|
 Knowledge of the
meteorological microburst was a very new concept in 1960 when Radio-Electronics
magazine editor Hugo Gernsback penned this column. However, microbursts were not
formally identified until the 1970s by meteorologist Tetsuya Theodore Fujita, following
his investigation of the 1975 Eastern Air Lines Flight 66 crash. His research defined
them as dangerous, localized downdrafts, leading to improved aviation safety measures
like Doppler radar detection. In his noted fashion, Mr. Gernsback accurately
described the phenomenon and predicted the Doppler radar technology which would
be needed to forewarn pilots of impending danger. Microbursts are most threatening
near the ground where the airplane does not have...
 Start your week our right with a few electronics-themed
comics from these 1960's vintage Radio-Electronics magazines. The one on
page 108 is my favorite - by far the most clever. The artist had no idea that he
was drawing the
world's first e-cigarette, only not in its present-day form. The page 86 comic
invokes memories for just about everyone regarding some dummkopf neighbor or boob
in a car with the stereo volume level cranked way up. We hope they will all someday
go deaf from it, as a form of retribution. I had a neighbor one time who had a massive
stereo outdoor system around his pool, and he blasted the area all weekend long
during the summer. I finally got it under control after I would fire...
 These two puzzlers for the student, theoretician
and practical man, appeared in the October 1966 issue of Radio-Electronics
magazine. A wide variety of difficulty in problems exist. "Double-check your answers
before you say you've solved them," says editor Clark. Readers submitted most of
the "What's
Your EQ?" problems. The magazine paid $10 ($92 in 2025 money) for each one accepted.
"We're especially interested in service stinkers or engineering stumpers on actual
electronic equipment." See the huge list below of others I have posted over the
years...
 "Researchers have achieved a major leap
in quantum computing by simulating
Google's 53-qubit Sycamore circuit using over 1,400 GPUs and groundbreaking
algorithmic techniques. Their efficient tensor network methods and clever 'top-k'
sampling approach drastically reduce the memory and computational load needed for
accurate simulations. These strategies were validated with smaller test circuits
and could shape the future of quantum research, pushing the boundaries of what classical
systems can simulate. Simulating Google's Quantum Circuit..."
 This article on applications for the most
basic of adjustable electronic components - the
potentiometer (aka "pot") - will probably surprise a lot of readers with the
wide variety of configurations in which it can be used to perform much more than
a boring light bulb dimmer or motor speed control. In this 1966 issue of Radio-Electronics
magazine, Mr. F.H. Franz educates us on how to add components around the pot
to perform specialized linear and nonlinear responses, and even some wild curves
when a battery is inserted. Stereo systems have used logarithmic responses in speaker
circuits for more than a century using some of these tricks (audio taper potentiometer)...
 Breaking news from May 1969: Researchers
at Bell Labs and Japan's Kyodo Electronic Labs developed new IC fabrication methods
to cut costs and
shrink transistor sizes by 75%. Bell's collector-diffusion isolation eliminates
masking steps by using a p-type layer for insulation, while base-diffusion isolation
reduces power needs and enables sub-1-nsec switching. Kyodo's technique deposits
insulating polycrystalline silicon oxide, allowing denser circuits. These advances
could double or triple IC yields per silicon wafer. Meanwhile, Hughes Aircraft tested
retractable solar arrays for spacecraft, delivering 1,500 watts when unfurled. In
consumer tech, Motorola introduced a 20-cent audio...
 Amplifier Solutions Corporation (ASC) is
a manufacturer of amplifiers for commercial & military markets. ASC designs
and manufactures hybrid, surface mount flange, open carrier and connectorized amplifiers
for low, medium and high power applications using Gallium Nitride (GaN), Gallium
Arsenide (GaAs) and Silicon (Si) transistor technologies. ASC's thick film designs
operate in the frequency range of 300 kHz to 6 GHz. ASC offers thin film
designs that operate up to 20 GHz. ASC is located in an 8,000 sq.ft. facility
in the town of Telford, PA. We offer excellent customer support and take pride in
the ability to quickly react to evolving system design requirements.
