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![To Be, Or Not to Be [a Metal] - Do Astrophysicists Know the Difference?: Kirt's Cogitations™ #374 - RF Cafe](miscellany/homepage-archive/2026/images/big-bang-universe-creation-kirt-blattenberger-hp.gif) As a
multi-decade-long amateur astronomer, I have read countless articles written by
astronomers who refer to all elements heavier than helium (#2 on the
periodic table of the elements) as "metals." Ostensibly, the origin stems from
early detection of heavy elements in stars, based on heliographic spectrum
investigations, where iron - being the most abundant stable byproduct of
supernova explosions - was most readily observed. I wondered if the "metals"
nomenclature came from the next heaviest element, lithium (#3 in the periodic
table), being a metal, thereby laying the foundation. Not so, claims AI, since
lithium is very rare overall in the universe, and not readily observed. For
clarity, I also procured the scientific distinction...
 I usually learn something new with each episode
of Mac's Radio Service Shop, but not necessarily related to electronics. Such is
the case this time where after Mac gives Barney a quick lesson in how to determine
a transformer's winding turns ratio when needing to create an impedance match circuit.
He then, while discussing whether "free" repair estimates are truly free or of any
real value at all, he uses the phrase "a horse on you." Maybe it is because I don't frequent bars that
I had never heard that, but after a little research I now know it refers to a bar
dice game called "'Horse." "A horse on you" is when you lose the final round of
a 2-out-of-3 challenge. "A horse apiece" is when you and your opponent each win
one round in a 2-out-of-3...
 "Data centers for AI are turning the world
of power generation on its head. There isn't enough power capacity on the grid to
even come close to how much energy is needed for the number being built. And traditional
transmission and distribution networks aren't efficient enough to take full advantage
of all the power available. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration,
annual transmission and distribution losses average about 5%. The rate is much higher
in some other parts of the world. Hence, hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services,
Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure are investigating every avenue to gain more power
and raise efficiency. The potential virtues of
high-temperature
superconductors..."
 Consumer grade
thermoelectric coolers have been around for so long now that most
people probably assume there is nothing wondrous about the discovery that makes
them possible. I still marvel at the process that allows the application of a current
through physical junction of two dissimilar metals (certain
types) to produce a cooling effect rather than the I2R heating normally associated
with conductors. This article from a scientist at Westinghouse Electric's research
laboratories provides a nice introduction to the subject of thermoelectricity from
both electric current generation based on the application of heat to a dissimilar
metals junction, and the aforementioned cooling effect possible from passing a current...
 FM radio has been in the news fairly frequently
in the last couple years as phone manufacturers and the
National Association of Broadcasters lobby the FCC and politicians
to mandate the inclusion of FM radio capability into every phone manufactured. In
a ploy to exploit the gullibility and egos of said bureaucrats and pols, their primary
argument that FM radio is a "first informer in times of crisis," assuming of course
that people will miss news of "the big one" when and if it occurs. To my knowledge,
successful reception of FM radio on a cellphone requires the listener wear a set
of wired ear buds since the wire from the phone to the ear buds functions as the
antenna. What percentage of cellphone users would bother to carry a set of ear buds?
I, of course, am a huge proponent of...
 Arthur Brach created many
crossword puzzles for Popular Electronics magazine in the 1950s and
1960s. Unlike the hundreds of RF Cafe Crossword Puzzles I designed over more than
two decades, the PE puzzles usually have a few words that are not specifically related
to electronics and/or technology. Still, they are a good source of a brief break
from the day's business. You will need to print out this crossword puzzle to work
it, since it is not interactive. Have fun.
 "Fair
Trade" was a policy established in the post-WWII era in response to what consumer
retail groups considered business-ruining cost cutting by dealers who offered to
sell products at or barely above cost in order to steal profit from other stores.
