This Emperor Has No Clothes? [Microwave Bytes]

Well, not many anyway. With more than 40 years of experience in wireless communications technology and its associated hardware construction, I find the current flurry of interest in orthogonal frequency division modulation (OFDM) actually rather quaint. For example, it is amazing to me that the extremely revolutionary nature of this signal class is actually poorly understood, particularly by the academic community. On the industrial side, there is a general misunderstanding of the economic consequences of building hardware needed to generate and receive an OFDM signal. In my entire career I have never encountered a signal type that has such a bimodal interest distribution-some adherents love it, and there are others who cannot loathe it more. Exploring this most interesting development is the purpose of this column.