|
 I have written
before about the love-hate relationship a lot of the buying public had with
television and radio repair shops and repairmen - similar to car owners and
mechanics. Lots of jokes and skits (what today is termed a "meme") were created
back in the heyday of in-home entertainment to make light of the situation.
These four
electronics-themed comics from a 1962 issue of Radio-Electronics
magazine are typical examples. The one from page 111 alludes to an issue that
would almost never be seen today on a TV, unless maybe the AC power supply was
on the fritz. A composite analog broadcast signal contained vertical and
horizontal sync[ronization] components which...
 "Electrostatic
discharge (ESD) protection is a significant concern in the chemical and electronics
industries. In electronics, ESD often causes integrated circuit failures due to
rapid voltage and current discharges from charged objects, such as human fingers
or tools. With the help of 3D printing techniques, researchers at Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory (LLNL) are 'packaging' electronics with printable elastomeric
silicone foams to provide both mechanical and electrical protection of sensitive
components. Without suitable protection, substantial equipment and component..."
 Mr. Bob Davis, a seemingly endless
source of little known and/or long forgotten
historical radio and television
technical trivia, apprised me of this short segment from the 1960s Dragnet
television series, starring Sgt. Joe Friday. It features a guy, who turns out to
be a ... well, I won't spoil it for you ... who proudly professes his thirty
year career as a radio repairman. "...started back in the days of the old Crosleys, Atwater-Kents, Farnsworths.
Those were real radios, well built, well designed. Nothing cheap about any of
them. They didn't have transistors in those days, just tubes as big as light
bulbs. That meant heavy chassis, heavy transformers, and we didn't fix them by
simply slapping in a new part, either. We fixed the old parts. I wish...
 A new word has been added to my personal
lexicon: "sphenoidal."
Author John Kraus used it to describe the wedge shape of a
corner reflector. The Oxford Dictionary defines "sphenoid" thusly: "A compound
bone that forms the base of the cranium, behind the eye and below the front part
of the brain. It has two pairs of broad lateral "wings" and a number of other projections,
and contains two air-filled sinuses." This "square corner" configuration - essentially
a "V" shape, is shown to exhibit up to 10 dB of gain while being relatively (compared
to a parabolic reflector) insensitive...
 Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity,
published in 1915, fundamentally reshaped the way scientists understand gravity,
space, and time. It extended his 1905 special theory of relativity, which described
how the laws of physics are consistent for all observers in uniform motion and how
light's speed is constant in a vacuum. However, the special theory did not address
accelerating reference frames or gravitational forces. Einstein's general theory
tackled these limitations by proposing that gravity is not a force in the traditional
sense, but rather a curvature of spacetime caused by mass and energy. This profound
insight would alter the course of 20th-century physics, influencing cosmology, black
hole theory...
 "The growing use of artificial intelligence
(AI)-based models is placing greater demands on the electronics industry, as many
of these models require significant storage space and computational power. Engineers
worldwide have thus been trying to develop neuromorphic computing systems that could
help meet these demands, many of which are based on memristors.
Memristors are electronic components that regulate the flow of electrical current
in circuits while also 'remembering' the amount of electrical charge that previously
passed through them. These components could replicate the function of biological..."
 Reading through the news items in the vintage
electronics magazines provides a mixture of important historical facts and figures
along with some predictions on the future of the industry. Some of the predictions
turn out to be amazingly accurate, even though in retrospect they might seem obvious.
Take, for example, Sylvania VP Dr. Robert Castor's foresight about how, "the future
growth of the semiconductor industry lies in a major switch from the production
of individual components to solid-state subsystems that can be used as building
blocks in electronic designs." "Well of course," you might be temped to say; however,
at the time there were still significant hurdles to overcome related to material
purity, wafer size, photolithography...
 Reactel has become one of the industry leaders
in the design and manufacture of RF and microwave filters, diplexers, and sub-assemblies. They
offer the generally known tubular, LC, cavity, and waveguide designs, as well as
state of the art high performance suspended substrate models. Through a continuous
process of research and development, they have established a full line of filters
of filters of all types - lowpass, highpass, bandpass, bandstop, diplexer, and more.
