the first phase regarding materials and their various merits. Part of the second stage is to limit the process to elements for which data is readily available. This proved to be simple for copper and silver but less so for some other metals. The assumption is that the materials used are considered pure and homogeneous, which is not strictly true. There is an additional implicit assumption that the behaviour is dominated by the body of material rather than the impurities and macroscopic structure.

The second phase does not conclude as much as fade into the third stage. The outcome of the second stage is an accumulation of data which loosely fits around the first stage but appears to have little in the way of direction.

Third Phase

The combination of observed effects, collated data and some calculation created a wealth of useful data that seemed to be pointing in a direction.

It was the mental reflection of one particular experiment that kept suggesting a particular phrase, yet the conclusion did not manifest itself from the data. The conclusion was more of a realisation than a true "Eureka" moment but it still had that impact.

The outcome does not dispense with any of the known theories of signal propagation or conduction in cables/conductors. It does suggest that there is an incredibly simple truth that may hold a key that is significant to the data and telecom industries.