|
 This 1959 Popular Science magazine
reprint of a 1925 Radio News magazine article focused is on visionary physicist
Robert H. Goddard's proposed Moon Rocket as a means to test
whether radio waves can traverse interstellar space, potentially enabling communication
with other planets. Amid recent radio achievements, including mysterious signals
during Mars' approach and solar disturbances recorded on Earth, the piece challenges
Oliver Heaviside's theory that radio waves are confined by Earth's atmosphere. Goddard's
innovative rocket, propelled by successive explosive charges to escape gravity and
reach the Moon, would carry a compact radio transmitter in its nose cone, broadcasting
signals throughout its flight. Astronomers would track...
 This week's
crossword puzzle, as with all RF Cafe puzzles, uses only words pertaining to
engineering, science, mathematics, mechanics, chemistry, astronomy, etc. You will
never find a reference to some obscure geological feature or city, or be asked to
recall the name of some numbnut movie star or fashion designer. You will, however,
need to know the name of a famous RF filter design software author. Enjoy...
 "Broadband achromatic wavefront control
plays a central role in next-generation photonic technologies, including full-color
imaging and multi-spectral sensing. A research team led by Professor Yijun Feng
and Professor Ke Chen at Nanjing University has now reported a significant advance
in this field in PhotoniX. The researchers introduced a hybrid-phase cooperative
dispersion-engineering approach that combines Aharonov-Anandan (AA) and Pancharatnam–Berry
(PB) geometric phases within a single-layer metasurface. This strategy enables
independent achromatic control of wavefronts for two different light spin states..."
 As with the article in this month's issue
of Radio-Craft magazine (December 1937), the reference to a 200th anniversary
is understated by 88 years for 2025.
Luigi Galvani was sort of the Benjamin Franklin of biology in
that just as Franklin demonstrated that lightning was a form of electricity, Galvani
showed that signals sent from the brains to the appendages of animals were electrical
in nature. In my high school days in the 1970s, we duplicated his experiment by
making deceased frogs' legs twitch when motivated by a D cell. Today, such an exercise
would likely be met with demonstrations by animal rights people (whose lives, BTW,
have probably in some way been improved as a result of previous such experiments).
But, I digress. Mr. Galvani's name is...
 Superheterodyne receivers were originally
the sole domain of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), which owned the patents
and refused to license them until around 1930. Hugo Gernsback, a contemporary editor
of the era, provides a little insight into the superregenerative receiver circuits
superheterodyne was about to replace, and why it was an important improvement in
technology. Sidebar: The question often
arises regarding the difference between a "heterodyne" circuit and a "superheterodyne"
circuit. The most popular answer that "super" refers to the IF being located above
the range of human hearing, which peaks at about 15 kHz. Doing so assured that
any IF leakage into the audio circuits would not be discernable by a radio...
 Carl and Jerry stories are usually a good
mixture of teenage curiosity, adventure, and electronics technology, but this "Out
of the Depths" episode is a bit too far-fetched. The first ninety percent of
this 1957 Popular Electronics magazine tale fulfills expectations, with
the boys applying their shared interest in technology while attempting to learn
and apply the technique of luring elusive fish from their safe dwelling places and
onto the ends of their hooks. A car battery, DC-to-AC inverter, tape recorder, and
high-gain microphone are the basis for the scheme. Things were going well, and I
expected the normal hard-fought victory with big, fat bass in their creels - and
then something only slightly more believable than finding a crashed alien spaceship...
 RCA, the
Radio Corporation of America was not merely a manufacturer of
radio, television, and phonograph equipment for home entertainment. The company
also made vacuum tubes for all sots of electronic equipment, and produced a weekly
radio broadcast called "Magic Key" on the NBC Blue Network. Sticking to their communications
roots, RCA today markets televisions, microwave ovens, Android-based tablet computers,
DVD / Blu Ray drives, telephones, 2-way radios, radios, clocks, antennas, and many
other devices - with no tubes in sight, not even in their TV displays...
