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 A lot of RF Cafe visitors might not be familiar
with some of the electronic waveforms presented in this
Oscilloscope Quiz by Popular Electronics magazine's ultimate quizmaster, Robert
Balin. The shapes are recognizable to anyone who has done a lot of design, troubleshooting,
testing, or alignments on analog circuits. Electronics repairmen were intimately
familiar with these - and much more complex - waveforms. Modulation of the z-axis
is especially cool as it varies the intensity of the waveform. I always roll my
eyes when, back in the day, a laboratory or medical facility in movies or on TV
had an oscilloscope display with a Lissajous pattern writhing on the display...
 "SpaceX is putting its longstanding focus
of sending humans to Mars on the backburner to prioritize
establishing a settlement on the Moon, founder Elon Musk said Sunday. The South
Africa-born billionaire's space company has found massive success as a NASA contractor,
but critics have for years panned Musk's Mars colonization plans as overambitious.
The move also puts Musk in alignment with U.S. President Trump's shift away from
Mars. "For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing
city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas
Mars would take 20+ years. Difficulties in reaching Mars include the fact that "it
is only possible to travel to Mars when the planets align every 26 months..."
 Life for the blind has always been fraught
with obstacles that we who can see will never be able to fully appreciate. Society
has come a long way in accommodating the special needs of those with no or severely
reduced eyesight. Recent news stories report of experiments with electronic implants
that use implants set into the eye and couple somehow with the retina to send image
information to the person's brain. While in no way close to being able to be called
sight, it has at least allowed the guy or girl with training to detect and avoid
obstacles based on changes in scenery shading. We are probably a century away from
true bionic vision, incremental improvements will thankfully improve
the lives of our thusly challenged brethren. This article from a 1947 edition of
Radio News reports on efforts made by the New York Institute for the Educations
of the Blind to make amateur radio...
 everythingRF, a long-time supporter of this
website, is now, in addition to publishing e-books, putting out an
e-zine which provides
some insightful content, interesting products and expert interviews within the RF &
Microwave industry. Vol. 4, now available, includes articles on Next Gen Adjustable
Q-Band Gain Equalizers, Earth to Orbit:The Important Role of Antennas in NTN, Benefits
for Phased Array Systems Through SM Components, as well as product features, upcoming
industry events, and more.
Download it now.
 Have you ever heard of a
"globar" resistor? They have been around since the early days
of radio and were used, among other things, to protect vacuum tube heater elements
from burning up due to high inrush current when first turned on. Globars have a
negative temperature coefficient (NTC) of resistance so that, opposite of standard
carbon and metal film type resistors, they exhibit a higher resistance when cold
than when hot. Mac and Barney discuss their use in this episode of "Mac's Radio
Service Shop." You might be more familiar with the name "thermistor" for such devices,
but globars are unique elements in that their construction from non-inductive ceramic
material makes them useful at high power levels and high frequencies. Globar appears
to now be owned by Kanthal (aka Kanthal Globar). Interestingly, Keysight Technologies...
 Louis Garner was the semiconductor guru
for Popular Electronics magazine in the 1960s when he wrote this article
attempting to
demystify the proliferation of over 2,000 transistor types. He devised a "transistor
tree," tracing evolution from the obsolete point-contact transistor - unstable with
high gain but noisy - to advanced designs balancing cost, frequency, power, and
reliability. It covers pnp and npn basics, then details processes: grown-junction
(inexpensive, good high-frequency); meltback diffused (similar, better response);
alloyed-junction (popular for power); surface-barrier family (SB, SBDT, MA, MADT;
excellent high-frequency, low voltage); post-alloy-diffused...
 "Gentlemen,
ei*π
+ 1 = 0 is surely true, it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand
it, and we don't know what it means. But we have proved it, and therefore we know
it must be truth." - Benjamin Peirce
(not to be confused with Captain Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce), 19th century Harvard mathematician.
ei*π
+ 1 = 0 i, BTW, is known as
Euler's identity
- engineers live by it.
