Service Technicians' All-American Award Winners

If you had a father, brother, uncle, grandfather, husband, or neighbor who was an electronics service technician in the days of yore, he might have been mentioned in this 1958 issue of Radio & TV News magazine highlighting General Electric's Service Technicians' All-American Award Winners. Rather than rewarding the independent businessmen for their technical prowess, the company assigned awards based on community services performed, thereby reflecting positively on both GE and the electronics service business as a whole. Each winner received a $500 check, which in 2020 money is the equivalent to about $4,500 in today's economy. The closest thing we have to the radio and television serviceman today is maybe the guys who install broadband cable and satellite dishes. Their level technical knowledge is not required to be anywhere near as deep...

World's Most Accurate Radar

If you do a Google search on the Talos Defense Unit at White Sands Proving Grounds, you have to look really hard to find any mention of Radio Corporation of America (RCA) having had any part of the program. Bendix Corporation built the Talos missile. According to the sparse documentation on the development of the AN/FPS-16 monopulse radar, it was the brainchild of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and built by RCA in Moorestown, NJ. This 1958 Radio & TV News magazine article claims the FPS-16 was developed with a lot of input from Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) of Johns Hopkins University, but the Wikipedia webpage makes no mention of it. The FPS-16 had the highest spatial resolution of its time at 0.15° and 4.5 meters. It operated at 5400-5900 MHz...

Calculation of Potentiometer Linearity and Power Dissipation

Here is yet another example of where the basics in electronics never changes. There are always new people entering into the realm, so even if the subject has been covered countless times already, there is always a need to print it again. Remember that at one time you were a newbie and appreciated seeing beginners' concepts explained. The old-timers of the day probably complained about being tired of seeing the simple stuff re-hashed over and over. Most standard potentiometers (pots) are linear in operation, that is, the resistance between the moveable wiper contact and the overall resistance between the two ends is directly proportional to the percentage of travel along the length of the resistive element (printed or wirewound). One of more popular specialty pots is the logarithmically tapered type that is used in audio circuits...

Cover Story: Modern Ham Shack

World Radio Laboratories (WRL) was a major manufacturer of amateur radio equipment in the middle of the last century. They were famous for high power transmitters like the Globe King models, which looked exactly like the big, black, rack-based units seen in older movies with Ham radio cameos. It took a couple chassis filled with big glowing vacuum tubes to pump out a kilowatt of power. Today's semiconductor-based transmitters do the job in a small fraction of the volume, with higher quality and higher reliability and with usually no periodic maintenance required. The savings in your electric bill is substantial. WRL provided a great service to the amateur radio community that constituted its customer base by encouraging anyone passing through Council Bluffs, Iowa...

Fahnestock Clip Advertisement

You have probably seen Fahnestock clips, but did you know that's what they were called? Me neither, until I first saw the name of them on a page in a MicroMark catalog a while back. When I ran across this advertisement in a 1947 issue of Radio News magazine, it seemed like a good opportunity pass the revelation on. Model train enthusiasts must not use Fahnestock clips as much anymore for wiring their layouts since there are more modern quick-change type terminal connections available. MicroMark does not sell them anymore, but you can still get some from Newark Electronics and other online sellers. Maybe the ones sitting in my parts drawer will one day be worth big $$$ to collectors (just kidding).

Some ABCs of V.H.F. Receiver Design

Author Edward Tilton discusses here the tradeoff between bandwidth and sensitivity in receivers, given that broadband noise power follows bandwidth in a 10 log BW fashion. Pulling in the most distant stations requires very low noise in able to get the SNR as high as possible, which requires the minimum bandwidth possible. Prior to highly stable local oscillators, operating successfully in a narrow bandwidth for voice (phone), and particularly for CW (Morse code), dictated the use of a fixed frequency crystal to keep from having to constantly re-tune the station. Nowadays, of course, what used to be considered a metrology grade oscillator can be bought for tens of dollars...

Television and FM Antennas

This article on the design and use of antennas for television and FM radio was printed in a 1948 issue of Radio-Craft magazine. Equations and charts are provided for calculating element lengths for half-wave antennas, including directors and reflectors. Many types of antennas - dipole, stacked dipole, folded dipole, conical, adjustable "V," cross-element - are discussed regarding siting issues (location and height above the ground), and radiation patterns. It is a pretty good primer for someone new to antennas, and makes a great supplement to the data furnished in study guides for obtaining a Ham radio license...