 Finish up your week by considering these
three "What's
Your EQ" circuit challenges that appeared in a 1964 issue of Radio-Electronics
magazine. They were submitted for consideration by readers, and sometimes by staff
writers. The first is yet another form of the Black Box mystery component. Kendall
Collins sort of gives away part of the answer in the problem statement. The second
is a fairly straight-forward switching circuit. You'll get it with no problem. The
third is most challenging. Don't be put off by the presence of a vacuum tube in
the schematic. Mentally replace it with a FET and go from there. Interestingly,
there is a lot of forum chatter about the Dynakit "Stereocator" feature regarding
stereo reception...
 "Japan-based Fujitsu Ltd has reported gallium
nitride (GaN) high-electron-mobility transistors (HEMTs) on free-standing GaN substrates
operating at 2.45 GHz in the industrial, scientific & medical (ISM, 2.4–2.5 GHz)
reserved band with
85.2% power-added efficiency (PAE) and 89.0% drain efficiency (DE) [Toshihiro
Ohki et al, Appl. Phys. Express, p18, p034004, 2025]. The team reports: 'To the
best of our knowledge, our device sets a new record for the highest power-added
efficiency and drain efficiency among discrete GaN HEMTs, highlighting the superior
potential of GaN-on-GaN HEMTs for highly efficient RF power amplifiers..."
 In his 1967 Radio-Electronics magazine
column, editor Forest Belt envisioned the 1970s as a decade of radical electronic
transformation, where homes would become
"total-electronic" environments controlled by advanced technology - from computer-assisted
cooking and video communicators to 3D television, laser communications, and even
sleep-enhancing atmospheric systems. He urged electronics professionals, experimenters,
and service technicians to prepare for this future, emphasizing that innovation
and broad technical expertise would be critical to meeting consumer demands for
ever-newer gadgets and conveniences. Belt warned that technicians who failed to
adapt would be left behind, while those mastering emerging fields like fuel cells
and heatless...
 At Tuskegee, Alabama, March 7, Colonel Frederick
V. H. Kimble, U. S. A., pinned wings on the blouses of five young Negro lieutenants,
members of the first
graduating
class of the Army's first Negro air school. Since last July they had undergone
all the primary and advanced training to which white Army cadets at Randolph and
Kelly fields are subject. Now they are charter members of the Air Force's 99th (all
Negro) Pursuit Squadron, established last summer at a $2,000,000 airdrome near Alabama's
famed Tuskegee Institute and now developing into one of the Army's biggest training
bases...
• 3% 2025 Chip
Capex Growth
• Drink
Coffee Every Day to Reduce Cancer Risk
• Deutsche Telekom
Quantum Internet Record
• Satellite-Hungry
Orange Taps Telesat
• UK Invests
£23M in Telecoms
R&D
 In August 1968, Radio-Electronics
magazine's "News Briefs" reported on RCA's groundbreaking development of liquid
crystal displays (LCDs), demonstrating how an electric field could turn transparent
liquid crystals opaque - a key step toward flat-panel TVs. The article explained
that these displays, just 0.001" thick and requiring minimal power, could be driven
by integrated circuits and were visible even in bright light, unlike traditional
CRTs. That "Radar
Colander" photo looks like an out-of-this-world being - the lady's hairdo that
is, not the metal hemisphere! Additionally, the Supreme Court ruled 7-0 that the
FCC had authority to regulate CATV systems, reversing a lower court decision and
impacting cable operations nationwide...
 This 1964 Radio-Electronics magazine
article details the
operation of common electrical meters - voltmeters, milliammeters, and ohmmeters
- all based on Ohm's law (I = E/R). The core component is the d'Arsonval
movement, a DC-sensitive mechanism that can measure AC when paired with rectifiers.
Voltmeters use multiplier resistors for different ranges, while ohmmeters employ
an internal battery, producing a nonlinear scale. AC measurements rely on rectifiers
to determine RMS voltage (0.707 of peak sine wave), though this method only works
for pure sine waves. The article also explains practical circuits, including protection
features like fuses, and discusses voltmeter sensitivity (ohms/volt), emphasizing
that higher input resistance minimizes measurement errors by reducing circuit loading.