 "Scientists have shown that
twisting a crystal at the nanoscale can turn it into a tiny, reversible diode,
hinting at a new era of shape-engineered electronics. Researchers at the RIKEN Center
for Emergent Matter Science, working with collaborators, have created a new technique
for building three-dimensional nanoscale devices directly from single crystals.
The approach uses a focused ion beam instrument to precisely carve materials at
extremely small scales. Using this method, the team shaped tiny helical structures
from a topological magnetic material made of cobalt, tin, and sulfur, known by its
chemical formula Co3Sn2S2..."
 I am constantly amazed when reading stories
about how easily Adolph Hitler rose to power in Germany by encouraging and exploiting
resentment of his countrymen over being forced, among other concessions outlined
in the Treaty of Versailles, to disarm militarily and make reparations for atrocities
committed in World War I. Part of the Nazi (National Socialist) party success
was extensive use of propaganda via print, radio, and the relatively new technology
of television. Government exercised complete control over the mainstream media (i.e.,
not "underground") by dictating content that promoted the proclaimed virtues of
Nazism and the Aryan race and the vices of just about every other form of government
and race. At the height of Hitler's reign of terror during the Third Reich era,
radio and television sets were only permitted to use crystals
tuned to state-sponsored...
 Manmade electrical noise (QRM) and natural
electrical noise (QRN) has been the nemesis of communications
- both wired and wireless - since the first signals were sent. While it is true
that over the last century the amount of "background" noise has increased significantly,
the ability of modern circuits to deal with (reject) it and/or accommodate (error
correction) it has pretty much kept up with the advancement. You might be tempted
to think that "back in the good old days" such problems did not exist, but operators
were plagued by poorly designed and inadequately filtered transmitters as well as
really deficient electrical service installation that spewed noise from transformers,
inadequately grounded transmission lines, lousy connections...
 Please take a few moments to visit the
everythingRF website to see how they can assist you with your
project. everythingRF is a product discovery platform for RF and microwave products
and services. They currently have 354,801 products from more than 2478 companies
across 485 categories in their database and enable engineers to search for them
using their customized parametric search tool. Amplifiers, test equipment, power
couplers and dividers, coaxial connectors, waveguide, antennas, filters, mixers,
power supplies, and everything else. Please visit everythingRF today to see how
they can help you.
 The debate about upgrading electronics service
shop equipment
from vacuum tube to solid-state instruments was raging in the late 1960s, when
this Mac's Service Shop story appeared in Electronics World magazine. Barney
is querying Mac regarding FET-based VOM performance specifications he is considering
to replace a VTVM. He covets the Hewlett-Packard 217A square-wave generator, delivering
clean 1 Hz-10 MHz waves with 5-ns rise time and scope triggering, justifying its
$300-$400 cost for precise scope testing. An electronic counter for 5 Hz-10 MHz
frequencies, with four- or six-digit readouts and line- or crystal-gated accuracy..
 A lot of people like to demean engineers
and scientists for their propensity to want to
conduct experiments and obtain measured, empirical data rather
than "winging it" and being satisfied with "intuitive" knowledge or the contemporarily
popular term "gut." If mankind had not adopted scientific methods and ventured beyond
the "cradle of civilization" on the African continent, we would all still be living
in grass huts, hurling rocks at prey, making clicking sounds for communication,
and foraging for berries. Quantifying and categorizing all things in nature helps
inventors create new and improved implements that help make life better. Early on
it was mostly individuals like Archimedes, Euler, Newton, and Edison who built the
pool of knowledge that fed and evolved into corporations, governments, and universities
doing the vast majority of the work. Bell Laboratories...
 "A new metasurface lets scientists flip
between ultra-stable light vortices, paving the way for tougher, smarter wireless
communication. Scientists have developed a new optical device capable of producing
two different types of vortex-shaped light patterns: electric and magnetic. These
unusual light structures, called
skyrmions, are known for their exceptional stability and resistance to interference.
Because they hold their shape so reliably, they are strong candidates for carrying
information in future wireless communication systems. 'Our device not only generates
more than one vortex pattern in free-space-propagating..."