Fairbanks-Morse Model 81 2-Band 2 V. "Farm" Set Radio Service Data Sheet

Prior to the Rural Electrification Act of 1936, the year this Radio Service Data Sheet appeared in Radio-Craft magazine, commercial electric service was limited primarily to urban and suburban areas. Vast expanses of rural farmland were without electric service and had to rely on individual wind and, where possible, hydro power generators for DC power. The output voltage was of course direct current since it could be stored for later use. Even through the early 1940s many farms and rural households had only the convenience of DC power by virtue of banks of lead-acid batteries. Sears, Roebuck &Co. sold wind-driven electricity generators for farm use to charge batteries in place rather than having to load them onto a wagon and truck them into town for charging. Many farms already had windmills erected to mechanically drive grist mills, saws...

Engineering & Science Crossword Puzzle January 12

As with my hundreds of previous engineering and science-themed crossword puzzles, this one for January 12, 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.

"Frequency" vs. "Amplitude" Modulation

A momentous development that changed the field of radio communications warranted merely a half-page announcement in 1935 when frequency modulation inventor Edwin Armstrong had his article published in Radio-Craft magazine. It indisputably changed the world while causing poor Mr. Armstrong much grief while defending his right to the invention. Spread spectrum modulation / demodulation would be the next big communications advance that began with the frequency hopping (FHSS) scheme dreamed up by Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr and pianist Antheil George during World War II. Direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) followed in the digital age, and since then I do not know of any fundamentally new communications technology in that time...

Radio Astronomy and the Jodrell Bank Radio Telescope

One of the photos in this 1958 Radio & TV News magazine article on the Jodrell Bank radio telescope shows what appears to be the largest multi-conductor cable connector I have ever seen. It looks like a early Photoshopping of a DB-9 connector with a heavy metal back shell. The cable bundle is three to four inches in diameter. Rather than use slip rings to transfer the control, data, and power signals from the base to the steerable 250-foot diameter parabolic dish of the Jodrell Bank radio telescope (now called the Lovell telescope), a single massive cable does the job. The science of radio astronomy was barely three decades old at the time it was built. It was in 1931 that Karl Jansky first determined that radio signals were coming from our Milky Way galaxy. He eventually ended up working for Bell Labs in Homdel, New Jersey, where he built a radio telescope to investigate background noise in the 10-20 meter wavelength band, where Bell planned to use its microwave relay system...

Popular Electronics Editorial - The 1972 IEEE Show

Before there was the annual International Microwave Symposium (IMS) trade show, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' (IEEE) Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S) hosted the show, which was widely known as the MTT-S show. Before that, the event went by a variety of names, including "Intercon," (International Convention and Exposition) as reported in this 1972 issue of Popular Electronics magazine. For the first few decades since its inception in the 1950s, New York City was the venue, often in a hotel. As with tides and solar cycles, enthusiasm and attendance waned and ebbed over the years. 1972 was one of the low years. Per the story, about half the number of people were there compared to two years prior. I could not locate a chart of attendance numbers over the years, nor the numbers to generate my own chart...

The Lincoln Vocational Technical Center - A Partial Autobio

One day in late spring of 1973 I found myself walking around the gymnasium of Annapolis Junior High School (AJHS) trying to decide which courses I would prefer upon beginning tenth grade the following fall. It was one of the final days of ninth grade, which had been by far my least happy year in school. Living in Mayo, Maryland, I and my fellow neighborhood ninth graders should have attended Southern Senior High School (SSHS) in Harwood, Maryland, where our predecessors had gone for ninth grade, but overcrowding caused the Anne Arundel School Board wizards to decide that for at least that year, we would remain at AJHS for another term. Historically, kids from my area went to AJHS only for seventh and eighth grades and then switched to SSHS. Annapolis, being the capital city of Maryland, was significantly more urban than the rural areas to which SSHS type people were accustomed. The clientele was much more aggressive in the big city. Sure, we had our "red neck greaser" rowdies in the southern part of the county, but at least their parents would whip them if they got caught getting into trouble...

Mac's Radio Service Shop: Was Ist Los?

Imagine reading an article from a 1958 magazine that references the schematic for a specific radio manufactured in Germany, and then being able to download a copy of it for free on the Internet. Such is the case with this Mac's Radio Service Shop story entitled, "Was Ist Los?" Mac is describing to his sidekick Barney the difficulty in troubleshooting and repairing a Metz Transformatoren: Babyphon 56 that a serviceman had purchased while stationed overseas. The diagram is of course in German, which requires Mac to pull out a language translation dictionary. The problem was that many words unique to technical jargon were not in it. Additionally, units of measure for the capacitors and inductors were not like U.S. units. Mac noted that many capacitor values were labeled with units of "u," "n," and "p," for "micro," nano," and "pico." He mentions the "micro" prefix for the letter "u," but never calls the "n" and "p" by the now-standard terms...

Engineering & Science Crossword Puzzle for January 5

As with my hundreds of previous engineering and science-themed crossword puzzles, this first one of the new decade, January 5, 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...