Full-wave rectification improves sensitivity compared to half-wave setups...
 "A team of researchers from Arizona State
University, the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL), Lehigh University, and Louisiana
State University has developed a groundbreaking high-temperature copper alloy with
outstanding thermal stability and mechanical strength. Their study, published in
the journal Science, presents a novel bulk nanocrystalline alloy,
Cu-3Ta-0.5Li, that demonstrates exceptional resistance to grain coarsening and
creep deformation, even at temperatures approaching its melting point. 'Our alloy
design approach mimics the strengthening mechanisms..."
 Three more problems await your attention
here to challenge your
Electronics Quotient (EQ), compliments of the February 1963 issue of Radio-Electronics
magazine. First in line is figuring a way to determine which of five boxes of resistors
contains mismarked components. It's a variation on a fairly common way to test components.
The second is another Black Box; it's a bit simpler than usual. Hint: WWTD? (What
would Thévénin do?). The third is a typical method of wiring a series of switches
so that a device can be turned on or off from any number of locations. I recently
implemented such a wiring job to control basement lights from four doorways - no
big deal. Have fun...
 Dr. Allen Du Mont played a huge role
in making television practical because of the improvements he made to the cathode
ray tube (CRT). Prior to his work, the lifespan of a CRT was measured in tens of
hours, and they were expensive, so their use was limited to special military and
research applications. Du Mont's interest in "wireless" began at an early age,
and he earned his commercial radio operator's license at the age of 14 (in 1915).
He designed and produced oscillographs (i.e., oscilloscopes) that incorporated his
CRTs. His involvement in the television industry was a natural evolution and extension
of the work done in related industries. The DuMont Television Network was formed...
 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.
 These two
electronics-themed comics appeared in a 1966 issue of Radio-Electronics
magazine. The page 40 comic is especially funny, IMHO. The term that best fits this
scenario is "anachronism," which is an object or concept that is out of its proper
historical time period. You'll concur once you see the comic. In 1966, real-world
lasers - as opposed to those found in science fiction - had output powers in the
range of watts or tens of watts. Maybe a hundred watts from a CO2 laser in a laboratory
setting like in the page 93 comic. Still, the concept of a laser powerful enough
to be used as a weapon - capable of vaporizing an enemy - was reality in most people's
minds...
 "DNA
strand displacement circuits are inching closer to becoming cellular machines.
Scientists are finding ways to make these programmable nanodevices stable and functional
inside living cells. If successful, they could revolutionize how we interface with
and control biology at the molecular level. A recent review published in Intelligent
Computing, titled 'From the Test Tube to the Cell: A Homecoming for DNA Computing
Circuits?' outlines major advances in the effort to bring DNA computing circuits
into living cells. The authors describe how dynamic nanodevices powered by DNA strand
displacement reactions could soon perform..."
 everything RF is the Internet's largest
source for mmWave scanners, with helpful search function for your specific needs.
mm-Wave Security Scanners use high-frequency millimeter waves
to create detailed 3D images of objects and identify objects concealed under layers
of clothing. mmWaves can penetrate clothing but not the skin or other dense materials,
making them ideal for detecting hidden objects without revealing detailed body contours,
thus addressing privacy concerns. This makes them ideal as security scanners in
Airports and other venues like stadiums, train stations and other high-traffic venues.
mmWave security scanners from the leading manufacturers are listed here.
 A pair of items from this June 1963
Radio-Electronics magazine "News Briefs" column stands out: "Born 15 years
ago this month were the transistor, June 30, and the long-playing record, June 21."
Hard to imagine being there to reading that back in the day. Also noted was the
world's first IEEE convention, held March 25-28 in New York City. Subjects presented
250 papers at 54 session. This online document discusses the IRE's award recipients
to be honored at that March 1963 meeting. This doc is typical of the extremes corporations
go to in order to specify and control their "brand," in this case the simple IEEE
"kite" logo and text - sheesh! More TV sets were then in use abroad than in the
U.S., reported Television Factbook. At the end of 1961, there were 54 million sets
in foreign countries. By October, 1962, the total was 65 million, as compared to
60 million in the U.S. That, of course, is the sum of all countries other than the
U.S.
