I’ll be presenting a paper, “On the Origins of RF-Based
Location,” at the 2011 IEEE Radio and Wireless Symposium this
morning at 8:00 in room Cira A. The paper collects together the
pre-WWII material I’ve blogged about under the History of RF-
Based Location category here at ÆtherCzar. This paper will
provide a brief survey of the origins of RF-based location
technology through the beginning of the Second World War.
Direction finding (DF) was invented by John Stone Stone in 1902
and improved upon by Lee de Forest, Ettore Bellini and
Alessandro Tosi. Both radar and amplitude ranging date to 1904,
although these concepts were in advance of the ability of RF
technology to implement. DF played a critical role in the First
World War, most notably in the naval Battle of Jutland. The
requirement for accurate night-time direction led classicist and
cryptographer Frank Adcock to invent an improved DF system. In
the 1920’s, DF and related concepts came of age for civilian
applications like navigation. Inventors of the p