Established in 1979. Please contact Reactel today to see how they might help your
project.
 2012 came and went more than a decade ago.
The date was 50 years in the future back in 1962 when Radio-Electronics
magazine editor Hugo Gernsback asked industry leaders to cogitate on possibilities
of the
state of electronics in 2012. Let's see how they did. One guy predicted our
communications would be in the 100 THz to 1,500 THz band, using 2 decimeter
antennas. Nope. Another believed we would be communicating with aliens on a regular
basis. A military dude partly hit the mark by predicting 2- and 3-year-olds would
be sitting in front of "televideo screens" (cellphones) learning Esperanto and "other
basic studies." Bell Labs believed most audiovisual material, along with commerce,
would be done electronically; i.e., the World Wide Web. I'm not quite sure how to
interpret the IT&T guy's prediction of replacing microwave space transmission
with light wavelength waveguide transmission. Seems bassackward to me...
 Here is a unique approach to discouraging scam
callers. A lot of scam calls are themselves AI, so can one AI detect and aviod another?
"Gangster
Granny! Meet Daisy: O2's new weapon against scammers. O2 has unveiled its new,
unique weapon in its fight against scammers: Daisy, an AI-powered assistant designed
to keep fraudsters talking and waste their time. As part of Virgin Media O2's 'Swerve
the Scammers' campaign, Daisy's mission is to distract scammers with realistic,
rambling conversations, helping protect potential victims while raising awareness
about fraud. Her lifelike conversations, peppered with stories about family or hobbies
like knitting, have kept fraudsters on the line for up to 40 minutes..."
Albert Einstein's
special theory of relativity, a milestone in physics, transformed our understanding
of space, time, and energy (mass). The theory, published in 1905, stemmed from Einstein's
efforts to resolve inconsistencies in classical physics, specifically between Newtonian
mechanics and electromagnetism as formulated by James Clerk Maxwell. By reconceiving
space and time as interconnected and relative to the observer's frame of reference,
Einstein established a framework that had profound implications for science and
technology. To understand how this groundbreaking idea emerged, one must consider...
 Werbel Microwave's Model WM2PD-0.5-26.5-S
is a wideband 2-way in-line power splitter covering of 500 MHz to 26.5 GHz with
excellent return loss, low insertion loss, and high isolation performance. With
ultrawideband performance, amplitude balance is typically 0.24 dB and phase
unbalance is typically 2.6°. Insertion loss is low for the bandwidth, coming in
at a typical 1.2 dB above 3 dB splitting loss. Return loss 16 dB
typical. Isolation 18 dB typical. The device is precision-assembled and tested
in the USA...
 If you wanted a career as an
electronics technician at the end of World War II, the world was your oyster
- so to speak. Electronics and communications trade magazines and publications like
Mechanix Illustrated and Popular Science ran a plethora of ads
monthly that offered unlimited opportunity to men seeking a career servicing the
burgeoning market of postwar technological marvels. Even though the enclosures were
not yet being marked with "No user serviceable parts inside," that fact was most
people were not qualified - nor did they want - to monkey with the guts of radios,
televisions, and other household appliances... (I provide a simulation to show the
true zener diode circuit output)...
 Take time out of your busy workday to look
at these three
electronics-themed comics from the February 1962 issue of Radio-Electronics..
The page 32 comic reminds me of sometime in the late 1970s while working as
an electrician (prior to enlisting in the USAF) when I was doing side jobs, and
a guy had me wire up a receptacle for his big 25" screen (CRT) which he had mounted
in a wall, with the chassis sticking out the back. It was in an upstairs room in
a Cape Cod style house with lots of room behind the wall. He was a "man cave" pioneer
with a full suite of high quality audiovisual equipment - even a Betamax machine!
The page 81 comic exhibits the irony that would have existed in the day if
American-made electronics equipment had been promoted in Japan, which they probably
were not. In 1962, Japanese...