 You can buy a pretty good metal detector
today for a hundred dollars that will find coins buried many inches deep and larger
metallic items even deeper, and you even get discriminator functions to filter out
unwanted objects like tin cans. They weigh just a couple pounds and can be used
with one arm. Compare that to early
metal detectors that had huge induction coils on a frame so heavy
that shoulder straps were needed just to lug them around. Some models came on wheels
for pushing or pulling like a cart. You could plan to spend a few hundred dollars
(a thousand or more in today's dollars) for one. Even then, they were not as sophisticated
as the $50 models sold in Walmart now. In classic fashion, teen electronics hobbyists
Carl and Jerry use their technical prowess to design and build their own metal detector
and then unintentionally using it to convince...
 This might be one of the earliest printed
instances of Harold A. Wheeler's simplified formulas for the
three basic inductor forms. Wheeler is credited with having devised the first
automatic volume control (AVC) using diode envelope detection. We all use them on
a regular basis, but for most the origin was never known or has long since been
forgotten (I fall into the latter category). I did some research on Wheeler's
inductance formulas a few months ago while working on what is now titled "RF Cafe
Espresso Engineering Workbook™," so it was sort of déjà vu when this blurb appeared
in a 1932 edition of Radio-Craft magazine...
 The leading website for the PCB industry.
PCB Directory is the largest directory of
Printed Circuit Board (PCB)
Manufacturers, Assembly houses, and Design Services on the Internet. We have listed
the leading printed circuit board manufacturers around the world and made them searchable
by their capabilities - Number of laminates used, Board thicknesses supported, Number
of layers supported, Types of substrates (FR-4, Rogers, flexible, rigid), Geographical
location (U.S., China), kinds of services (manufacturing, fabrication, assembly,
prototype), and more. Fast turn-around on quotations for PCB fabrication and assembly.
 Don't let the title fool you. This "Ultrafax" system developed by RCA in the late 1940s was essentially
the first attempt at video on demand, or streaming video. Rather than piping the
signal over cable or local broadcast frequency towers, a microwave link was used.
While initial system equipment space and financial requirements meant only corporations,
universities, and governments could procure an Ultrafax, engineers who developed
the system envisioned an eventual culmination of equivalent systems in every home.
Even at the end of the last century it was still not possible for program providers
to personalize broadcasts to individuals. It wasn't until broadband Internet came
on the scene in the 2000s that such services were possible. Now, a decade later,
people watch any video they want on cellphones while riding in a car...
 Maxwell's inception of the theory of electromagnetic
radiation is compared here to if Christopher Columbus had conceptualized the existence
of America and mapped its features based solely on observations of how the known
oceans and land masses interacted. I have always been amazed at the ability of people
who formulate entirely new theories of science, finance, medicine, etc., and manage
to detail and support their ideas with hard data and mathematics. Einstein did so
with relativity, Dalton did so with atomic structure, Darwin did so with evolution,
Pasteur did so with germ theory; the list is long. There are lots of geniuses out
there, but a relative few change the world...
 "A research team affiliated with UNIST has
introduced a novel, high-performance, and thermally stable polymer-based non-volatile
analog switch. This next-generation device is as
thin and flexible as vinyl, yet capable of withstanding high temperatures. Professor
Myungsoo Kim and his team from the Department of Electrical Engineering at UNIST,
in collaboration with Professor Minju Kim from Dankook University, have developed
this robust, flexible radio-frequency (RF) switch. Such technology could enable
reliable 5G and 6G wireless communication in demanding environments -- such as wearable
devices and the Internet of Things (IoT)..."
 Werbel Microwave began as a consulting firm,
specializing in RF components design, with the ability to rapidly spin low volume
prototypes. Our
WM4PD-0.5-18-S is a wideband 4-way in-line power splitter covering 500 MHz
to 18 GHz with excellent return loss, low insertion loss, and high isolation
performance. The device covers several military radios letter octave bands in one
product, delivering much value to the program. Aluminum enclosure measures 6.25
x 2.98 x 0.50", includes four through-mounting holes, and has durable, stainless
steel SMA female connectors. One device covers the upper UHF band, as well as L,
S, C, X and Ku bands...