So-scheming stores planned to make up for the low profit margin with high sales
volumes. Doing so drove a lot of the local competition out of business, leaving
the crafty dirty dealers to later raise prices. Stores that had manufacturer-sanctioned
service shops often got screwed because they were obligated to repair items like
TVs and radios that were bought from another dealer who did not do service work.
Profit margins on repair work - at least from honest shops - were typically very
low, so the owners depended on new product sales...
 Yowza, yowza, yowza
(The Jazz Singer),
QentComm's stock will be rising soon! "Quantum technology is already alive and
well in telecom networks, and although security is the top-of-mind use case, telcos
are also looking at quantum to make networks more resilient and transmit information
more quickly. Comcast announced this week it completed a trial with AMD and Classiq
that leveraged quantum software to find independent backup paths for network sites.
Elsewhere, Deutsche Telekom and Qunnect successfully demonstrated
quantum teleportation over an existing fiber network in Berlin..."
 The persona of Scott Adams' "Dilbert" is
described exactly in the opening sentence of this article in a 1930 edition of
Radio-Craft magazine. It is amazing - if not frustrating - to realize how
long the perception of science-minded people being introverts has been around. Dilbert's
"pointy-haired-boss" is nailed in the second sentence.
Georg von Arco is celebrated here as a major contributor to the
advancement of early radio, particularly wireless telegraphy equipment development.
Interestingly, as brought to my attention by Melanie as she did the text clean-up
after OCRing the magazine page, von Arco worked at the Sayville radio transmission
station on Long Island, New York, where the Telefunken Company's Dr. K.G. Frank
was arrested and interred for the duration of the World War I for sending out
"unneutral messages...
 Lots of Hams still use this tried-and-true
system for
tuning antennas for efficient operation on a variety of bands.
There are plenty of multi-band designs that rely on traps to reactively isolate
portions of the antenna that properly resonate at the desired frequency, but there
is usually a price to be paid in VSWR. Poor VSWR; i.e., higher mismatch loss, can
be overcome with higher transmitter output power, but the real sacrifice for poor
matching is loss of receiving range. The utter simplicity of using an insulated
cord to vary the physical length of the antenna element(s) for tuning is hard to
beat. It could be impractical on a setup where access to the antenna mount is difficult,
but my guess is most people can make good use of it...
 In this 1958 Popular Science magazine
article titled "Russian
Proposes Global TV," Soviet engineer V. Petrov proposed a global TV relay using
three geosynchronous satellites at 35,800 km altitude, launched 120° apart from
the equator at ~6,000 mph to match Earth's 24-hour rotation. Fixed over sites like
the USSR, China, and USA, they would relay signals - uplink on meter waves, downlink
on microwaves - via inter-satellite links, enabling worldwide broadcasts beyond
line-of-sight limits with directional antennas mitigating solar interference. Each
would require 10-kW antenna power, potentially reduced via pulsed transmission (note
digital waveforms in the drawing). This closely mirrored Arthur C. Clarke's 1945
Wireless World article "Extra-Terrestrial Relays," which...
 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 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, and
the need for matching SSB transmitters with... wait for it... carrier and sideband
suppression...
 "A new transceiver developed by electrical
engineers at the University of California, Irvine boosts radio frequencies into
140-gigahertz territory, unlocking data speeds that rival those of physical
fiber-optic cables and laying the groundwork for a transition to 6G and FutureG
data transmission protocols. To create the transceiver, researchers in UC Irvine's
Samueli School of Engineering devised a unique architecture that blends digital
and analog processing. The result is a silicon chip system, comprising both a transmitter
and a receiver, that's capable of processing digital signals significantly faster..."
 Somehow, after being in the RF business
for four decades, I have to admit to not being familiar with the term
"acceptance angle" for antennas. That is after having read scores
of articles on antennas. Maybe I did and just don't remember - embarrassing. Acceptance
angle is mentioned and explained in this article during the description of rhombic
antenna characteristics versus dipoles and multi-element designs. Although the author
focuses on television installations, information provided on signal reflections,
shadowing, ghosting, multipath, etc., is applicable to radio as well...
