It is no secret that I have
been a long-time fan of the TV show Welcome Back Kotter, which centers around Buchannan High School,
a fictitious Brooklyn, NY, institution of learning, and a gang of affable, low-achiever
Sweathogs. Gabe Kotter, a reformed former Sweathog himself, is now a teacher of
Social Studies at Buchannan. He is the only person able to coax any semblance of
respect or conformance from them. It was a simple, clean show, typical of 1970s
Prime Time television.
In the episode embedded below, titled, "Sweatwork†," (a takeoff
on the 1976 movie "Network"),
produced from my purchased copy of the Welcome Back, Kotter DVD set, is about the Sweathogs running a radio station
in the school. On the blackboard outside of the broadcast studio is a schematic
for a vacuum-tube-based AM transmitter. It looks legit, and includes all the components
to form a basic transmitter, including the audio input. I could not make out the
manufacturer of the transmitter cabinet in the studio.
Freddie "Boom-Boom" Washington
talking to Buchannan HS VP Mr. Woodman
AM Transmitter schematic on blackboard
in background
Season 3, Episode 16, Aired December 22, 1977
† " is a variation of the 1976 movie "Network."
The famous scene in Network is where the broadcast anchor prompts all his viewers
to go to the window and yell ,"'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this
anymore!" Arnold Horshack does his own interpretation of the scene on his radio
broadcast. Strangely, 33 years later the same sentiment exists; it appears we kept
on taking it after all.
RF Cafe began life in 1996 as "RF Tools" in an AOL screen name web space totaling
2 MB. Its primary purpose was to provide me with ready access to commonly needed
formulas and reference material while performing my work as an RF system and circuit
design engineer. The World Wide Web (Internet) was largely an unknown entity at
the time and bandwidth was a scarce commodity. Dial-up modems blazed along at 14.4 kbps
while tying up your telephone line, and a lady's voice announced "You've Got Mail"
when a new message arrived...
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