 This week's
Wireless Engineering crossword puzzle contains the usual collection
of only words and clues related to RF, microwave, and mm-wave engineering, optics,
mathematics, chemistry, physics, and other technical subjects. As always, this crossword
contains no names of politicians, mountain ranges, exotic foods or plants, movie
stars, or anything of the sort unless it/he/she is related to this puzzle's technology
theme (e.g., Reginald Denny or the Tunguska event in Siberia). The technically inclined
cruciverbalists amongst us will appreciate the effort. Enjoy!
 Providing full solution service is our motto,
not just selling goods. RF &
Connector Technology has persistently pursued a management policy stressing
quality assurance system and technological advancement. From your very first contact,
you will be supported by competent RF specialists; all of them have several years
of field experience in this industry allowing them to suggest a fundamental solution
and troubleshooting approach. Coaxial RF connectors, cable assemblies, antennas,
terminations, attenuators, couplers, dividers, and more. Practically, we put priority
on process inspection at each step of workflow as well as during final inspection
in order to actualize "Zero Defects."
 "Essayons," that's the motto of the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers. It means "Let us try," in French. In 1968, when this
G.I. Engineers editorial appeared in Electronics World magazine, it
noted that about 38,000 engineers, or roughly roughly 6% of the nation's total,
served in the U.S. Armed Forces, far more technically skilled than in World War
II or Korea. Despite surpluses in bachelor's-degree holders, advanced-degree shortages
persisted, with over 15 thousand master's and PhD positions unfilled - by fewer
than 8,500 qualified personnel, forcing underqualified assignments. Utilization
varied: Air Force effectively deployed 14,000 engineers in R&D and civil roles;
Navy specialist programs covered ship, ordnance, aeronautical, and Civil Engineer
Corps (Seabees)...
 Here is a handy-dandy baker's dozen worth
of "kinks," otherwise known as
tricks, shortcuts, or clever ideas, that could prove useful while
working in the lab at work or in your shop at home. One suggestion is to place a
sheet of tracing paper over your schematic while wiring a circuit and draw each
connection as it is completed, rather than mark up the original drawing. That was
definitely good for a time when making a spare copy of a magazine page or assembly
instruction from a kit was not as simple a matter as it is today...
 "Apple has published a patent application
describing a method to detect user gestures on wireless earbuds by measuring changes
in RF antenna impedance, potentially reducing the need for dedicated touch-sensing
hardware. The filing, titled 'Gesture
Detection Based on Antenna Impedance Measurements,' published on January 8,
2026 as US 20260010234, describes using antennas already present for wireless communication
as dual-purpose components that can also detect user input..."
|
 • FCC to
Exempt Amateurs from Foreign Adversary Reporting
• Continuing
Your Professional Education in 2026
• India Reaches
400M 5G Subscribers
in 3 Years
• EIB Backs
Europe's 1st Gallium Production Investment
• 2026 a
Pivotal Year for 6G Standardization
• New
60-Meter Frequencies for Hams
 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.
 1954 was in middle of a time of many transitions
in the electronics world. Vacuum tubes were being replaced by semiconductors, point-to-point
wiring in chassis was giving way to printed circuit boards, FM was overtaking AM
as the preferred radio medium, and color TV was (for those who could afford it)
shoehorning itself into homes across America and the world. This article in
Radio-Electronics magazine has the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
extolling the many virtues of telecommunications. I have not been able to ascertain
whether it is a direct reprinting of an FCC publication or an excerpted section.
At the time, there were
600,000 licensed transmitters including commercial and amateur radio operations.
Interestingly, Industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) equipment is mentioned,
although nothing about an unlicensed band have been allocated yet...
 This entire page has been reworked to make
the denormalization
of prototype lowpass filter component values much easier to understand. I have received
numerous questions about the process over the years, particularly regarding the
swapping of capacitor and inductor values for highpass transformations. Bandpass
and bandstop transformations can be equally confusing. The original page pretty
much regurgitated the kind of presentation made by many textbooks, but this new
format should make amply clear the transformation from normalized lowpass component
values ...
