Acoustic Surface-Wave Devices

"Praetersonic" - now that's a word you don't run up against very often. It is a combination of praeter* (beyond) and sonic (related to sounds), or what more familiarly is called ultrasonic. If fact, praetersonics was the early term given to surface acoustic wave (SAW) piezoelectric devices. Amazingly, even as far back as the early 1970s, SAW filters were being fabricated that worked in the 40 MHz realm. This Popular Electronics article does a really nice job of introducing the basics of SAW and BAW (bulk acoustic wave) technology at the time it was coming into the mainstream. Lots of hurdles still needed to be overcome, like high insertion loss, difficult to control impedances and internal signal reflections, etc. As with many new technologies, pundits cast hopeful prediction...

Television? ... It's a Cinch!

If television was "a chinch," in 1953 as this Radio-Electronic article claims, the world would have had it long before then. Just like looking up the work-out solutions to a physics problem in the back of a textbook, a lot of things look simple and obvious once someone else has already done it. I guess that's not really a fair criticism of this piece since author Aisberg's goal is to assuage some of the doubts and misconceptions a lot of people had about the relatively new technology. 1953 is the year that the NTSC formalized its color TV standard, which, BTW, was careful to accommodate B&W transmissions on the same channels - similar to how AM-FM stereo and stereo FM radio can coexist with monaural (mono) broadcasts. Television, in case you are not aware, began as an electromechanical system with picture frames and shutters, spinning discs, and other Rube Goldberg contraptions...

Stop Pay TV!

The more things change, the more they remain the same. People (including, admittedly, me) don't want to have to pay for any type of media delivery, especially when it arrives via air waves or the Internet. Six months before I was born, a reader of Radio-Electronics magazine wrote to declare his outrage at the fledgling industry of Pay Television. That a viewer would be expected to pay the broadcaster for a show that was being, in his opinion, amply subsidized by advertisers, was an outrageous concept, an unthinkable assault on all that is holy. While his indignation was probably shared by the majority of the television viewing public, evidently the maniacal scheme succeeded. In the 1950s and even through part of the 1970s, television shows typically included about 10-12 minutes of commercials and other non-show segments for each hour of broadcast. Season 1, Episode 1 of Star Trek, for example, ran for 50 minutes; that was in 1966...

New Technology Sparks an Expansion for Germanium Transistors

Whilst reading articles on semiconductor research and development in the era of this 1964 Electronics magazine, it often occurs to me that much of the terminology presented is new to most people in the electronics field, having been just recently coined by those developing the technology. To wit, here author Landress shows diagrams of planar and mesa structures for transistors. We are so familiar by now with those configurations that it hardly seems there was a time when engineers did not speak so matter-of-factly of them. Hole and electron mobilities were terms familiar to a niche group of atomic materials scientists a decade earlier, as were diffusion depth and doping concentrations. As the 1919 electronics practitioner would confabulate upon matters of thermionic emission and getter flashing in vacuum tubes...

RF Cafe Engineering & Science Crossword Puzzle for March 10

Since 2000, I have been creating custom science-themed crossword puzzles for the brain-exercising benefit and pleasure of RF Cafe visitors who are fellow cruciverbalists. The jury is out on whether or not this type of mental challenge helps keep your gray matter from atrophying in old age, but it certainly helps maintain your vocabulary and cognitive skills at all ages. A database of thousands of words has been built up over the years and contains only clues and terms associated with engineering, science, physical, astronomy, mathematics, chemistry, etc. 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 start like Hedy Lamarr or a geographical location like Tunguska, Russia, for reasons which, if you don't already know, might surprise you...

Delco Radio Division of General Motors Employment Ad

I, along with probably most other people my age, habitually associate the brand name of Delco (Delco Electronics, technically) with General Motors (GM) electrical and electronic products such as radios, storage batteries, alternators, and spark plugs. Dayton Engineering Laboratories Co., of Dayton, Ohio, merged with GM's AC spark plug division in 1974 to become AC-Delco. I bought many sets of AC-Delco spark plugs for my cars over the years. Nowadays, GM's electronic products go by the name of ACDelco (no hyphen now). Attempting to research the full provenance of the modern-day AC-Delco is headache-inducing due to sell-offs to Delphi, Aptiv, and other entities. The best I can determine is that the contemporary ACDelco is a brand name for products that might be manufactured by many different companies. This advertisement searching for electrical and mechanical engineers...

Opportunity Awareness: Thoughtful Reflections on Your Future

This 1971 article from Popular Electronics magazine was the twelfth in a long series of features reporting on electronics related college degrees, technical schools, on-the-job training, military training, areas of specialty, career planning and options, current hiring practices and companies doing the hiring, salaries and hourly rates, worker's compensation and insurance, etc. All the issues of importance today were being covered even half a century ago, although the names have been changed for some entities. For instance the state employment bureaus are now referred to as departments of labor and industry; e.g., here in Pennsylvania, the DLI supplies statistics on labor...