 Admittedly, I mostly posted this because
of the drawing. "While
direct-to-cell (D2C) satellite communications were a big topic at the recent
Brooklyn 6G Summit, the technology is already here, well before 6G's anticipated
2030 arrival. Apple and Google already offer D2C emergency messaging, and Starlink,
T-Mobile and others are anticipated to follow. D2C satellite communications will
be well established when 6G arrives. The 3GPP froze a 5G specification for Non-Terrestrial
Networks (NTN) in Release 17 in March 2022, which means that NTN-compatible chips
and components should be available now or soon. SpaceX has reduced the cost..."
 The subtitle of this article from a 1971
issue of Popular Electronics magazine, "From
Quackery to Speculation to Programmed People," could to some extent still be
applicable even though the author evidently meant to put an end to the "quackery"
and "speculation" part of it. Indeed, a lot of advancement has been made in the
fields of electrostimulation of weak or/or paralyzed muscles, healing of certain
types of soft and hard tissues, suppressing sporadic muscle twitching and epileptic
seizures, and other malady diagnosis and relief. Specifically tuned microwave frequencies
have proven useful in healing and symptom relief as well. As with most articles
on medical procedures, I cringe at some...
Anatech Intros 3
Filter Models for November
 Anatech Electronics offers the industry's
largest portfolio of high-performance standard and customized RF and microwave filters
and filter-related products for military, commercial, aerospace and defense, and
industrial applications up to 40 GHz. Three new
C-band cavity bandpass filter models have been added to the product line, including
a 4994 MHz BPF with a 50 MHz bandwidth, a 4950 MHz BPF with a 10 MHz
bandwidth, and a 5785 MHz BPF with a 100 MHz bandwidth. Custom RF power
filter and directional couplers designs can be designed and produced with required
connector types when a standard cannot be found, or the requirements are such that
a custom...
• 5G
Is 42% of Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) in 2024
• Robert Dennard,
DRAM Pioneer, Dies at 91
• TSMC's Energy
Demand Drives Taiwan's Geopolitical Future
• Semiconductor
Packaging Market on 5.6% CAGR 'Till 2028
• Altering
Asteroid Trajectories with Nuclear X-Rays
 Albert Einstein, one of the most renowned
physicists in history, was born on March 14, 1879, in Ulm, in the Kingdom of Württemberg,
part of the German Empire. His father, Hermann Einstein, was an engineer and salesman
who ran an electrochemical factory, and his mother, Pauline Koch, managed the household
and supported her son's education. Einstein had one sister, Maja, who was born in
1881 and with whom he had a lifelong close relationship. Einstein's extended family
included several relatives who would play various roles in his life, both personally
and professionally. His early family life was comfortable, though his parents moved
frequently as they sought economic stability. Hermann Einstein's business ventures
had varying success, and eventually, the family moved to Italy in 1894...
 Here is the second part of a series of articles
about
stepping switches appearing in 1967 issues of Radio-Electronics magazine.
A standard (at the time) dial rotary phone was used as a familiar example in the
part one. It delivers a single pulse for each number / letter set from 1, 2 (ABC),
3 (DEF), through 9 (WXY), 0 (Operator). On some phones, you can hear the clacking
of the switch contacts as the spring-loaded dial rotates from the selected number
back to home position. The stepping action as the result of dialing occurs at the
telephone system switching and call routing equipment at central locations. There,
stepping switches increment with each pulse received, and when the full number of
pulse sets have arrived, the circuit is complete and the call put through to ring
the phone...
 "Results are published, and the numbers
are in. They paint a picture of a very active
2024 ARRL
Field Day. Nearly 1.3 million contacts were reported during the 24-hour event.
That is up from 2023's 1.25 million contacts. That's likely indicative of the continued
rise of Solar Cycle 25 leading up to the event, but more people also participated
this year. Entries were received from all 85 ARRL and Radio Amateurs of Canada (RAC)
sections, as well as from 27 different countries from outside the US and Canada.
'It is encouraging to see a rise in participation year to year,' said ARRL Contest
Program Manager Paul Bourque, N1SFE. 'ARRL Field Day is amateur radio's premier
event, and the hams turned out for it..."
 After searching for the first mention of
Nikola Tesla in U.S. newspapers, I performed a similar search on
Albert
Einstein, again using editions available in the NewspaperArchive.com database.
I was utterly surprised to find it in a 1919 issue of the The New York Times.
