Post a pic

[Kevin Bresnahan]

I was going through some old digital photo albums for my wife's Aura picture frame when I came upon some pictures from a visit to Mosaic Records in 2003. I had totally forgotten that my friend Rob took a picture of me and Michael Cuscuna.

[Gheorghe]

23 hours ago, Kevin Bresnahan said:

I was going through some old digital photo albums for my wife's Aura picture frame when I came upon some pictures from a visit to Mosaic Records in 2003. I had totally forgotten that my friend Rob took a picture of me and Michael Cuscuna.

Great

[JSngry]

On 5/12/2026 at 4:51 PM, Kevin Bresnahan said:

 

That Cuscuna sure had a nice head of hair!

[Kevin Bresnahan]

1 hour ago, JSngry said:

That Cuscuna sure had a nice head of hair!

Back then, so did I.  

I also took this out-of-focus picture of the Mosaic office. It was so tiny.  

[jazzbo]

[rostasi]

[Gheorghe]

19 hours ago, rostasi said:

infos plz: Alice Coltrane I suppose ? 

[Brad]

On 5/17/2026 at 5:44 PM, Gheorghe said:

infos plz: Alice Coltrane I suppose ? 

I believe it is. 

[Aggie87]

Statue of St. John of Nepomuk, patron saint of Bohemia, at Sforza Castle, Milan

2 May 2026

 

[Brad]

 

Nearly got run over taking this photo. Thought it was a deserted track. Not so. 
 

Edited 11 hours ago by Brad

[JSngry]

[Rabshakeh]

On 5/17/2026 at 10:44 PM, Gheorghe said:

infos plz: Alice Coltrane I suppose ? 

No way of knowing. It could be anyone. 

[Kevin Bresnahan]

When I decided to retire, I took a few pictures of my last work areas. I was an applications engineer for Analog Devices' RF products group. I tested parts from MHz to 100 GHz.

Here was one of my last test benches, but I don't think the product was mine. By this time, I was responsible for beam forming products. This looks like a GaN ampllifer - you can tell by the monster capacitor on the test board. Those things needed to be pulsed and the drew a ton of current, so you needed a massive cap to be able to supply that current quickly.

It was probably this 1-22 GHz amp: https://www.analog.com/en/products/adpa1112.html

The labs I worked in typically had 50 or 60 test benches like this. Here is one "chase" with about 10 test benches/racks in it. The floor is conductive (as are  the chairs) for ESD purposes. You can see a temp chamber on the left. We used to have to characterize our parts from -40 degrees to +85 degrees Celsius. The plexiglass box/cover is there because we had to pump in Nitrogen to prevent frost/freezing.

This was one of our workhorses in the test lab. As you can see if you can zoom in, this box could test from 2 Hz to 110 GHz with extraordinary dynamic range. Cabling was extremely important with these test boxes. Some of our cables cost upwards of $12,000 each. My understanding of using cables capable of cleanly transmitting high frequency signals is why is am a bit biased against a lot of the audio cable debates... audio (Hz to maybe 16 kHz if you're lucky) is a piece of cake to conduct compared to the signals I used to have to worry about.  

BTW - I took this picture to show to the Keysight rep.

Those calibration stickers have to be redone every year in a special cal lab.

[Kevin Bresnahan]

One of the last products I worked on was a "beam former". These beasts are used in 5G type communication systems. They typically work with 4 signals simultaneously, which is how you get so much data with 5G. A simplified block diagram doesn't even do it justice.

Mounting these devices onto a board is a bear too. Each solder connection has to work at all 8 RF ports across the whole frequency band over the entire temp range. Not as easy as it sounds. Board assembly was a huge part of my days at Analog Devices, as getting these parts soldered down perfectly every time was ultra-important to our customers.

The last one of these I worked on came in a bumped package i.e. little solder balls in the bottom. The biggest problem with them was that they curl a bit under solder heat temps (~260 degrees C) and sometimes, the little solder balls don't make good connections if the curl is too great.