 Diode characteristics and their applications
have not changed fundamentally since this article was published in 1952. Sure, the
die are smaller, power handling and frequency range has increased, package styles
are greatly expanded, and the cost per unit is way down, but if you are looking
for some basic diode information, you will find it here in this 4th installment
of a multi-part series in Radio & Television News magazine. Don't
let the vacuum tubes in schematics scare you off and think that it makes the
story irrelevant for today's circuits. For purposes of illustration substitute a
transistor's collector (or drain) for the tube's plate, a transistor's base (or
gate) for the tube's screen grid, and a transistor's emitter (or source) for the
tube's cathode...
 Mechanical meter movements have been around
since the late 1800s. In 1882 Jacques-Arsène d'Arsonval and Marcel Deprez developed
a meter movement with a stationary permanent magnet and a moving coil of wire which
survives today as the dominant form. Lord Kelvin's (aka William Thompson) galvanometer
preceded d'Arsonval's by a decade or so, but it relied on the Earth's magnetic field
and needed to be properly oriented to work. d'Arsonval's movement incorporated a
permanent magnet instead to improve sensitivity and convenience. I'm not sure d'Arsonval
gets sole billing on the name - why not the Deprez movement? This article in Popular
Electronics magazine from 1960 is as relevant today as it was more than half a century
ago...
 Here is an editorial excerpt from a 1965
issue of Electronics magazine that could be from a contemporary news publication:
"If U. S. manufacturers continue to
abandon their engineering and production for Japanese products, they are headed
for oblivion because they cannot compete with the purely merchandising organizations
such as Sears, Roebuck & Co. and Montgomery Ward which buy Japanese products
too." Of course you could easily substitute South Korea, China, Taiwan, or any other
now-prominent technology company in place of Japan. American economic "experts"
assured us in the 1990s that we no longer needed to manufacture anything; rather,
we would become a service and retail economy. That worked out real well, eh? What
we really became was dependent on the rest of the world for our goods, and were
forced to surrender intellectual property (IP), erstwhile closely guarded national
defense secrets (handing over ICBM guidance systems, high precision CNC machinery,
semiconductor processing equipment, etc.) for the privilege of establishing...
 It has been a while since I saw the
quotient rule for derivatives applied. Probably the last time was in a college
text book, because I'm pretty sure I haven't had the occasion to use it since then
- except maybe back in the days when I was writing my RF Workbench software and
needed to derive closed form solutions for group delay in filters. This 1933 article
from Radio News magazine presented the quotient rule as part of a discussion for
finding the impedance of a load for maximum power transfer. Pure resistances were
used in the example, but the method applies as well to complex impedances...
 Talk about ESD tolerant! Get a load of that
electron beam in the process of
welding computer memory. Of course that isn't silicon - it's magnetic core memory,
the kind with tiny toroids with four extremely small gauge wires running through
them for the read and write operations. If you want a computer memory that will
survive a nuclear EMP, this is your answer. Hook it up to your electron tube computer
and you'll be playing Pong* while all the other survivors are back to tic-tac-toe
with pencil and paper! Also news in this 1967 issue of Electronics World
magazine was final testing of the Tiros weather satellite, a million-volt pulse
generator, and a multi-satellite military satellite payload being launches by the
U.S. Air Force...
 For many years, I have been scanning and
posting schematics & parts lists like this one for the
Crosley Model 56FC tabletop radio, which appeared in a 1947 issue of Radio
News magazine. Often, a description of the radio's operation and detailed tuning
instructions are provided - sort of like a Reader's Digest condensed version
of the Sams Photofact data pack. In this instance, only the schematic and parts
list are provided. When the textual content is also available, I usually OCR it
and post it along with the graphical stuff. There are still many people who restore
and service these vintage radios, and often it can be difficult or impossible to
find schematics and/or tuning information. I keep a running list of all data sheets
to facilitate a search...