His theory of Special Relativity was published in 1905 and his theory of General
Relativity was published in 1915, so it took The NY Times four years to
mention it. There is a reference to Dr. Einstein's' work on relativity in a 1915
edition of The Manitoban, from Winnipeg, Canada. The NY Times article
is an actual interview with Albert Einstein, wherein at one point it is stated that
there were perhaps only a dozen people in the world at that time who understood
general relativity. Interestingly, Einstein uses the term "difform motion" to describe...
 Exodus Advanced Communications, is a multinational
RF communication equipment and engineering service company serving both commercial
and government entities and their affiliates worldwide. We are pleased to announce
the model
AMP2103P-LC, dual-mode (CW & pulse) amplifier covering 800 to 3200 MHz.
1000 watt peak pulse power, or 500 watts CW. Ideal for automotive pulse/radar
EMC-testing & commercial applications. Pulse widths to 560 μsec, duty cycle
to 10%, 60 dB gain, and outstanding pulse fidelity. Monitoring parameters for
forward/reflected power in watts and dBm, VSWR, voltage, current, and temperature,
with unprecedented reliability and ruggedness in a compact 7U chassis...
 Sally Mason was the soldering iron-wielding
heroette (heroine sounds too much like the narcotic) of Nate Silverman's "Sally,
the Service Maid" series that ran in Radio-Craft magazine during the
years of World War II. As I noted in the previous episode, many of the nation's
women were left behind to run their husband's, father's and/or son's electronics
sales and repair businesses when they went off to save the world from aggressive
Communists, Socialists, Maoists, Nazis, and other nasty types. Some of those ladies
had already become very adept at troubleshooting, component replacement, and aligning
radio and television sets, while some were left to learn at the School of Hard Knocks.
Sally's father, Gus Mason...
 Crane Aerospace & Electronics' products
and services are organized into six integrated solutions: Cabin Systems, Electrical
Power Solutions, Fluid Management Solutions, Landing Systems, Microwave Solutions,
and Sensing Components & Systems. Our Microwave Solution designs and manufactures
high-performance
RF, IF and millimeter-wave components, subsystems and systems for commercial
aviation, defense, and space including linear & log amplifiers, fixed &
variable attenuators, circulators & isolators, power combiners & dividers,
couplers, mixers, switches & matrices, oscillators & synthesizers.
 The AN/MPN-13|14 mobile radar system I worked
on while enlisted in the U.S. Air Force was designed and fielded around the time
this
Electronic Navigation in Flight article appeared in a 1962 issue of Radio-Electronics
magazine. It had been upgraded a few times by 1979 when I was in Air Traffic Control
Radar Repairman technical school at Keesler AFB, Mississippi; however, the original
system did not featured a Doppler capability. The fully RF analog system could not
provide air traffic controllers with speed data, but it did use physical mercury
delay lines to provide a stationary target (ground, and to some degree, rain, clutter)
cancellation by inverting and summing a real-time radar...
 Decisions, decisions, decisions. As the
title states, color television manufacturers were, in 1965 when this Electronics
magazine article was published, finding themselves between a rock and a hard place,
as the saying goes, regarding a change
from vacuum tubes to transistors. The buying public (aka consumers) had mixed
emotions about the newfangled semiconductors based at least partly on bad information
about transistors. Transistors had been designed in various circuits for a decade
and a half and were gaining rapidly in performance and reliability. The price was
coming down, but as reported here, still cost $5 to $10 apiece compared to a $1
vacuum tube. Company management needed to decide whether to delay implementing the
new engineering and production methods required to deal with transistors...
 "At 8:30 p.m. on 16 May 1916, John J. Carty
banged his gavel at the Engineering Societies Building in New York City to call
to order a meeting of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. This was no
ordinary gathering. The AIEE had decided to conduct a live national meeting connecting
more than 5,000 attendees in
eight cities across four time zones. More than a century before Zoom made virtual
meetings a pedestrian experience, telephone lines linked auditoriums from coast
to coast. AIEE members and guests in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, New York,
Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco had telephone receivers at their
seats so they could listen..."
|
 The old-time radio broadcasts available on
the Internet are obviously recorded version of shows made long ago. However, back
in the day those shows were
originally performed live in front of microphones and recorded
in a broadcast studio. With a cast of two or three or even more, the actors would
voice their lines with as much talent and effort as those performing for movies.