 "Scientists at the University of New Hampshire
are using artificial intelligence to dramatically speed up the search for
new magnetic materials. Their approach has produced a searchable database containing
67,573 magnetic materials, including 25 previously unknown compounds that retain
their magnetism at high temperatures, a key requirement for many real-world applications.
'By accelerating the discovery of sustainable magnetic materials, we can reduce
dependence on rare earth elements, lower the cost of electric vehicles and renewable
energy systems, and strengthen the U.S. manufacturing base,' said Suman Itani, lead
author of the study..."
 Breaking News!
Espresso
Engineering Workbook™ v3.2.2026 has just been released. This makes the 49th
worksheet added. It calculates magnitude, phase, and group delay for Butterworth
and Chebyshev lowpass, highpass, bandpass, and bandstop filters. Outside of the
kilobuck simulators, finding a calculator for phase and group delay is extremely
difficult - believe me, I've searched extensively for years. Espresso Engineering
Workbook™ can be downloaded free of charge. All you need is Excel™ v2007 or newer.
It is provided compliments of my advertisers. Contact me if you would like your
company added to the next release.
 Disneyland opened its gates in Anaheim,
California on July 17, 1955. It was billed as the most high-tech theme park in the
world, with a "wow" factor on par with the World's Fair extravaganzas. One of its
much-ballyhooed features was the "realistic" jungle safari tour with life-like animal
automatons and authentic 3-D jungle sounds. This article, published less than a
year after opening day, highlights some of the equipment and methods used by artists
and engineers to achieve the effects...
 Established in 1990,
dB Control supplies mission-critical,
often sole-source, products worldwide to military organizations, as well as to major
defense contractors and commercial manufacturers. dB Control designs and manufactures
high-power TWT amplifiers, microwave power modules, transmitters, high- and low-voltage
power supplies, and modulators for radar, ECM, and data link applications. Modularity
enables rapid configuration of custom products for a variety of platforms, including
ground-based and high-altitude military manned and unmanned aircraft...
 You will love the irony at the end of this
Carl Kohler technodrama. It appeared in the June 1957 issue of Popular Electronics
magazine. I'm not going to spoil it by even hinting at the conclusion - only that
the story follows the familiar path of the dauntless husband-electronic-hobbyist
taking off on another of his somewhat hair-brained ideas, while "friend-wife" looks
on. Her self-restraint is tested, as usual - although she jabs with some uncharacteristically
harsh zingers this time. Have you noticed how men are expected to be self-deprecating
in situations in order to create humor? The technology here was considered bleed-edge
back in the day. BTW, I fed the husband's humor bait to AI and it came up with some
pretty good responses - like what had been expected by him. AI came up with
a long name for FUNIAC (clearly a play on names like UNIVAC and ENIAC)...
 "The Whistler
and His Dog" is one of those tunes that you have probably heard dozens of times
but never knew the title of it (video at bottom of page).
It is mentioned in this installment of "Mac's Radio Service Shop" from a 1948 edition
of Radio & Television News magazine. Barney is said to have been whistling
it while replacing an output transformer on a receiver-recorder... a wire recorder
at that. The "20 Questions" theme is from the game where the player attempts to
guess the answer by asking a series of questions that narrows the possible results
until only the correct one is left - aka deductive reasoning. BTW, I'll bet "The Syncopated Clock" is another tune you've
heard many times but didn't know the title of it...
 Have you noticed how many wooden utility
poles are
bending under the load of communications cable weight they were never designed
to withstand? Some are ridiculously burdened - and it is not "engineered deflection"
for line tension changes. Power companies want to charge the communications companies
for pole and/or cross bar replacement and/or upgrading, but the FCC just ruled that
pole owners cannot charge the full cost of replacement. That financial deficit,
of course, gets passed on to electric power customers. You wonder why your monthly
bill has skyrocketed in the last few years? That is part of it - along with
us peoples subsidizing wind and solar generation, and paying for free Internet and
cellphones to half the population (including Illlegals). Do you fell violated? I
do.