 Radio control (R/C) systems operating in
the 2.4 GHz ISM band, using one of or a combination of frequency hopping and
direct sequence spread spectrum scheme, have been in widespread use since the early
2000s. As with any new technology, there was a lot of reluctance to adoption of
the systems based on a few reports (valid or not) of performance issues - primarily
lack of control range where communications between the transmitter (Tx) and receiver
(Rx) with a pilot and aircraft was lost and a crash ensued. Tx power was already
at the FCC-mandated maximum, so manufacturers quickly improved receivers by adding
diversity with a second Rx antenna. The receiver microprocessor continuously monitors
signal integrity from both antennas and uses the best one. It is the same scheme
that was already being used by WiFi routers also operating at 2.4 GHz...
 Servel is not a name that immediately comes
to mind (and probably not at all) when thinking of companies who manufactured refrigerators
or any other household appliances. However, they were rather prominent in the in
the early 1940's when this "Wartime Message" appeared in a 1942 issue of Life
magazine. So, too, was Crosley, a name which lives on today, and they still make
refrigerators (manufactured by Westinghouse). Unique about
Servel refrigerators was that they operated off of natural gas. It might seem
strange that a cooling - even freezing - process can be accomplished via a flame,
but such is the case. In fact, Melanie's parents had a gas-powered refrigerator
and a gas-powered chest freezer at their house on a mountaintop in West Virginia,
where they got free natural gas from a well a gas company operated from their property.
But I digress... The motivation for posting this piece is that Servel was one of
hundreds of American companies that spent some of their hard-earned their advertising
money to promote the sacrificial efforts of fellow citizens (many of whom were former
employees or relatives of current employees). It was a time when major companies
were owned and run by patriotic Americans...
 As with most technologies,
solar cells have come a long way in the last half century. Fabrication
processes and efficiencies have improved significantly, motivated highly in the
last twenty years or so by the global push to replace fossil fuels with other forms
of power*. This article from a 1973 issue of Popular Electronics
magazine is a snapshot of state of the art solar cells at the time. In the
1970s, there were no large scale solar cell arrays that were a critical part of
an electric power grid. Ditto for wind turbines. One of the most significant
uses of solar cells then was for powering satellites that operated near enough
to the sun to generate useable energy (out to about Mars' orbit). Due to the
relatively low output capacity, nuclear power supplies provided electricity for
higher demand nearby loads and for deep space probes. A radioisotope
thermoelectric generator; i.e., nuclear, powered the lunar rovers for Apollo
astronauts. Yep, we left plutonium 238 on the moon...
 Most people today under 30 years old have
probably never seen the mechanics or electronics inside their many personal devices.
Everything is so miniaturized and optimized that if something does go wrong, there
is little chance of the owner repairing it. Instead, the phone, television, stereo,
microwave oven, whatever, gets thrown away and a relatively cheap (compared to paying
for a repair) replacement is purchased (or stolen). Besides, if the item was more
than two years old, it was on the verge of obsolescence anyway. Up until around
the early to mid 1980s you had a fair chance of being able to repair an electronic
circuit if trouble arose because at least with commercial products
printed circuit boards (PCBs) were usually 1- or 2-sided and the components
still had leads protruding from the sides of the packages...
 "The Radio Month" was a regular feature
in Radio-Electronics magazine in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It contained
news items from around the industry and across the world. The entire two pages are
included in the included scan, but a couple items in particular stand out that are
worth mentioning. The first is announcing the soon to be available rectangular cathode
ray tubes (CRT) for television. Until then, the actual CRTs had round faces even
though the displayed image was rectangular. A 4:3 aspect ratio was the standard,
which required the tube diameter to be roughly 25% larger than the horizontal size
of the picture. In fact,
that is how TV display sizes came to be rated by their "diagonal" dimension
rather than the picture width, and the standard stuck even after rectangular tubes
were available. For instance, the 4:3 aspect ratio conveniently produces a diagonal
length of 5 (the 3:4:5 triangle), where the hypotenuse...