The crew usually included a group of people responsible for creating background
sound effects like horses running, car horns tooting, airplanes buzzing by, and
dogs barking. All was done real-time with split-second timing required to pull it
off and sound convincing. Radio audiences were unaware of all the work required
as they sat intently listening to the Adventures of the Lone Ranger and The Shadow.
Behind the scenes were dozens of engineers and technicians tending local radio broadcasting
equipment and all-important telephone landlines used for synchronizing stations
across the country...
 A lot of nostalgia gets waxed here on RF Cafe,
to which frequent visitors can readily attest. Old timers (if you're not one now, you
some day will be) often like to see remembrances of days of yore, the halcyon days of
past hobbies, family, long naps, school (yuk), vacations, and other pleasurable times.
Hopefully, you already have or will soon have a few of your own. This 3-page
Lafayette Radio Electronics spread from a 1965 issue of Popular Electronics
magazine is typical of what what avid electronics hobbyists would have read and
drooled over with so many great items in the offering. If you were like me, the
cost of most of the things I wanted were well outside my budgetary reach. Prices
for electronics gizmos were quite high...
 Good, clean humor has always been a welcome
addition to my day whether it comes in the form of a printed comic strip, a TV show,
or someone's mouth. My father's side of the family was populated with many jokesters
who could be counted on to deliver an ad hoc pun or zinger at the appropriate moment.
The environment instilled a great appreciation for such entertainment, so these
electronics-themed comics that appeared in editions of Radio-Electronics,
Popular Electronics, et al, are a refreshing distraction from the workaday
world. An old saying claims "laughter is the best medicine," and while it cannot
cure cancer, a good dose of humor often helps ease the pain...
 Those of us who have been around for six
or more decades have lived through two evolutions of video display types - raster
scanned
cathode ray tubes (CRTs) and digitally pixelated light-emitting diode (LED)
and liquid crystal (LCD) displays. Unlike with the latter display types that improved
in color depth, picture resolution and display size, the former had effectively
a fixed resolution of horizontal lines (525 vertical steps - only 484 visible, actually,
due to blanking). That meant for CRTs, designers needed to find ways to make images
appear in-focus while also looking continuous on larger screens. Doing so involved
cleverly adjusting the size and spacing of fluorescent color dots on the picture
tube face while also using special metal masks between the electron gun and the
tube. A lot of research that included panels of people rendering opinions...
 Banner Ads are rotated in all locations
on the page! RF Cafe typically receives 8,000-15,000 visits each
weekday. RF Cafe
is a favorite of engineers, technicians, hobbyists, and students all over the world.
With more than 17,000 pages in the Google search index, RF Cafe returns in
favorable positions on many types of key searches, both for text and images.
Your Banner Ads are displayed on average 225,000 times per year! New content
is added on a daily basis, which keeps the major search engines interested enough
to spider it multiple times each day. Items added on the homepage often can be found
in a Google search within a few hours of being posted. If you need your company
news to be seen, RF Cafe is the place to be...
 One aspect of advertising on the RF Cafe
website I have not covered is using
Google AdSense.
The reason is that I never took the time to explore how - or even whether it is
possible - to target a specific website for displaying your banner ads. A couple
display opportunities have always been provided for Google Ads to display, but the
vast majority of advertising on RF Cafe is done via private advertisers. That is,
companies deal with me directly and I handle inserting their banner ads into the
html page code that randomly selects and displays them. My advertising scheme is
what the industry refers to as a "Tenancy Campaign," whereby a flat price per month
is paid regardless of number of impressions or clicks. It is the simplest format
and has seemed to work well for many companies. With nearly 4 million pageviews
per year for RFCafe.com, the average impression rate per banner ad is about 225,000k per
year (in eight locations on each page, with >17k pages)...