 Radio-Craft magazine solicited inputs
from its readers for a series of "Radio
WittiQuiz" questions and answers related to radio and electronic, with a stipulation
being that there had to be some aspect of humor included. That meant that some of
the multiple choice answer options needed to be inane. For most of the questions,
the process of elimination is pretty easy, but a couple could cause some head scratching
- especially if you are not really sure of the answer. This group starts at number
28, so obviously preceding issues had questions 1 through 27. At some point I will
probably acquire them and post other Radio WittiQuizzes...
 Having never been a sports aficionado, I
have not spent much money or time at baseball, football, or soccer fields, hockey
rinks, bowling alleys, curling sheets, or basketball courts. When an air show comes
to town, however, I'm there. I'll stand in line for 45 minutes to tour the inside
of a DC-3, B-25, B-17, PBY-5, or just about anything that will admit me. What is
particularly enjoyable is inspecting the radio equipment racks and bays. The sight
and smell (I consider it an aroma) of the old UHF
and VHF sets, recording equipment, power supplies, generators, synchros, and the
associated wiring and connectors is something I never tire of experiencing. I always
imagine the men who operated and maintained everything doing their assigned duties
to keep those wonderful machines flying...
 The
Chronistor, which appeared in a 1958 issue of Popular Electronics magazine,
was a compact elapsed time indicator in the form of a common glass fuse. Powered
by electroplating, it requires roughly 1 mA of DC current to migrate metal
ions from anode to cathode via an electrolyte, resulting in visible cathode deposition
along a glass-printed hour scale. Standard options included 500, 1000, or 2500-hour
ranges, with specials (like a 1-year, 8760-hour version) from Bergen Laboratories.
The article outlines a basic series circuit for AC line operation, comprising a
half-wave rectifier, pilot lamp, and limiting resistor for the Chronostat...
 If
you have kids, you'll probably appreciate these two
comics that appeared in the May 1956 issue of Young Men • Hobbies • Aviation
• Careers magazine. Young Men was a fairly short-lived publication,
having existed for only a couple years around the 1956 timeframe. It was not affiliated
with the Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA), which had its own series of magazines.
Howard McEntee, famed radio control pioneer, was on the staff, and Albert L.
Lewis was editor. Unlike the other aviation magazines of the day, Young Men covered
a broad range of activities and hobbies including model boating and cars, electronics,
chemistry, physics, school, amateur magic tricks, shooting, and more.
 "Google's parent Alphabet has reached a
definitive agreement to
acquire renewable energy developer Intersect Power for $4.75B, a transaction
that signals a structural transformation in how Silicon Valley intends to power
the AI era. By owning a power utility, Google can secure energy for its data centers
directly. This acquisition marks a departure from the industry's decade-long standard
of signing Power Purchase Agreements, where companies contract for energy from third-party
developers. Instead, Google is taking ownership of a 3.6-GW pipeline of late-stage
solar and wind projects, along with 3.1 GWh of battery storage..."
 Well... it was 50 years ago referenced to
the year this story was published in 1937. That makes it 138 years ago referenced
to 2025. The story's point is that half a century had passed already since the confirmation
of existence of electromagnetic waves as proposed by James Clerk Maxwell.
Heinrich Hertz's "Funken-Induktor" (spark inductor) and his "Knochenhauershen
Scheiben" (Karl-Wilhelm Knochenhauer's disk-type capacitors) were key to his ability
to generate, transmit, and receive EM energy. The work originated from attempts
to prove that light was a form of electromagnetic waves...
 Before the advent of companies like Sam's
Technical Publishing information packets, it was often impossible to obtain schematics
and service information from manufacturers unless you were a certified service shop
and/or dealership. In response to many inquiries from Radio-Craft magazine's
readers, publisher Hugo Gernsback queried the
top manufacturers of the day to determine their policies for distributing such
data. Unlike the last couple decades, procuring service information on commercial
products could be very time consuming, and often resulted in not even obtaining
what you needed. Thanks to the Internet being populated with schematics and mechanical
drawings for seemingly everything ever made, we no longer need to call or mail order
for information needed to repair your radio, television, cellphone, lawn mower,
toaster...