 Electrolytic capacitors have long been the
components that provide the highest capacitance density factor, that is, they have
the highest capacitance value for a given volume of space occupied. Anyone familiar
with electrolytic capacitors is aware of the polarization indicated on the package
(a marking or unique physical feature), indicating that there is required direction
for hookup; in fact, a backwards connection can lead to an explosive failure. While
physical construction of electrolytic capacitors have evolved over the decades since
this article was published, the fundamental operation has not. It is interesting
to note the reference to capacitors as "condensers," a name still commonly used
with internal combustion engine ignition systems and with some AC motors that use
them at turn-on for providing a starting coil phase shift...
 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...
|
 • Revisiting
the
1996 Telecommunications Act
• China's
BeiDou Satellite (their GPS) Does Emergency Messaging
• How & When Will
Memory Chip Shortage End?
• At Age 25, Wikipedia
Refuses to Evolve
• Amazon Leo Asks FCC for
Satellite Launch Extension
• FCC Gives
Amazon OK for 4,500 More Satellites
 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.
 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...
 The December 13, 1965 issue of Electronics
magazine was largely dedicated to assessing
Japan's status in the electronics industry. Japan, with the help of the United
States, made a remarkable recovery from defeat during World War II to have
become an emerging power in electronics. "Made in Japan" labels on products had
transformed from being the butt of jokes because of pre-war low quality products
to representing assurance of low cost, high functionality and high value products.
It still does to this day. The Japanese people have worked hard to acquire the world's
respect as smart innovators and hard workers, and have been sure to maintain manufacturing
bases within their borders. When you read this article, be prepared for a few dated
terms like a "Kita" diode...
 Homepage
Archives for January 2025. Items on the RF Cafe homepage come and go at a pretty
fast rate. In order to facilitate fast page loading, I keep the size reasonable - under a megabyte (ebay, Amazon, NY Times, etc., are multiple
megabytes). New items are added at the top of the content area, and within a few
days they shift off the bottom. If you recall seeing something on the homepage
but now it is gone, fret not because many years I have maintained
Homepage Archives.
 This
Chart of Radio Symbols would make a nice wall poster for your office, lab, or
Ham shack. It has a nice vintage look to it - because having been scanned from a
1935 edition of Radio-Craft magazine, it is a true vintage relic. Although it would
look great in its gray scale format, importing it into a graphics program and adding
a little color would really jazz it up. A bit of brown would provide an aged sepia
look, or you could go all out and custom color each square (I created one for you).
Click on the image to have the high resolution version display for printing...
 1970 just doesn't seem all that long ago, but holy
moly that is going on half a century! This quiz appeared in Popular Electronics
to test the hobbyist's knowledge of the
whereabouts of some of the major components and products companies. Many of the businesses
have gone defunct, been bought and absorbed by other companies, or if they do still exist,
are in new locations. It will take a real old-timer to score well on this quiz without
resorting to lucky guesses. Still, there are a couple stalwart manufacturers today that
even a newcomer can get right. Most of the Popular Electronics quizzes were
created by Robert P. Balin, but this one was dreamed up by Thomas Haskett...
 Nobody is irreplaceable. That is a common
argument offered in response to an assertion that a particular person is the only
one capable of fulfilling a certain role in business, sports, community, and other
areas. While it is mostly true (except in the case of some personal relationships),
securing the service of that person is capable of filling the figurative shoes of
the contested soul is often difficult or impossible. A more accurate argument might
be that out of the field of people qualified to replace someone in a particular
role, the likelihood of doing so is essentially zero. To my knowledge, nobody ever
uttered any form of that statement regarding me; however, many certainly said it
about
Hugo Gernsback. Except for here on RF Cafe, Mr. Gernsback is not often
mentioned these days, but throughout the first half of the last century, his name
was well known by those with an interest in science, electronics, and science fiction.
This pseudo-eulogy / mini-biography appeared in the October 1967 issue of Radio-Electronics
magazine, which was the last of many publications he founded...
 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)...
 You genius types might not be able to relate
to the rest of us who read articles like this one entitled "Fundamentals
of Color TV: The NTSC System" and are in awe of minds that conjure such things
as the NTSC System and then build, refine, and perfect working hardware. Making
the system backward-compatible with existing black and white (B&W) signals added
to the complexity and cleverness of the solution - akin but more sophisticated than
compatibility of stereo with original mono radio transmissions. When catchy marketing
slogans like the familiar (to old folks) RCA television advertisement claim of "Before
you see the color ... Your ColorTrak System grabs it, aligns it, defines it, sharpens
it, tones it ... and locks the color on track," what it actually means is that a
very smart bunch of engineers and scientists spent a lot of time and money designing...
 Listen to this
story on the RF Cafe Podcast! All three of my hobbies are contained in this
episode of
Carl & Jerry - electronics, astronomy, and airplanes! For as clever as the
two teenagers are, they sure do manage to get themselves into some sticky situations
due to what can only be termed as stupidity. This is not the first time their future
relied on a fairly large number of people being 'out there' who were familiar with
Morse code. Supporting the claim that trends run in cycles, the ignition-type model
engine common in the mid 1950s eventually gave way to glow fuel (a nitro methane
and castor or synthetic oil mix) engines, but nowadays miniature electronic ignition
systems have made model-size gasoline...
 This quiz tests your awareness of the many
mergers
and acquisitions that occurred in the RF, microwave, and analog electronics industries
during 2017. Mr. Raghav Kapur, of the everythingRF website, compiled a good list
of events with a short description of the transactions, so I used it to generate this
10-question quiz. It was made using Google Docs. Winners receive a free subscription
to the RF Cafe website for a full month. Good luck...
 "Morale
Radio" sets were manufactured by many companies and provided to service men
for entertainment and hearing news from back home and around the world. Unsubstantiated
sources claim American companies were paid cost + 15% for each set. Other countries
made similar "Morale Radios" for their troops, or procured sets from elsewhere and
made necessary modifications to suit their format. Not a whole lot of information
can be found about them on the WWW, and finding a photo of one of the German Wehrmacht
radios with the Swastika and eagle on it is darned near impossible, other than the
one shown in this 1945 Radio-Craft magazine article. Part of the reason for the
scarcity is the German people's desire to destroy as much of the Nazi (National
Socialist German Workers' Party) history as possible both to put the horrible era
behind them...
 National Radio News magazine was published
bi-monthly by the folks at the National Radio Institute (NRI). NRI used to be a
major training center for electronics technicians beginning in the early part of
the 20th century. This article was provided for them by the Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) as a synopsis of
radio frequency spectrum allocations at the time. Compare a 1940 spectrum allocation
chart (just a simple description here) to one for 2016 and you will see a remarkable
difference in not just the number of bands, but in the extension of the frequency
range. This link produces the FCC Online Table of Frequency Allocations (July 1,
2022) document, and this one is a more user-friendly equivalent graphical U.S. Frequency
Allocations chart published by the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications
and Information Administration (NTIA) Office of Spectrum Management, using 2016
data, which appears to be the most recent...
 Last week Melanie and I drove down to Greensboro,
North Carolina, to attend our daughter's wedding. The weather was typically hot
there, but not out of the norm. All went well at the small ceremony. Both bride
and groom showed up, as did the minister and necessary witnesses. After the blessed
event was over, we headed back northward to our humble abode in Erie, Pennsylvania.
Our route upon exiting NC is I81 for a few miles in Virginia, then north onto I77,
up to Rt. 19, then I79 all the way home up and down mountains for a few hundred
miles. Our 2011 Jeep Patriot has never had any mechanical issues, but then it only
has 81k miles on it and is kept in the garage. That day, though, the transmission
overheating idiot light illuminated while on I81 - not a particularly hilly stretch.