 Ask and ye shall receive... at least sometimes.
I posted a request for an article by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, of
2001: A Space Odyssey fame, describing a
geostationary satellite system that was published in the October
1945 edition of Wireless World magazine. Thanks to RF Cafe visitor Terry
W., from the great state of Oklahoma, it is now available for everyone to enjoy.
Clarke was not just a sci-fi writer, but also an educated visionary and card-carrying
member of the British Interplanetary Society, who proposed many technological solutions
to issues of his day. In this instance, the challenge was developing an efficient
means to distribute TV signals across Europe and the world. Clarke's calculations
for the necessary number of repeater towers proved that concept impractical, so
he proposed using modified surplus German V2 rockets to launch Earth-orbiting "artificial
satellites," powered...
 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 333,423 products from more than 2198 companies
across 460 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.
 Here are two more circuit problems for you
from the August 1966 issue of Radio-Electronics magazine. The first is
a fairly familiar tapered resistance network where you are asked to determine the
input resistance of the infinite network. Out of curiosity, I asked Arya, ChatGPT
4.1, Grok 3, and Gemini 2.5 Pro, to calculate the given formula to 75 decimal places.
I received four different answers. All agreed to 33 decimal places, and three
of them agreed to 51 places, then everything fell apart. Once again I warn: Do not
blindly trust the results of AI clients. Verify everything important!!! The other
problem is to determine the output waveform of a duo-diode vacuum tube circuit.
The semiconductor equivalent is a pair of PN junction diodes with the anodes at
the top.
 "It seems AI jobs are here to stay, based
on the latest data from the 2025 AI Index Report. To better understand the current
state of AI, the annual report from Stanford University's
Institute for Human-Centered
Artificial Intelligence (HAI) collects a wide range of information on model
performance, investment, public opinion, and more. Every year, Spectrum summarizes
our top takeaways from the entire report by plucking out a series of charts, but
here we zero in on the technology's effect on the workforce. Much of the report’s
findings about jobs..."
 In the mid 1960s, Radio-Craft magazine
ran a series of articles on "Inventors of Radio." This April 1966 issue featured
Boris Lvovitch Rosing (1869–1933), a Russia-born physicist and pioneer of television
technology. Rosing was born in St. Petersburg, where he studied under Heinrich
Friedrich Emil Lenz and later taught at the Technological Institute. Beginning in
1902, he experimented with cathode-ray tubes for image transmission, developing
the first electronic television device by 1907, which used rotating drums and a
modulated electron beam to produce images. His breakthrough came in 1911 when he
successfully displayed simple images, earning him recognition and awards. Despite
interruptions from World War I and the Russian Revolution, Rosing continued refining
his designs, achieving higher-resolution scans...
 What's the big deal about
multicolor radar, you might ask? Not much today, but in 1955 color
displays were in their infancy. The earliest color cathode ray tubes (CRTs), developed
by John Logie Baird in the early 1940s, used just two phosphor colors (magenta and
cyan), illuminated by two separate electron guns, to produce a limited color display.
Ernest Lawrence came along later in the decade with his tri-color Chromatron CRT,
which had separate red, blue and green phosphor dots deposited in a triangular pattern
across the inner face of the tube. That is the scheme employed in this first multicolor
radar system. It was a major improvement for air traffic controllers since it facilitated...
 Success won in the realm of
space-based communications has been fraught with many failures.
As with most endeavors, it is thanks to the relative few who have sacrificed and
endured against overwhelming odds to bring significant technological advances in
communications to the many. Space presents a particularly difficult venue because
of the harsh deployment and operational environment, and inaccessibility after deployment.
Personal sacrifice has taken the form of depression, financial ruin, lost opportunity
for other endeavors, broken families, sickness, substance abuse, and other maladies
brought on by an obsession with success. Take a good look at the people in these
photos, and remember they are the ones who laid the foundations for the modern world
we take for granted. Such sacrifice has built the modern world...
|
 Electronics has dominated our lives ever
since the first commercially available radios became available in the early twentieth
century. It was a mysterious miracle science then and still is today. Most people
have no understanding of electronics; they just know that life without it is unimaginable.