 Werbel Microwave began as a consulting firm,
specializing in RF components design, with the ability to rapidly spin low volume
prototypes, and has quickly grown into a major designer and manufacturer with volume
production capacities. Our
WMC-0.5-20-30dB-S is a wideband 30 dB power coupler is a wideband 4-way
in-line power splitter covering 500 MHz to 18 GHz with very good return
loss, low insertion loss, and high isolation performance. The device covers military
bands C through J (upper UHF band, L, S, C, X, Ku, and K bands), delivering much
value to the program. No Worries with Werbel!...
 A lot of the guys I knew from my time in
the U.S. Air Force as an Air Traffic Control Radar Repairman (AFCS 303x1) went to
work for the government or defense contractors after separation. Many were retirees,
so they were (are) collecting military retirement pay on top of really good pay
doing field service work. At this point, probably most of those guys are now doubly-retired,
and collecting Social Security. They're living pretty well these days, probably
with nice homes paid off long ago. 1957, the year this solicitation for
field engineers appeared in Popular Electronics magazine, was right
at the end of the Korean War, and only a decade after World War II. A lot of
new equipment was designed and delivered...
 While working as an electronics technician
at the Oceanic Division of Westinghouse in Annapolis, MD, in the 1980s, I received
a vintage 1941 Crosley model 03CB console style radio for Christmas from Melanie.
It was in poor condition, having spent the previous few decades sitting in a barn
on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Due to the era of manufacture, vacuum tubes rather
than transistors provided all the necessary amplification. One of the engineers
I worked for at Westinghouse (Mr. Jim Wilson, engineer extraordinaire)
was a Ham radio operator and had been from boyhood in Pittsburgh, PA. After learning
of my Crosley, he gave me his
B&K Dyna-Quik Model 650 tube tester for use in restoring the
radio. The Model 650 was a rather high-end portable tube...
 "Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost Mission
2 with the LuSEE-Night radio
telescope aboard will attempt to become the third successful mission to land
there. The moon's far side is the perfect place for such a telescope. The same RF
waves that carried images of Neil Armstrong setting foot on the lunar surface, Roger
Waters's voice, and hundreds of Ned Potter's space and science segments for the
U.S. broadcast networks CBS and ABC interfere with terrestrial radio telescopes.
If your goal is to detect the extremely faint and heavily redshifted signals of
neutral hydrogen from the cosmic Dark Ages, you just can't do it from Earth..."
 In the early days of television, what we
today refer to as cathode ray tubes were called
kinescopes. The kinescope on the receiving end displayed images generated
by a tube called an iconoscope on the transmission end. Kinescopes had round faces
onto which a rectangular picture was electronically drawn. Once manufacturing technology
evolved sufficiently, it became possible to make them rectangular in order to save
on material and to fit a larger picture in a smaller area. The real story as told
in this 1947 Radio News magazine article from my perspective is appreciating the
ingenuity of the manufacturing engineers for an ability to develop machines that
handle very complex operations. They were wonders of electromechanical manipulation.
Oh, and I learned a new word - "lehr"...
|
 • At Age 25,
Wikipedia Refuses to Evolve
• Amazon Leo Asks FCC for
Satellite Launch Extension
• FCC Gives
Amazon OK for 4,500 More Satellites
• China
Memory Producers Race to Exploit Shortage
• U.S.
Manufacturing Sector Returns to Growth
• ARRL
Student Coding Contest $25k Award
 The
RF Cafe Homepage Archive
is a comprehensive collection of every item appearing daily on this website since
2008 - and many from earlier years. Many thousands of pages of unique content have
been added since then.
 Here is an unusual twist in waveform recognition
presented by Radio-Electronics' and Popular Electronics' quizmaster,
Robert Balin. If you happen to be a former analog television repairman, then you
will probably recognize the answers based on your many years of diagnosing faulty
horizontal or vertical
sweep circuits. If not, then you might need to strain the "little gray cells"
a bit, as Agatha Christie's premier sleuth Hercule Poirot might say. The instructions
say to assume that if you choose the horizontal sweep sawtooth to be the errant
signal, then assume the vertical sweep sawtooth is correct, and vice versa. Right
off the bat, waveform 8 is unique enough to easily identify the sweep that would
produce it since only one has two repeating components. Most of the others can be
readily deduced, too, by mentally following the x and y points as the "correct"
sweep...
