Kenneth Bullington was an American electrical engineer known for his studies of radio propagation

Radio propagation

Radio propagation is the behavior of radio waves when they are transmitted, or propagated from one point on the Earth to another, or into various parts of the atmosphere...

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Bullington work at Bell Labs

Bell Labs

Bell Laboratories is the research and development subsidiary of the French-owned Alcatel-Lucent and previously of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company , half-owned through its Western Electric manufacturing subsidiary.Bell Laboratories operates its...

, Holmdel, New Jersey. Between 1950–1951, he performed pioneering research on tropospheric scatter

Tropospheric scatter

Tropospheric scatter is a method of transmitting and receiving microwave radio signals over considerable distances – often up to 300 km...

, collecting data over paths ranging 200 to 300 miles in length, and pointed out the potential applications for communications in papers published in the Proceedings of the I.R.E. in 1950 and 1953. In 1953 he also published the first article foreshadowing cellular radio systems in "Frequency Economy in Mobile Radio Bands".

Bullington received the 1956 IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Award

IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Award

The initially called Morris Liebmann Memorial Prize provided by the Institute of Radio Engineers , the IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Award was created in 1919 in honor of Colonel Morris N. Liebmann. It was initially given to awardees who had "made public during the recent past an important...

 "for his contributions to the knowledge of tropospheric transmission beyond the horizon, and to the application of the principles of such transmission to practical communications systems", and the Franklin Institute

Franklin Institute

The Franklin Institute is a museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and one of the oldest centers of science education and development in the United States, dating to 1824. The Institute also houses the Benjamin Franklin National Memorial.-History:On February 5, 1824, Samuel Vaughn Merrick and...

's 1956 Stuart Ballantine Medal for his studies of space communications.

Selected works

• "Frequency Economy in Mobile Radio Bands", Bell System Technical Journal, volume 32: 42 et. seq. January 1953.
• K. Bullington, W. J. Inkster, and A. L. Durkee, "Some tropospheric scatter propagation measurements near the radio-horizon", Proceedings of the IRE, October 1955, pages 1336–1340.
• "Radio Propagation Fundamentals", The Bell System Technical Journal, vol. XXXVI, no. 3, pages 593-626, May 1957.
• "Radio Propagation for Vehicular Communications", IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, vol. VT-26, no. 4, November 1977.