Raymond J. Leopold | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | January 6, 1946 |
| Education |
|
| Occupation | Engineer |
| Engineering career | |
| Employer(s) | Motorola |
| Projects | Iridium satellite constellation |
Raymond J. Leopold is one of the three engineers who in late 1987 conceived of and later designed the Iridium satellite constellation, the first realization of global, wireless, personal communications. [1]
Leopold joined Motorola in 1987 after having spent a career in the U.S. Air Force where he held a variety of technical and technical management positions. He directed the development of communications systems at the Electronics Systems Division in Massachusetts. He served two tours in The Pentagon, one in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and one on the Air Staff. He taught for over five years at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado, and worked in research and development for four years at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory in Albuquerque. He was also an adjunct professor of electrical engineering at George Washington University, and he had been a senior lecturer at MIT and had chaired the Industry Advisory Board for the Aero/Astro Department. He has also lectured at Stanford University. [2]
Leopold earned three degrees in electrical engineering, a bachelor's degree from the United States Air Force Academy in 1967, a master's degree from North Carolina State University in 1968, and a Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico in 1973. He was also honored with a Doctor of Telecommunications Management Degree from South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in 1997. He has completed Executive Education courses at the Harvard Business School, MIT (Sloan), The University of California (Berkeley), The Center for Creative Leadership, and The Defense Systems Management College. [3]
The Iridium system integrates a packet-switched architecture within its globally deployed constellation of satellites together with the circuit-switched architecture of the public switched telephone network. It was created by Leopold and Bary Bertiger and Ken Peterson. [4]
Iridium Communications Inc. is a publicly traded American company headquartered in McLean, Virginia, United States. Iridium operates the Iridium satellite constellation, a system of 75 satellites: 66 are active satellites and the remaining nine function as in-orbit spares. Iridium Satellites are used for worldwide voice and data communication from handheld satellite phones, satellite messenger communication devices and integrated transceivers, as well as for two-way satellite messaging service from supported Android smartphones. The nearly polar orbit and communication between satellites via inter-satellite links provide global service availability.
Wireless communication is the transfer of information (telecommunication) between two or more points without the use of an electrical conductor, optical fiber or other continuous guided medium for the transfer. The most common wireless technologies use radio waves. With radio waves, intended distances can be short, such as a few meters for Bluetooth or as far as millions of kilometers for deep-space radio communications. It encompasses various types of fixed, mobile, and portable applications, including two-way radios, cellular telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and wireless networking. Other examples of applications of radio wireless technology include GPS units, garage door openers, wireless computer mouse, keyboards and headsets, headphones, radio receivers, satellite television, broadcast television and cordless telephones. Somewhat less common methods of achieving wireless communications involve other electromagnetic phenomena, such as light and magnetic or electric fields, or the use of sound.
Andrew James Viterbi is an Italian Jewish–American electrical engineer and businessman who co-founded Qualcomm Inc. and invented the Viterbi algorithm. He is the Presidential Chair Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering, which was named in his honor in 2004 in recognition of his $52 million gift.
The V band ("vee-band") is a standard designation by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for a band of frequencies in the microwave portion of the electromagnetic spectrum ranging from 40 to 75 gigahertz (GHz). The V band is not heavily used, except for millimeter wave radar research and other kinds of scientific research. It should not be confused with the 600–1,000 MHz range of Band V of the UHF frequency range.
A satellite telephone, satellite phone or satphone is a type of mobile phone that connects to other phones or the telephone network by radio link through satellites orbiting the Earth instead of terrestrial cell sites, as cellphones do. Therefore, they can work in most geographic locations on the Earth's surface, as long as open sky and the line-of-sight between the phone and the satellite are provided. Depending on the architecture of a particular system, coverage may include the entire Earth or only specific regions. Satellite phones provide similar functionality to terrestrial mobile telephones; voice calling, text messaging, and low-bandwidth Internet access are supported through most systems. The advantage of a satellite phone is that it can be used in such regions where local terrestrial communication infrastructures, such as landline and cellular networks, are not available.