 Significant advances in electronics - and
all other kinds of technology for that matter - occurred during World War II,
which in conjunction with the U.S. government selling surplus equipment at the end
of that war at very low prices, cause a boom in consumer electronics markets. The
established radio business and the fledgling television markets were abetted by
quickly expanding numbers of
broadcast stations. This chart from early 1948 show the number
of currently licensed AM, FM, and TV stations, with projections out 20 years to
1968. I don't have ..."
 As with my hundreds of previous
engineering and science-themed crossword puzzles, this one for May 3, 2020,
contains only clues and terms associated with engineering, science, physical, astronomy,
mathematics, chemistry, etc., which I have built up over nearly two decades. Many
new words and company names have been added that had not even been created when
I started in the year 2002. You will never find a word taxing your knowledge of
a numbnut soap opera star or the name of some obscure village in the Andes mountains.
You might, however, encounter the name of a movie star like Hedy Lamarr or a geographical
location like Tunguska, Russia, for reasons which, if you don't already know, might
surprise you.
 With more than 1000
custom-built stencils, this has got to be the most comprehensive set of
Visio Stencils
available for RF, analog, and digital system and schematic drawings! Every stencil
symbol has been built to fit proportionally on the included A-, B-, and C-size drawing
page templates (or use your own page if preferred). Components are provided for
system block diagrams, conceptual drawings, schematics, test equipment, racks, and
more. Page templates are provided with a preset scale (changeable) for a good presentation
that can incorporate all provided symbols...
 When this January 1948 issue of Radio
News magazine was published, a mere two and a half years had passed since the
end of World War II, and military planners were already strategizing about
what a future war might look like. Two technologies that had a huge effect on the
previous efforts were the atom bomb and the guided missile; therefore, they were
prominent in discussions. Germany's use of the V-1 Buzz Bomb is a familiar example
of a
guided missile that struck terror in the hearts of populations that experienced
its devastating destructive power. Ditto for the V-2 rocket. The U.S. developed
a few missiles of its own, particularly immediately after WWII when it had the assistance
of Werner von Braun and other notable rocket scientists who worked for the
U.S. space effort after the war...
 The claim of a "non-conducting metal sheet"
as a substrate for drawing electronic circuit traces seemed suspicious, so I did
a search for non-conducting or at least low conductivity metal, and there is no
such thing. The advertisement says components can be soldered directly to the board
without effecting a connection. Even low conductivity metals to which solder will
adhere are good enough electrical conductors to prevent components from being attached
on a common surface without significant conduction (i.e., short circuits) between
them. A pen with conductive ink is used across the surface to create interconnecting
paths. My guess, although I could not locate any information on the company's substrate
fabrication, is that the board had an array of isolated copper pads that would be
bridged by the conductive pen.
Metal Circuit Systems Corporation was...
 The April 1963 edition of Radio-Electronics
magazine had many notable items in its monthly News Briefs feature.
Radio communications was rapidly replacing wired communications was a primary
means of transferring information from point to point. A mere two decades earlier,
troops on the battlefield were unrolling spools of wire over the ground sometimes
for miles to facilitate phone systems at strategic locations. By the time this News
Briefs appeared, international and intercontinental communications radio was the
realm primarily of military, government, and amateur radio operators. A lack of
understanding of the upper atmosphere's physical properties, with their constantly
varying parameters based on solar activity, prevented a commitment to long distance
wireless. The International Geophysical Year (IGY) effort in the late 1950's saw
great leaps of knowledge which were being exploited at a rapid rate in order to
reduce reliance on extreme undersea and overground communications cable. An explosive
demand for TV programming was a big driver...
 When I began reading this piece I wasn't
sure whether it was reporting on interference caused to amateur radio operation
or
interference caused by amateur radio operation. It turns out to be the latter.
Ever since radio operation began in the days of Marconi, unintentional interference
has been a problem. The problem has always been a combination of improper transmitter
and/or receiver filtering. Electromagnetic spectrum regulatory agencies attempt
to assess and address interference through operational band assignments for particular
segments of the spectrum, including how much residual (unintentional) power can
be emitted outside of band or within a defined power mask. Amateur radio operators
are often the first group to be suspected of causing interference, no doubt due
to the "amateur" part of their moniker. In truth, many amateurs are some of the
most knowledgeable and responsible users of the airwaves...