 I ran across this full-length video of the
documentary titled, "Nikola Tesla - Master
of Lightning," which was aired by PBS in 2000. It is the most extensive visual
resource of information on Tesla that I have seen. Most people, if they have ever
even heard of Nikola Tesla, associate him with gigantic high voltage generators
making his hair stand on end, but his contributions to the world of electricity
go far beyond that. Aside from the lightning machines, he also developed almost
single-handedly the basic concept of alternating current (AC) power generation,
distribution, and motors. The battle, both personally and corporately, with Thomas
Edison and his proposed direct current (DC) system is epic and tragic. Documentaries
like this one tend to flourish the tale a bit with exaggerations that build sympathy
for the featured good guy du jour...
 As evidenced by this advertisement in a circa
1951 issue of Radio & Television News magazine,
Channel Master has been producing commercial broadcast television and radio
antennas and antenna accessories for a really long time. They are one of the very
few companies still making such items, with RCA being another. A few years ago I
bought a high gain Channel Master VHF-UHF-FM antenna for use with my vintage Alliance
Model U-100 Tenna-Rotor. Both companies still sell remote control (wired) antenna
rotators. Being an ardent over-the-air broadcast adherent, having a good old-fashioned
steerable, multielement antenna is quite nice. I can dial in any TV or FM radio
station within 50 miles, and some from over 100 miles away. I would like to have
a similar setup for AM radio, but the antenna length gets out of hand at 530 to
1,700 MHz (525 to 1,705 MHz including 10 kHz channel spacing)...
 A mere five years had elapsed from the time Echo,
a gas-filled metallized plastic sphere that passively reflected radio signals back
to Earth, was launched and the time that 35 television cameras had been launched
into space. The
Space Race was at a fever pitch. Although the Ruskies beat us in being the first
to launch both an active satellite (Sputnik) and a man (Yuri Gagarin) into space,
America's deep pool of intellectual resources, consisting of both native scientists
and many of the world's top scientists who chose to flourish in freedom here rather
than oppression behind the Iron Curtain, fostered the advantage that in short order
established the U.S. as the leading super power both in space and on terra firma.
TIROS satellites began providing real-time visual data on the Earth's weather in
1960. Not only were cameras transmitting images of the Earth, but a month before
this issue of Electronics World went to press the Mariner spacecraft sent
close-up images of the planet Mercury's surface...
 Like a lot of Americans (and presumably
some Canadians), I was amazed to watch as a
Chinese spy craft as large as a couple school busses was permitted to drift
over the country from Alaska to South Carolina. It was laden with sophisticated
sensors (optical?, radio frequency?, audio?) and communications equipment, powered
by huge PV arrays. A detailed reverse engineering effort of an intact, possibly
functional inspection could determine the system architecture, electronic component
types, software / firmware, mechanics, optics, battery technology, etc., including
where they came from and who built them. A lot of information can be gleaned from
such an investigation. We are just now being informed that the military knew of
the craft from the time it was launched off the coast of China. We are also now
told that Biden* was not apprised of the situation until it had been spotted over
Montana by civilians and photographed with a cellphone. Then, officials said bringing
it down over populated areas was too risky, even though there was ample opportunity
to do so while it was over unpopulated areas in Alaska and Canada. In fact, it could
probably have been brought down over land gradually via controlled deflation rather
than blowing it out of the sky with a Sidewinder missile. The payload equipment
would then have been more readily accessible and intact for inspection. Prior to
learning the balloon was being tracked even before it flew over the U.S., we were
told that NORAD and all other radars missed it...
 For the sake of avid cruciverbalists amongst
us, each week I create a new crossword puzzle that has a theme related to engineering,
mathematics, chemistry, physics, and other technical words. This December 7th
Pearl Harbor Day crossword puzzle has a few words and clues relating to the
surprise attack in 1941. As always, the crossword contains no names of politicians,
mountain ranges, exotic foods or plants, movie stars, or anything of the sort unless
it/he/she is related to this puzzle's technology theme (e.g., Hedy Lamarr or the
Bikini Atoll). The technically inclined cruciverbalists amongst us will appreciate
the effort. Enjoy!!! |
