A few years ago I became interested in first person shooter games and in particular how the world levels are created and rendered in real time. At the same time I found myself in between jobs and so I embarked on an effort to learn about 3D rendering with the goal of creating my own 3D rendering engine. Since I am a developer and not an artist I didn’t have the skills to create my own models, levels, and textures. So I decided to attempt to write a rendering engine that would render existing game levels. I mainly used information and articles I found on the web about Quake 2, Half Life, WAD and BSP files. In particular I found the Michael Abrash articles that he wrote for Dr. Dobbs magazine while working at Id to be very illuminating.
The new digital radio system DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting, nowadays often called
Digital Radio) is a very innovative and universal multimedia broadcast system which will
replace the existing AM and FM audio broadcast services in many parts of the world in
the future. It was developed in the 1990s by the Eureka 147/DAB project. DAB is very
well suited for mobile reception and provides very high robustness against multipath
reception. It allows use of single frequency networks (SFNs) for high frequency
efficiency.
Before I can present design concepts or tactical wireless communications and network
challenges, I feel the need to mention the challenges of writing for a field where some
information is not available for public domain and cannot be included in this book’s context.
Another challenge is the use of military jargon and the extensive number of abbreviations
(and abbreviations of abbreviations!) in the field. Engineering books are naturally dry, and I
have attempted to make it light by presenting the concepts in layman’s terms before diving
into the technical details. I am structuring this book in such a way as to make it useful for
a specialized graduate course in tactical communications and networking, or as a reference
book in the field.