 Frequency crowding has evidently been an
issue since the early days of radio according to this 1930 article in Radio-Craft
magazine. The situation was really bad in the earliest times when unfiltered spark
type transmitters were the norm. Those pioneers could be credited, I suppose, with
being the first users of wideband communications, but it was not because they chose
to do so. Here author Clyde Fitch discusses the debate over whether there really
were such things as sidebands from modulation (yes, it was questionable in the day)
and makes an argument for their existence based on analysis of various types of
modulation. In particular, he predicts the coming popularity of single sideband
receivers with crystal-filtered channels (also a relatively new concept), and the
need for matching SSB transmitters with... wait for it... carrier and sideband suppression.
He also reviews "The Heterodyne Theory..."
 RCA's Numitron was their answer to the Nixie
tube (manufactured by Burroughs Corporation). It was a simpler 7-segment incandescent
display (DR2010) that, with all lines energized, formed the number 8. It worked
off of +3.5 to +5 volts, with each element requiring 24 mA of current. The
number 8 drew 192 mA of current and dissipated 0.672 W at 3.5 volts and
a whopping 0.96 W at 5 volts! RCA marketed a BCD*-to-7-segment display driver
(the CD2501E). The
Numitron was pitched as a sensible alternative to the 7-segment
LED display, but with an element size of 0.35" wide by 0.6" high, there was no real
advantage over the LEDs, which were just entering the electronics market in 1970.
Numitrons do have a certain nostalgic 'cool' factor, though. It is interesting to
note that the author's last name, Wood, is the same as that of Frank Wood, who was
issued...
 News was a bit slow to spread prior to the
Internet. Unless you worked in a newsroom with a ticker machine clacking away all
day heralding breaking headlines from around the world, your access was relegated
to the discretion of media editors and producers. Items like the
passage of radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi on July 20, 1937, due to a heart
attack would surely have been broadcast on radio shows and printed in major newspapers,
but long lead times for magazines meant a three or four month delay for publications
as in this October 1937 issue of Radio-Craft. This story appeared along
with a separate editorial by Hugo Gernsback. Not to tarnish the man's name, but
you might be interested in this article which included mention of Marconi's fascist
political bent, even embracing Mussolini's faction in the 1920s. There is a link
to a New York Times quote where he claimed to be the "first fascist in
the field of radiotelegraphy." Should the world therefore, as is the trendy Cancel
Culture practice, reject and abandon any invention associated...
 Did I ever tell the story about a manager
I had at a major defense electronics firm who thought he could make an
NPN transistor by wiring two diodes in series with the anodes tied together?
He reasoned that since a bipolar junction transistor consisted of three alternating
layers of n-type and p-type silicon, the device could be affected per his scheme.
That was in the mid 1980s when I was still a technician (working diligently on my
BSEE degree at night). Needless to say the engineers who worked under him were not
too impressed with the guy's technical prowess (nor his managerial prowess, as I
remember it). I didn't consider myself qualified at the time to judge him one way
or the other, so the fact that he was a good guy made him OK in my book. This article
from the year I was born reports on the advancements during the first decade of
the transistor era. It was just before Christmas of 1948 that Mssrs. Brattain, Bardeen,
and Shockley announced to the world their universe-changing invention...
 People have been worrying and complaining
about machines and computers taking away jobs from humans ever since Eli Whitney
invented the cotton gin (probably even before then). In this advertisement in a
1946 issue of Radio News magazine, General Electric touts the wonders of
its electronic inspection apparatus that is capable of inspecting and testing
hand grenade fuses at a rate of 4,000 per hour. The job is performed
with a variety of specialty vacuum tube types, including an x-ray generator to produce
metal-penetrating energy and a phototube to detect the resultant image. A thyratron
tube provides 1/10th megavolt pulses to the x-ray tube, and sundry amplifier and
rectifier tubes decide whether the image represents a good fuse...