Irwin Mark Jacobs is an American electrical engineer and businessman. He is a co-founder and former chairman of Qualcomm, and chair of the board of trustees of the Salk Institute. As of 2019, Jacobs has an estimated net worth of $1.2 billion.
Siavash Alamouti is an Iranian-born business executive, and entrepreneur. and electrical engineer. He is the Executive Vice President of Innovation R&D at Wells Fargo, and the executive chairman of Mimik Technology, Inc. He is known for the 1998 invention of the Alamouti's code, a type of space–time block code.
Martin Cooper is an American engineer. He is a pioneer in the wireless communications industry, especially in radio spectrum management, with eleven patents in the field.
The Iridium satellite constellation provides L band voice and data information coverage to satellite phones, satellite messenger communication devices and integrated transceivers. Iridium Communications owns and operates the constellation, additionally selling equipment and access to its services. It was conceived by Bary Bertiger, Raymond J. Leopold and Ken Peterson in late 1987 and then developed by Motorola on a fixed-price contract from July 29, 1993, to November 1, 1998, when the system became operational and commercially available.
Robert D. Briskman is Technical Executive of Sirius XM Radio.
Jesse Eugene Russell is an American inventor. He was trained as an electrical engineer at Tennessee State University and Stanford University, and worked in the field of wireless communication for over 20 years. He holds patents and continues to invent and innovate in the emerging area of next generation broadband wireless networks, technologies and services, often referred to as 4G. Russell was inducted into the US National Academy of Engineering for his contributions to the field of wireless communication. He pioneered the field of digital cellular communication in the 1980s through the use of high power linear amplification and low bit rate voice encoding technologies and received a patent in 1992 for his work in the area of digital cellular base station design.
Robert W. Brodersen is a professor of electrical engineering, now emeritus, and a founder of the Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC) at the University of California, Berkeley.
John Francis Mitchell was an American electronics engineer and president and chief operating officer of Motorola.
Abbas Jamalipour received a PhD from Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan. He is Professor of Ubiquitous Mobile Networking with the School of Electrical and Information Engineering, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Iridium 77 was a communications Satellite which was part of a satellite constellation known as Iridium, named after the 77th chemical element of the periodic table, iridium. It was owned and funded by Iridium, a communications company.
Bernhard H. Walke is a pioneer of mobile Internet access and professor emeritus at RWTH Aachen University in Germany. He is a driver of wireless and mobile 2G to 5G cellular radio networks technologies. In 1985, he proposed a local cellular radio network comprising technologies in use today in 2G, 4G and discussed for 5G systems. For example, self-organization of a radio mesh network, integration of circuit- and packet switching, de-centralized radio resource control, TDMA/spread spectrum data transmission, antenna beam steering, spatial beam multiplexing, interference coordination, S-Aloha based multiple access and demand assigned traffic channels, mobile broadband transmission using mm-waves, and multi-hop communication.
Theodore (Ted) Scott Rappaport is an American electrical engineer and the David Lee/Ernst Weber Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at New York University Tandon School of Engineering and founding director of NYU WIRELESS.
Robert W. Heath Jr. is an American electrical engineer, researcher, educator, wireless technology expert, and a Lampe Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the North Carolina State University. He is also the president and CEO of MIMO Wireless Inc. He was the founding director of the Situation Aware Vehicular Engineering Systems initiative.
Ranjan Kumar Mallik is an Indian electrical and communications engineer and a professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering of the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. He held the Jai Gupta Chair at IIT Delhi from 2007 to 2012 and the Brigadier Bhopinder Singh Chair from 2012 to 2017. He is known for his researches on multiple-input multi-output systems and is an elected fellow of all the three major Indian science academies viz. Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy, and The National Academy of Sciences, India. He is also an elected fellow of The World Academy of Sciences, Indian National Academy of Engineering, and The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
Eytan H. Modiano is a professor and associate head of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and associate director of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts.