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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