Fantastic new applications for electronics are continually being introduced to supplement
or replace mechanical devices. Sensing and control are prime applications for electronics
that improve functionality and safety. This promotion of the MIT-Sperry Detonation
Indicator, aka the "Knock-O-Meter,"
is a good example. It appeared in a 1945 issue of Radio-Electronics magazine, near
the end of World War II. Today, such a name invokes chuckles and usually implies
a joke of a product, but not so at the time...
 As with so many aspects of electronics, physics,
economics, medicine (well, maybe not medicine), the basics do not change a whole
lot since first being discovered. If you are a newcomer to the world of electronics
and are trying to come up to speed on
transistor fabrication and operation, even this article that appeared
in a 1958 issue or Radio-Electronics magazine will be useful to you.
Figure 1 reminds me of a situation I witnessed while working as a technician at
Westinghouse Oceanic Division, in Annapolis, Maryland. If you've heard this
before, please indulge me. One of the managers there, who was not a degreed
engineer (although he held the title), one day while in the lab actually
soldered a pair of 1N4148 diodes together back-to-back per Figure 1 and tried
biasing it to function like a transistor. A "real" engineer, whom I greatly
admired, stood watching with his mouth agape as he watched. Before he could
politely explain why the diode pair is not the same as the intimate PN junctions
of an actual transistor...
 This April 1967 edition of Electronics
World featured a handful of articles covering different types of
relays and circuits for controlling them: reed relays, time-delay
relays, stepping relays, mercury-wetted relays, resonant reed relays, operate and
release times, relay coil considerations, and more. Even with the advent of transistor
switching, there are still many uses in modern circuits for electromechanical relays,
so this material should prove useful. Links are provided to the other relay articles...
 QST reader George P. Orphan, KG4DXJ,
wrote in the February 2020 issue's "Letters from Our Members" column about an episode
of the old "Hazel" television show entitled, "Stop Rockin'
Our Reception," where interference on the Baxters' TV set was blamed on the
"shortwave set" operated by a teenager, Bruce, who had recently moved in down the
street. George Baxter, the household's impulsive lawyer father, was convinced enough
that Bruce, a friend of his son, Harold, was responsible that he paid a visit to
the boy's house and spoke to his father about it. Bruce politely informs Mr. B
that unless his television was was manufactured before 1950, it was unlikely that
his operations on the 10-meter band would be causing the interference, but it fell
on deaf ears. Shortly thereafter, a power company investigator was seen walking
around the front yard with a box bearing a loop antenna on the top of it. At the
request of Bruce's father...
 This Bell Telephone Laboratories (aka Bell
Labs) advertisement appearing on the inside back cover of the 1958 issue of
Radio & TV News magazine celebrated the 10th anniversary of their
announcement of the world's first
point contact transfer resistance (transresistance) semiconductor device
- aka the transistor. John Bardeen, William Shockley and Walter Brattain recorded
the monumental event in a lab notebook on December 23, 1947 - a nice Christmas present
for the world! The trio's invention was not like the robust bipolar transistors
used today, or even ten years later in 1958. Rather than employing point-contact
"cat's whisker" metallic probes for making the emitter and collector contacts with
the germanium PN base substrate, commercially viable bipolar transistors use a doping
element diffused into the purified crystal substrate to effect the emitter, base,
and collector regions on a single crystal (with gold contact pads for attaching
external leads)...
 "Short waves," with their ability to support
long distance communications under certain conditions, became a phenomenon in the
late 1920s, and a market developed for converting commercial broadcast receivers
to
short wave receivers. Magazines at the time were full of advertisements
for the devices. The particulars of short waves and the way they propagated in the
upper atmosphere were not yet well understood early on. In fact, the government
considered transmission frequencies above 1.5 MHz (≤200 meters) so useless
that they assigned those bands to amateur radio operators. The presence of an electrically
conductive layer, known as the ionosphere, was not verified until 1927 by Edward
Appleton...