 John T. Frye, creator of the "Mac's
Radio Service Shop" and "Carl & Jerry" technodrama article series, employed
his mastery of electronics to weave into tales valuable lessons in circuit design
and troubleshooting, business practices, dealing with customers, test equipment
usage, education, as well as introducing new technology. His columns ran for decades
in multiple electronics trade and hobby magazines. In addition to that, Mr. Frye
wrote many technical articles such as this "Fundamentals of Radio Servicing" piece
that ran in a 1951 issue of Radio-Electronics magazine. It is Part 23 of a series
and deals with "Signals in Space." An avid Ham operator, he is aware that it was
radio amateurs who played a large role in early discoveries...
 In spite of the proliferation of cellphones
and near ubiquitous communications, there are still many applications that require
private
2-way communications systems. Emergency services like police,
fire, and ambulance; amateur radio, vehicular dispatch for utilities, delivery and
repair services; and anywhere that cellular service is not either available or extremely
reliable, cannot rely on cellphones for mission critical needs. There are a lot
of legacy 2-way radio system antennas and associated towers still being used and
many new installations in place. Word has it that use of Citizen Band (CB) radio
is on the rise amongst not just truck drivers but everyday drivers and base station
operators - largely for the anonymity factor...
 I ran across a really nice e-book entitled
"Wireless Networking in the Developing World," which is a collaborative work by
many authors, and it is published under the Creative Commons licensing scheme (a
la Wikipedia). That permits reprinting with attribution. Some of the more pertinent
sections will be posted here on RF Cafe. "The exact theory of Fresnel zones is quite
complicated. However, the concept is quite easy to understand: we know from the
Huygens principle that at each point of a wavefront new circular waves start, we
know that microwave beams widen as they leave the antenna, we know that waves of
one frequency can interfere with each other. Fresnel zone theory simply looks at
a line from A to B, and then at the space around that line that contributes to what
is arriving at point B. Some waves travel directly..."
One aspect of advertising on the RF Cafe
website I have not covered is using
Google AdSense.
The reason is that I never took the time to explore how - or even whether it is
possible - to target a specific website for displaying your banner ads. A couple
display opportunities have always been provided for Google Ads to display, but the
vast majority of advertising on RF Cafe is done via private advertisers. That is,
companies deal with me directly and I handle inserting their banner ads into the
html page code that randomly selects and displays them. My advertising scheme is
what the industry refers to as a "Tenancy Campaign," whereby a flat price per month
is paid regardless of number of impressions or clicks. It is the simplest format
and has seemed to work well for many companies. With nearly 4 million pageviews
per year for RFCafe.com, the average impression rate per banner ad is about 225,000k per
year (in eight locations on each page, with >17k pages)...
 It was a lot of work, but I finally finished
a version of the "RF &
Electronics Schematic & Block Diagram Symbols"" that works well with Microsoft
Office™ programs Word™, Excel™, and Power Point™. This is an equivalent of the extensive
set of amplifier, mixer, filter, switch, connector, waveguide, digital, analog,
antenna, and other commonly used symbols for system block diagrams and schematics
created for Visio™. Each of the 1,000+ symbols was exported individually from Visio
in the EMF file format, then imported into Word on a Drawing Canvas. The EMF format
allows an image to be scaled up or down without becoming pixelated, so all the shapes
can be resized in a document and still look good. The imported symbols can also
be UnGrouped into their original constituent parts for editing...
 December 1942 was just a year into America's
"official" involvement in World War II. Already, both wired and wireless communications
had made major advances and were indisputably vital in both the logistical and strategic
aspects of troop movement, supply chains, fighting battles, and evacuation of wounded
personnel. It also played a large part in propaganda campaigns. This was all true
for both Axis and Allied forces.
Ham radio
operators provided a huge boost to the Signal Corps because they came at least
partially trained for the jobs. These dozen and a half photos from the field exhibit
the state of the art at the time. Maybe you'll recognize a father, grandfather,
or uncle in one of them. For that matter, you might even recognize a mother, grandmother,
or aunt...
 Popular Electronics printed in April 1966 its
first notice of
new frequency units to be used beginning with the June edition. The May issue included
this
 piece titled, "Comes the Revolution - or - '40
Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong'." Predictably, not everyone liked it. With the June
issue came the promised change and along with it the first in a series of reader responses.
