No Attribution Needed

It has been brought to our attention that a reader of Microwaves & RF called into question the original artwork source for Figure 5 in our article, “Evaluate Test System Impedance Matching And Switch Quality,” originally published in September 2007. He stated we had “obviously” used a tool from his web site to create the figure. While we acknowledge that some similarities exist between the figures, we did not use his tool in creating the original artwork for the article. In fact, it was based on material created for a presentation at NIWeek in 2005.

We’d like to address some of the reader’s specific claims made to Microwaves & RF: “It can’t be a coincidence. The authors used the same wave number, VSWR, nearly the same axes, and the same color code!”

1. He is correct that the wave numbers are the same. We chose a wave number of 1 to show the simplest possible example for the article. We suspect that the reader’s spreadsheet probably uses this wave number for the same reason.
2. The VSWRs do appear to be almost (but not exactly) identical. But the spreadsheet referenced by the reader allows users to input the reflection coefficients of their choice. So this would have been the case regardless of the VSWR we chose.
3. The axes of the two figures are different in that our Figure 5 places the x-axis origin at the impedance discontinuity, while the reader’s spreadsheet starts with the origin at the origination point of his wave on the left side of his graph.
4. Colors for the figure were chosen by the publisher, not the author. The similarities in the two figures are entirely coincidental. We take our work very seriously and would have absolutely given credit had we used his tool to create the figure in our article.

Sincerely,
Jeremy Meier
Staff Hardware Engineer
National Instruments Corp.
and
Jaideep Jhangiani
Product Manager
National Instruments Corp.

Nancy Friedrich responds:
Dear Jeremy and Jaideep, we apologize for this misunderstanding. As is often said, “Great minds think alike.” This was obviously the case with the figure in your article. Thanks for setting the record straight.

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