 Folded dipole antennas, as the name suggests,
are about half the length of a regular dipole, and work just as well for many applications.
I have had one attached to my FM radio receiver for many years and it does a great
job pulling in stations from as far away as Toronto, Canada, and Detroit, Michigan
(from Erie, PA). Receiver sensitivity and oscillator stability has been able to
obviate the need in most cases for super performance antennas in modern receivers,
as evidenced by ear bud wires and even conformal patch antennas in smartphones sufficing
in lieu of a "real" antenna. It is a real tribute to the brilliance of engineers
that cellphones work so well on multiple bands that accommodate frequencies ranging
from 88 MHz (FM), through 900 MHz (GSM), 1.5 GHz (GPS), 2 GHz
(UMTS), and WiFi (2.4 GHz) - all in one compact device with no external antenna...
 Three of the most popular topics for comics
back in the day when these appeared in Radio-Electronics magazine were
stereo system fanatics, the battle between television owners and servicemen, and
the notion that electronics product sales people were a bunch of charlatans. The
comic on page 98 is pretty funny, although it might be considered somewhat unacceptable
by today's easily offended population. Seeing the telephone number with a two-letter
prefix (e.g., Rick and Lucy Ricardo's MUrray Hill5-9975 meant their number was M[6]U[8]5-9975)
reminded me of the webpage I found explaining the system. It mentions that many
users opposed the elimination of the prefixes and going to all numbers, including
two organized groups - the Anti-Digit Dialing League and the
Committee of Ten Million to Oppose All-Number Calling. Coalitions of concerned
citizens for every conceivable issue has been around for a long time...
 I suppose the term "Subminiature"
as it applies to electronics components is as relative as the word "Modern" is in
book titles. They might be accurate at the time of the writing, but passage of time
renders them ambiguous. Subminiature in 1957, when this Radio & TV News magazine
article appeared, meant anything other than full-size vacuum tubes, huge power transformers,
multi-layer wafer switches, and hookup wire larger than 20 AWG. The advent
of peanut tubes, very early versions of transistors and solid state diodes, and
ever-higher operational frequencies permitted component sizes to be shrunk by a
factor of two or more. Rather than using a pistol-style soldering gun or a soldering
iron designed for assembling copper guttering, a precision pencil-type iron could
be used and greasy tools from the garage no longer sufficed for turning screws and
nuts. A lot of the material in this article is still useful for hobbyists and even
electronics professionals in the lab...
 When beginning to read this 1954 Radio-Electronics
magazine article, I almost missed the uniqueness of the author's name:
Henry Farad. Usually something like that appears in an April edition, but this
being March, I figured it was just a clever device used by whomever really wrote
the story. For anyone trying to enter the field of electronics repair in that era,
reading this piece must have been discouraging, and Mr. Farad makes that clear
up front by stating, "He is up against a problem as old as civilization - he hasn't
been able to find a job because he has no experience; he can't get any experience
because he can't find a job!" Profit margins were very low in repair work due to
the usually undeserved reputation of service shops as being rip-off joints. Taking
on an apprentice was a luxury few could afford since the payoff would take so long.
Radio, TV, record players, etc., were not generally serviceable by laymen (except
for swapping out vacuum tubes), and the throw-away mindset was not yet possible
because of how relatively expensive those sets were. Accordingly, you might think
knowledgeable servicemen...
 Glenn Bradford's delve into "Electronics
- at Work" is deep and wide. In this June 1945 issue of Radio News magazine,
he hits on many of the main issues being debated in the mid-1940s regarding what
role electronics would and should play in regrouping society following World War II.
Major advances in mechanics and electronics were made during the war, and a huge
potential workforce for dealing with designing, manufacturing, selling, and servicing
of a vast array of promised appliances and gizmos was "out there" looking for an
opportunity. In spite of that, indecision and reluctance to take risks plagued industries
scurrying to adapt from a (sometimes forced) wartime production mindset back to
a consumer-centric mode. Whereas the government funded conversion to defense products,
it was up to companies to make the transition back. This is a very interesting insight
into the situation. Be prepared for an introduction to many new terms... |