I also found a reader's opinion from the
August issue as well. Evidently, not everyone wanted to honor Heinrich Hertz by naming
the base unit of frequency in his honor...
 In his usual manner, John T. Frye uses
tech-savvy teenage experimenters Carl Anderson and Jerry Bishop to teach a lesson
while writing a compelling saga. In this case Jerry gets "bitten" by house current while fiddling with a receiver chassis.
Before certain safety measures were required by law, many electrical devices - radios,
televisions, vacuum cleaners, shop tools, kitchen appliances, etc. - were sold with
with either existing shock hazards or the potential for (no pun intended) a shock
hazard in certain usage or failure modes. Before the advent of polarized two-pronged
plugs and grounded 3-prong plugs, some devices presented hazardous voltage levels
to the user by virtue of a direct connection to exposed conductive (metal) surfaces.
In this instance, under normal operational conditions with the chassis installed
in its wooden case and plastic or phenolic control...
 Designing a
log periodic antenna is a piece of cake. Just punch in your computer program
or smartphone app a few parameters for frequency range, power handling, directivity,
impedance, etc., and out pops boom and element lengths, diameters, and spacings
- and probably radiation gain profiles for elevation and azimuth. That is the way
it's done today. However, when Dwight Isbell and Raymond DuHamel of the University
of Illinois came up with the log periodic concept in 1958, they did not have the
convenience of a computer or even a hand-held calculator. Slide rules and logarithm
tables were the order of the day. After trudging through the equations for building
the antenna ...
 This
Electronics Curves Quiz will probably prove to be a little more of a challenge
than some of the ones previously appearing in Popular Electronics magazine.
Being a rocket scientist won't help you much here, but being a seasoned electronics
technician, hobbyist, or engineer will sure come in handy. Be careful to note the
axis unit labels - I got tripped up by that from being lazy and missed one. Surely
you won't be hindered by such an oversight.
 I and others joke frequently about the promise
of flying cars, automated homes, and miracle pills to cure any maladies that were
predicted to be commonly available by the end of the 20th century. Magazines like
Popular Science, Mechanix Illustrated, Science and Mechanics,
et al, regularly printed stories about these and a host of other inventions that
were just around the corner. Most have never been realized, but we're appreciative
of the dreamers and those people who dedicated their lives - often to the point
of financial and/or physical ruin - while trying to succeed. Taking a different
approach, Edwin Lawrence, in this 1956 article in Popular Electronics,
solicits readers to consider inventing a few 'needed
inventions" that he throws out. Among them death ray that will incapacitate
or kill at great distances, a speech-into-writing translator, a buried explosive
detector, a 3-dimensional visual display, a device for recording television programs,
and a handful of other ideas. Interested parties are bade to contact the National
Inventor's Council...
 It's funny how often topics crop up bemoaning
the current state of society, technology, etc., as if they are suddenly new plagues
upon the entities concerned. That's not to say the subjects are not worthy of being
brought to the forefront of public awareness, but often times in fact those same
issues are exactly the same or reincarnations of former "emergencies" in need of
immediate attention. I have posted numerous articles and editorials from vintage
electronics and hobby magazines lamenting the
poor state of youth involvement, with blame being laid in the
lap of some newfangled hobby or activity that is presently stealing away erstwhile
brethren. The effort is usually not in vain since the intended effect of motivating
fellow enthusiasts to reinvigorate and motivate those drifting prodigals ...
 The newest release of RF Cafe's spreadsheet
(Excel) based engineering and science calculator is now available -
Espresso Engineering Workbook™. Among other additions, it now has a Butterworth
Bandpass Calculator, and a Highpass Filter Calculator that does not just gain, but
also phase and group delay! Since 2002,
the original Calculator Workbook has been available as a free download.
Continuing the tradition, RF Cafe Espresso Engineering Workbook™ is
also provided at no cost,
compliments of my generous sponsors. The original calculators are included, but
with a vastly expanded and improved user interface. Error-trapped user input cells
help prevent entry of invalid values. An extensive use of Visual Basic for Applications
(VBA) functions now do most of the heavy lifting with calculations, and facilitates
a wide user-selectable choice of units for voltage, frequency, speed, temperature,
power, wavelength, weight, etc. In fact, a full page of units conversion calculators
is included. A particularly handy feature is the ability to specify the the number
of significant digits to display. Drop-down menus are provided for convenience...