 If it has been a while since you read a story
with terms and phrases like "splinters
of galena," "the day of the tuning coil that stretched from the front bedroom
to the back library; or from the attic to the cellar," and "Ether God," then this
article from the December 1931 edition of QST is for you. Galena, by the
way, is a semiconductor with a bandgap of about 0.4 eV that was used as the
crystal in crystal radio sets. It was used as a point-contact diode along with a
safety pin or similar sharp wire, commonly known as a "cat's whisker." In fact,
the very first transistor developed by Drs. Bardeen, Shockley, and Brattain
used two cat's whisker type contacts on their crystals of germanium ...
 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)...
 Interestingly, the February 1958 article
in Radio & TV News magazine entitled "Report
on the Soviet Earth Satellite" never mentions the craft's name - "Sputnik 1,"
or "Простейший Спутник-1," which in English is "Elementary Satellite 1." Sputnik 1
was, in case your history is a bit fuzzy, the world's first successful artificial
communications satellite. Launched by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)
on October 4, 1957, Sputnik 1 remained operational for about three weeks in
low Earth orbit (284 miles average), during which time radio receiving stations
across the globe anxious tuned in hoping to hear the 20.005 MHz and 40.002 MHz
pulses that alternately repeated continuously in an alternating manner - the first
FSK (frequency-shift keying) from space. Ruskie engineers made the signal frequencies
and periods as stable as possible in order to enable careful frequency and timing...
RF Cascade Workbook is the next phase in the evolution of RF Cafe's long-running
series, RF Cascade Workbook. Chances are you have never used a spreadsheet
quite like this (click
here for screen capture). It is a full-featured RF system cascade parameter
and frequency planner that includes filters and mixers for a mere $45. Built in
MS Excel, using RF Cascade Workbook is a cinch and the format
is entirely customizable. It is significantly easier and faster than using a multi-thousand
dollar simulator when a high level system analysis is all that is needed...
 This
RF Engineering Theme Crossword Puzzle for March 28th has many 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!
 Note the byline in this 1953 Radio-Electronics
magazine article - Juliette Drut (she's on the cover). Not often were articles in electronics
trade magazines penned by a dame or damsel back in the day. For that matter, it's still
pretty rare today... hmmm... but I digress. If you thumb through any electronics magazines
from the middle of the last century, you find that the pages are filled with advertisements
offering courses to train prospects in the field of
television and radio repair, with promises of a potential to make big money.
Both institutional and home-study courses abounded. The costs never appeared,
but hey, with the money a fellow would be making soon, surely the price would be
inconsequential. Interestingly, in those same issues would be articles such as
this one addressing the reality of electronics servicing...
 Probably the biggest news in the March 1944
issue of Radio-Craft magazine's "Monthly Review" feature was the invention
of an extremely sensitive particle mass analyzer by Dr. James Hillier, of Radio
Corporation of America (RCA). Vladimir Zworykin, who you might recognize as a television
pioneer, is in the photo with Dr. Hillier. A related technology, electron microscopy,
was used to image viruses in the blood stream. The National Bureau of Standards,
now called NIST, announced a new
time standard broadcast signal consisting of a precise 2.5 MHz pulsed tone
feature a missing pulse once per minute. This facilitated calibration of frequency
and time standards. There is also an analog simulator built by Westinghouse for
use in designing high voltage power transmission networks where up to 18 separate...
 The
Allen B. Du Mont Laboratories was one of the earliest manufacturers
of television sets for consumer purchase. They were in operation long before committees
like the NTSC were formed to standardize television broadcast signal formats. There
were various methods competing for reproducing the image at the receiver end - including
electromechanical and purely electronic schemes. Regular readers of electronics
magazines like this edition of Radio-Craft followed the evolution of TV
with great, though somewhat guarded, enthusiasm. As with many technologies
that seemed at the time to have mostly commercial and consumer applications, development
during the war years yielded to the needs of victory for the Allied forces. Television
prices were relatively high even in the late 1940s, so most households still did
not have a TV set; radios still ruled in the domestic entertainment realm...
 It has been three or four decades since I
have seen anything about a
Lecher Line, the last time in memory being in a college lab. It might have been
a physics lab, but most probably an EE lab. We used one to measure wavelengths of
signals from an RF generator. The apparatus looked sort of like the one in the Wikipedia
link, only just a little more modern (but not much more, being typical school equipment).