1953 Radio-Electronics Tech-Themed Comic

If you look through the hundreds of technology-themed comics that appeared various electronics magazines, many deal with the trials and tribulations of television repair and service. That is because in the introductory era of TVs, people were, understandably, infatuated with being able to not just hear but see what was happening in the broadcast. Radios and phonographs got a lot of coverage as well. Storylines involving a guy on the roof installing or repairing an antenna were considered particularly funny, especially if it depicted someone hanging precariously from a lead-in cable or a ladder rung. This comic addresses the all-too-common situation where sometimes a better picture was obtained using a makeshift antenna than with a bona fide, professionally designed antenna...

Vintage Watkins-Johnson Tech Notes Additions & Updates

Thanks to Chuck U. for providing new Watkins-Johnson (WJ) Tech Notes v10-3 and v15-2, and an improved copy of v5-2. A lot (but not all) of the TNs that I had or other people sent to me are made from B&W copies from old scanners, so the quality is not super good. Chuck's versions appear to be scanned from the originals in color, so they're very good...

Nine of the Latest New Developments from G-E Research

Half a decade after Texas Instruments (Jack Kilby, 1958) and Fairchild Semiconductor (Robert Noyce, 1960) produced the first semiconductor integrated circuits, General Electric must not have been too confident that the newfangled technology was going to take hold. This 2-page spread from a 1964 issue of Electronics magazine, promotes their "Compactron" integrated circuit vacuum tubes. The Compactron is a building block concept where standardized stages of diodes, triodes, pentodes, etc., are encapsulated in a single vacuum tube package with necessary input and output pins for connecting external components. The incentive was smaller volume, lower parts count, lower power supply current, simpler chassis wiring or circuit board layout, and greater ruggedness. One source I found showed the availability in 1962 of 24 distinct Compactron models...

Daylight Saving(s) Time - Again!

Call me obsessive, but the switch to and from DST has bugged me not so much for its existence, but for butthead politicians that won't keep their hands off of it. A few years ago I wrote a piece titled, "A Graphical Look at Daylight Saving(s) Time," to deal with it, and then again last year with, "Daylight Saving(s) Time vs. Standard Time." Research the history of DST and you will see how often Congress has changed the days - always for good reasons, don't you know. In 1958, the year of my birth, DST began on April 27th (vs. March 10th this year), and ended on September 28th (November 3rd this year) - See 1958 Old Farmer's Almanac pages. What else can I say on the matter?

Hitachi Nuvistor Advertisement

According to the somewhat limited unique information available about the "nuvistor" vacuum tube amplifier, it was superior to many glass-encapsulated vacuum tubes. Lower noise figure, smaller size, greater ruggedness, intrinsically shielded, and relatively higher operating frequency were the main marketing standpoint. RCA introduced the nuvistor in 1959, and shortly thereafter GE, started making them, and then by 1964 Hitachi was offering nuvistors. The manufacturing process, where the entire assembly was performed in a vacuum chamber, made nuvistors more expensive than competitor glass tubes. The nuvistor concept might have been big if transistors had not been making such rapid progress in supplanting most vacuum tubes. In fact, nuvistors (a portmanteau of "new" and "transistor") were supposed...

Vector-Circuit Matching Quiz

This vector circuit matching quiz will hurt the brain a little more than most of the ones that were printed in Popular Electronics. In order to score well, it helps to visualize the circuits relative to where they would appear on a Smith Chart. Capacitive impedances lie in the bottom half and have negative phases (-s, -jω). Inductance lie in the upper half and have positive phases (s, jω). The familiar 'ELI the ICE man' mnemonic helps, too. Be sure to pay attention to the color of the vector arrow heads. Example: In a purely inductive circuit like #4, voltage leads current by 90°. Since phase rotation is CCW, you need to look for lettered phase diagram where the white arrowhead (voltage) is 90° ahead of the black arrow head...

Introduction to Solid-State Devices and Power Supplies

These NEETS training modules created by the U.S. Navy appear to have originally come out in 1990s and has been modernized a few times since then, so the information is fairly up to date. You will still find a lot of descriptions of vacuum tubes, but that is because even in 1998 the military still had a lot of legacy equipment that needed to be maintained. This particular module provides the student with an introduction to and history of semiconductor physics. The chapter runs a total of 62 pages so there's a lot of content...

RF Cafe Engineering & Science Crossword Puzzle for March 3

Beginning in 2000, I have created hundreds of custom electronics-themed crossword puzzles for the brain-exercising benefit and pleasure of RF Cafe visitors who are fellow cruciverbalists. The jury is out on whether or not this type of mental challenge helps keep your gray matter from atrophying in old age, but it certainly helps maintain your vocabulary and cognitive skills at all ages. A database of thousands of words has been built up over the years and contains only clues and terms associated with engineering, science, physical, astronomy, mathematics, chemistry, etc. 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 start like Hedy Lamarr or a geographical location like Tunguska, Russia, for reasons which, if you don't already know, might surprise you...