The outside temperature there was about 80 °F. I had noticed a slightly higher
pitch sound from it while going uphill, but didn't think anything of it until the
light came on. (On-Trak
Automotive Services)...
 Calibrated noise diodes are fairly inexpensive
these days and are widely used for measuring noise figure of systems and for generating
specific signal-to-noise ratios when testing receiver performance. This article
from a 1967 edition of the ARRL's QST magazine describes a method for using
a "hot resistor," aka "monode,"
as a noise reference source. When the temperature (T) and the resistance (R) is
known, a noise power can be calculated with a precision limited by the precision
of the T and R measurements. In this case the tungsten filament of a pilot lamp
is used as the resistor. Interestingly, if you do an Internet search for the term
"monode," the only thing that returns are references to this article. Per the author,
"The term 'monode' is derived from vacuum-tube terminology, a monode being a one-element
vacuum tube..."
 Decades before there were highly sensitive
CMOS-based light sensors and charge-coupled devices (CCDs), light detection for
image capturing was performed by vacuum tubes called
photomultiplier tubes (PMTs). They amplify light by releasing electrons in response
to a detector surface that answers to photon impingement. PMTs are still more sensitive
and of lower noise level than the silicon devices. In fact, super-sensitive elements
for many atom smashers and subterranean neutrino detectors still use photomultiplier
tubes for that reason. My first encounter with a PMT was as part of a video map
rendering system used on the airport surveillance radar (ASR) display that I worked
on in the USAF. Air traffic controllers etched an overlay map of the airport area
on a plate of coated glass. It was placed in a box that swept a light beam in synchronization...
 Here is an electronics
Lamp Brightness Quiz for you to try, compliments of Popular Electronics
magazine. Intuition from experience goes a long way here, but if all else fails
you can work out the details of the rectifier circuits to determine which lamp received
the most current. Keep in mind that the diode symbols are not LEDs; it is the 'A,'
'B,' and 'C' symbols inside circles that are the lamps whose brightnesses are being
considered. LEDs did exist at the time this quiz was created in 1969, but the circuits
would perform differently if in fact LEDs were used for double duty of rectification
and illumination. Good luck...
 Return on investment for advertising is
always a prime consideration for companies, regardless of how wide the perspective
audience or the size of the competition. Luck plays some part in whether a certain
advertising campaign is successful, but as Mac points out in the July 1949 edition
of Radio & Television News magazine, there is great advantage to
measuring the effectiveness of each advertising strategy. Advertising has never
been cheap, especially in venues with a large contingent of followers. In the Internet
age, one of the more popular schemes is 3rd-party pay-per-click ads that are served
by a central distributor (like Google and Bing) based on intelligent algorithms
designed by teams of business and marketing experts. Based on my conversations with
some RF Cafe advertisers who have tried Google's AdWords program, most are not happy
with the results because they experience a low ratio of clicks-to-sales. Those who
report success are people who have expended a lot of effort learning how the system
works and how to exploit it - often after learning the hard way what the wrong way
is. Unlike his fellow radio service and sales shops operators in the story, it is
doubtful many businesses would be willing to share their hard-earned secrets with
competitors...
 With a cover date of August 25, 1945, this
issue of The Saturday Evening Post obviously went to print some time prior
to the dropping of the two nuclear bombs on Japan that ended World War II. Victory
in Japan Day (V-J Day), was August 14, 1945. There is no hint inside the magazine
that the end of the war was nigh. There were, however, plenty of ads by companies
touting their contributions to the war, and even some ads, particularly food ads,
anticipating the end of rationing. Within this edition is also a short quiz entitled,
"How's Your Radio Knowledge?" The author, Captain James F. C.
Hyde, Jr., challenges readers to identify the locations of radio stations just
by looking at their call signs. As is done today, most stations attempt to get
call signs that are relevant to their location... |