This new patents report from a 1947 issue of Radio-Craft magazine has a
waveguide version of a Lecher Line that supposedly was able to do more precise measurements
of very short wavelengths by providing for detecting the internal wave over multiple
wavelengths instead of just a single half wavelength. It was developed at Bell Telephone
Laboratories...
 For a given semiconductor compound, the maximum
operational speed of a transistor is governed pretty much by its gate thickness.
Capacitance and impurities along with lithography precision and accuracy are the
culprits. Shrinking gate sizes and growing crystals with greater purity has driven
operational speeds upward significantly over the years. An equivalent set of issues
plagued vacuum tube development a century ago. The physical spacing of grid elements
wrt each other as well as to the cathode and plate placed an
upper limit on amplification bandwidth. As always, judicious study of the underlying
causes led to the development of new designs that, along with improved manufacturing
techniques, overcame existing barriers and, also as always, exposed yet a new set
of limiting criteria for conquering...
 Phil Salas, AD5X, published an extensive
review of the
NanoVNA vector network analyzer in the May 2020 issue of the ARRL's QST
magazine. Unfortunately, the article is not available to non-members, but if you
are a member or know someone who is, it would be worth reading. He compared measurements
by the NanoVNA with those obtained using an Array Solutions VNAuhf, which yielded
very favorable results. There are many knock-offs of the NanoVNA available, which
is typical since most of these low-cost, high-performance electronics devices are
built using widely available block-level components that make replication relatively
easy. Variations in the quality of coaxial connectors, internal batteries, switches,
etc., can and often does make a big difference in the quality and ruggedness of
the equipment you buy. Firmware and support software can vary significantly as well.
It's a roll of the dice to some extent...
 By now, engineers and scientists have managed
to replace most vacuum tubes with solid state devices - at least for consumer products.
The one place tubes remain are in microwave oven. Those klystron tubes operate in
the 2.4 GHz band and typically output ranging from about 500 W to 2 kW.
No doubt materials and methods have changed since the 1950s, but fundamentally klystrons
of today are the same as klystrons then. Between this article and Part 1 that
appeared in the April 1952 issue of Radio & Television News
magazine, authors Joseph Racker and Lawrence Perenic provide a very nice
introduction on the topic. According to the Wikipedia entry, the name "klystron"
comes from the Greek verb κλύζω (klyzo) referring to the action of waves
breaking against a shore, and the suffix -τρον ("tron") meaning...
 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...
 It would be more than a decade after the
publishing of this article before the first
direct-to-home satellite television broadcasts would be a reality, so it shows
how long plans were being made for such systems. Rural landscapes are still peppered
with the large vestigial C-band (~4 GHz) satellite dishes, many with faded
eyeballs and other clever (and ugly) artwork on them. Before coaxial cable was strung
beyond suburbs, country dwellers who either could not pull in over-the-air broadcasts
from downtown locations or just wanted more viewing options paid dearly for satellite
service. Equipment and installation costs on early systems could run into the $30k
realm. Today's satellite TV systems use much smaller antennas operating in the Ku
band (~12 GHz), with equipment and installation being free with a 2-year commitment.
C-band DBS (direct broadcast satellite) systems are still available, BTW...
 For some inexplicable reason, the first page
of Part 1 of the "Electric
Space Ships" articles in Radio-Electronics magazine is nowhere to be found.
It is missing from the scanned copy, so I am attempting to get a hard copy on eBay
(December 1950 issue). Until then, here is what is available from the PDF version
on the WorldRadioHistory website (I normally only use my own purchased hard copies).
One RF Cafe visitor wrote when I originally posted Part 2 that he has searched
in vain for the missing portion of Part 1 and thinks there might be some kind
of conspiracy to hide the information - part of the ET/UFO cover-up. Maybe the government
has gone around and ripped page 32 from every issue of the magazine ;-) Otherwise,
note in Figure 2 the "electric wind" affecting the candle flame. This flame-related
phenomenon is likely the principle which Lee deForest exploited in his early radio
signal detectors which, eventually, led to his Audion invention... |
