December is the month that IEEE Microwave Magazine highlights the upcoming Radio and Wireless Week (RWW), and in this issue, you will find a full slate of columns and features to let you know about the activities and technologies associated with RWW. For your first foray into the magazine, I suggest that you read the excellent From the Guest Editor column by Hamhee Jeon. I would like to thank Hamhee for his work in soliciting the five technical features for the issue, as well as the columns both greeting you to the conference and also outlining the family of conferences meeting that week. RWW coincides with the International Microwave Symposium Technical Program Review Committee meeting, ARFTG, as well as the first meeting of the year for the MTT-S Administrative Committee. And, for this year only, the Latin American Microwave Conference (LAMC) will also be collocating with RWW.

Besides the RWW issue technical features, and the columns on the technical program and events of RWW, we also have our usual columns. MTT-S President Maurizio Bozzi, in his final message as President, discusses the achievements of the last year, and outlines his extensive time representing the entire society and meeting its global membership at various conferences and events. Also in this month’s issue Fred Schindler talks about mergers in his MicroBusiness column, citing several examples that include the upcoming merger of IEEE Regions 1 and 2. We have two articles in the MTT Society News column: a report of two years of activities by the MTT-S Technical Committee 28 (Biological Effects and Medical Applications) and a report discussing activities headed by the Montreal Polytechnic IEEE Student Branch. We hope other student branches throughout the world can generate similar reports on their activities. Our MGA column this month highlights the visit of 2023 MTT-S President Nuno Borges Carvalho to Kolkata, India in December of last year.

In our new “Re: Industry” column, written by Jon Martens, we interviewe Yonghui Shu, the founder and CTO of Eravant. We plan to continue the column periodically in future issues of the magazine. In our Educator Corner, the organizer and contributor to our Enigmas, etc. column, Takashi Ohira, takes an in-depth look at impedance and reflectance, not from a fully Smith chart perspective, but rather also from the Poincaréa perspective. This perspective was used extensively in the Enigmas, etc. problems and solutions throughout 2024. Takashi also provides the solution to last month’s challenge. Rounding out the issue is another installment of our New Products column, as well as a 25-year retrospective on the IEEE Topical Meeting on Silicon Monolithic Integrated Circuits in RF Systems (otherwise known as SiRF) by Hermann Schumacher, one of SiRF’s originators. SiRF has long been a part of the RWW family of conferences and so the organizers of the issue thought magazine readers would be interested in SiRF’s history. Finally, check out the Conference Calendar, as well as the various Calls for Papers for conferences in 2025.

Robert Caverly, EIC, IEEE Microwave Magazine