 This rare
HP 5212A Electronic Counter was found in a second-hand shop
sitting in with a bunch of random electronic gear. The "HP" on the front panel piqued
my attention, so I carried it to the sales desk and asked the nice lady to plug
it in, figuring if the front panel lit up and none of the smoke that makes electronics
work leaked out, I'd buy it. It did, it didn't, and I did, respectively. The outside
condition is pretty good, with most of the scratches being on the top and bottom.
Some oxidation is present on the bare aluminum chassis components, but a little...
 Technology builds on its own successes in
order to evolve. This article from a 1948 issue of Radio News magazine
reporting on the relatively newly perfected
electron microscope. As electronics moved from the macro scale in the form of
vacuum tubes and large, high voltage- and power-handling leaded components (resistors,
inductors, capacitors) to semiconductors and smaller, lower voltage and power components,
using a standard optical type microscope was not good due to small features on the
IC die. As more powerful microscopes were developed, engineers and scientists were
able to develop semiconductor circuits with smaller features. That enabled more
compact, higher performance electronic microscopes to be built ... and the cycle
continued to where we are today. It is sort of another way of looking at Moore's
law...
 Here is a crossword puzzle from the November
1957 edition of Popular Electronics magazine. Unlike the weekly crosswords
from RF Cafe that uses only relevant technical words, this one fills in with common
words. It's still a good puzzle and will take a lot less time to complete. A list
of all the other crossword puzzles found in Popular Electronics, Electronics
World, QST, and other vintage electronics magazines...
 While
acoustical tiles are not exactly the stuff of RF engineering, their properties
and their effects on sound waves are analogous to RF absorbers and their effects
on electromagnetic waves. Reflections that cause multipath reception of signals
that contain the same information but are out of phase and unequal in amplitude
to the primary (direct) path seldom combine to enhance the overall signal-to-noise
ratio, so placing absorbent material in the surrounding environment is necessary
to improve signal quality. This article from a 1959 issue of Popular Electronics
goes through the process of outfitting an area with acoustical tiles and gives some
empirical test data from before and after...
 This assortment of custom-designed themes
by RF Cafe includes T-Shirts, Mouse Pads, Clocks, Tote Bags, Coffee Mugs and Steins,
Purses, Sweatshirts, Baseball Caps, and more, all sporting my amazingly clever "RF Engineers - We Are the World's Matchmakers"
Smith chart design. These would make excellent gifts for husbands, wives, kids,
significant others, and for handing out at company events or as rewards for excellent
service. My graphic has been ripped off by other people and used on their products,
so please be sure to purchase only official RF Cafe gear. I only make a couple bucks
on each sale - the rest goes to Cafe Press. It's a great way to help support RF
Cafe. Thanks...
Banner Ads are rotated in all locations
on the page! RF Cafe typically receives 8,000-15,000 visits each
weekday. RF Cafe
is a favorite of engineers, technicians, hobbyists, and students all over the world.
With more than 17,000 pages in the Google search index, RF Cafe returns in
favorable positions on many types of key searches, both for text and images.
Your Banner Ads are displayed on average 225,000 times per year! New content
is added on a daily basis, which keeps the major search engines interested enough
to spider it multiple times each day. Items added on the homepage often can be found
in a Google search within a few hours of being posted. If you need your company
news to be seen, RF Cafe is the place to be...
 Many people end on RF cafe as a result of a Google
(or other) search about electronics, so even though regular visitors might find this
primer on
Ohm's law to be redundant review, it will be valuable to the aforementioned people.
Electronics technology has moved forward at lightning speed in the last century, but
the fundamentals of Ohm's law remain unchanged. Indeed, we would be in trouble if voltage
no longer equaled the product of current and voltage (E = I x R).
National Radio-TV News magazine was published monthly by National Radio Institute,
a correspondence school that did business from 1914 through 2002. A bonus electronics-themed
comic is included... |
