Friday fragments - comms news from around the web for 15 November 2013

Indoor location with 10 cm precision; New buildings must have DAS; Harvesting energy wirelessly.

Never get lost again. For firefighters responding to a building fire, accurately pinpointing locations within buildings can make all the difference when attempting to rescue people and put out fires. The DecaWave company, headquartered in Dublin, has developed a single-chip sensor that can provide an indoor location precision of 10 centimetres. It does not rely on GPS and can operate for years powered by a small battery or energy harvested from the environment.

New buildings must have DAS. Building materials that block or attenuate radio signals are putting lives in danger, say experts in the US. The Arlington Country Board in Arlington, Virginia, has passed a resolution specifying that all new county buildings must be equipped with a distributed antenna system (DAS) to enable clear, reliable communications into and out of the buildings.

Energy on a chip. And on the subject of energy harvesting, researchers at Duke University in the US have developed a metamaterial device that wirelessly gathers energy in a similar fashion to solar panels. Applications include recharging of radio devices, and it could also be applied as a coating “to the ceiling of a room to redirect and recover a Wi-Fi signal that would otherwise be lost"