See Page 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 of the March 2022 homepage archives. Thursday the 31st
 Radio-Electronics magazine editor (and
engineer, inventor, fiction, and non-fiction writer) Hugo Gernsback made an interesting
point in his November 1959 editorial where he points out that it was not until man
"discovered" electromagnetic radiation during laboratory experiments that it was
learned the universe was already teeming with it. Once radio listeners began hearing
unintentional sounds in the broadcasts and investigated the sources. It turned out
that both manmade and natural electromagnetic energy (QRM and QRN, respectively)
was everywhere. Well "shazam," or "surprise, surprise, surprise," as Gomer might
say. Everything from car alternators to vacuum cleaners to the sun to the cosmos
was (is) emitting some sort of electromagnetic signals - from just above DC to way
beyond light frequencies. Note that Mr. Gernsback alludes to a Unified Field
Theory incorporating gravity would surely soon be formulated; however, even in 2022
no such solution is available...
 "Topological
qubits don't exist yet, but the company is convinced they'll scale. So far,
two primary quantum computing technologies have been commercialized. One type of
hardware, called a transmon, involves superconducting wire loops linked to a resonator;
it is used by companies like Google, IBM, and Rigetti. Companies like Quantinuum
and IonQ have instead used individual ions held in light traps. At the moment, both
technologies are in an awkward place. They've clearly been demonstrated to work,
but they need some significant scaling and quality improvements before they can
perform useful computations. It may be a bit surprising to see that Microsoft is
committed to an alternative technology called "topological qubits." This technology
is far enough behind other options that the company just announced it has worked
out the physics to make a qubit. To understand Microsoft's approach better..."
 Often in the letters to the editor section
of ARRL's QST magazine there are lamentations about an overwhelming lack
of technical knowledge and/or proper
etiquette and manners
amongst fellow Hams. One contributor commented, "Today, it's hard to distinguish
a radio amateur from a CB operator." DX operation (long distance) seems to be the
most affected aspect, although the problem is fairly widespread. Most writers blame
the problem on the ease with which a license may be obtained these days. They say
ever since a requirement to demonstrate proficiency in Morse code was removed, the
quality of operators has plummeted (my license was earned in the sans code test
era, so that makes me one of the lesser beings). That may be so, but I propose the
problem is much deeper - it is societal. Every generation whines about how crass
and disrespectful the younger generation is, so I suspect that has a lot to do with
the letter writers' observations. Beginning in the 1960s kids were taught to "question
authority," and to "turn on, tune in, drop out." Disrespect your parents, teachers,
and law enforcement...
 If
you have visited the ARRL website since last Friday
(3/25), it has been down for maintenance and was supposed to be back up by now,
but the page shown in this thumbnail image is still being presented. It says in
part: "ARRL Update [Tuesday 3/29/2022 @ 2100 UTC]. The ARRL website is offline as
we continue to complete a conversion to a new membership management system. Once
the integration is completed, the website will have a new home page to support the
new membership system ... While we're working, you can still email us (members@arrl.org)
with your questions or visit our Facebook page (www.facebook.com/ARRL.org) to read
the latest ham radio news. Many of our services will not be affected, you can still
access and enjoy the following during this time." BTW,
if you want to view content prior to the upgrade process, try the
Archive.org website.
 This Radio Service Data Sheet covers the
Zenith Farm Model 6V 27, 6-tube superheterodyne receiver. It was published in
a 1936 issue of Radio-Craft magazine. Of particular interest here is an
included wind-powered electricity generator meant to supply power in a rural location
that was not yet serviced by electrical utility lines. The Rural Electrification
Act had been signed into law a year earlier, but many years would pass before a
majority of remote farms received power lines. Most - if not all - electronics servicemen
had subscriptions to these magazines because they were a ready source of not just
these service sheets, but because of the extensive articles offering advice on servicing
radios and televisions. In fact, many electronics manufacturers had a policy of
supplying service data only to bona fide shops. A large list is included at the
bottom of the page of similar documents from vintage receiver schematics...
 New Scheme rotates
all Banners in all locations on the page! RF Cafe typically receives 8,000-15,000
website visits each weekday.
RF Cafe is a favorite
of engineers, technicians, hobbyists, and students all over the world. With more
than 12,000 pages in the Google search index, RF Cafe returns in favorable
positions on many types of key searches, both for text and images. New content is
added on a daily basis, which keeps the major search engines interested enough to
spider it multiple times each day. Items added on the homepage often can be found
in a Google search within a few hours of being posted. I also re-broadcast homepage
items on LinkedIn. If you need your company news to be seen, RF Cafe is the
place to be.
 Innovative Power Products (IPP) has over
35 years of experience designing & manufacturing RF & microwave passive
components. Their high power, broadband
couplers, combiners, resistors, baluns, terminations
and attenuators are fabricated using the latest materials and design tools available,
resulting in unrivaled product performance. Applications in military, medical, industrial
and commercial markets are serviced around the world. Products listed on website
link to detailed mechanical drawings that contain electrical specifications as well
as performance data. Please take a couple minutes to visit their website and see
how IPP can help you today.
Wednesday the 30th
 My favorite of this collection of
vintage electronics-themed comics is the one from page 186. Watching someone
involuntarily jump from being pranked is great fun, and I'll admit to being easily
spooked by such actions. Stop me if I've told this story before, but back in my
electrician days in the 1970s (before enlisting in the USAF) we were always trying
to make each other jump from thinking something happened to cause a spark or some
sort of electrical noise. If you've ever heard the sound a screwdriver makes when
accidently bridging the main service bus and ground of a circuit breaker panel,
then you know it's not always the loud "buzz" you hear when a small arc is occurring.
It sounds like a hammer slammed against the wall (trust me, I know). One of the
things we liked to do, especially to new guy, was while he was installing a switch
or receptacle into a wall box was to go on the other side of the wall and bang on
it with a hand or pair of lineman's pliers (in a manner that wouldn't harm the wall,
of course). The poor sap often would yell and fall backwards...
 The latest edition of Microwave Journal
features articles on breakthrough antenna technology. One by ED2 entitled "A
Disruptive Approach to mmWave for Wireless Telecom Applications" was particularly
interesting, IMO. It describes a type of polyrod dielectric waveguide antenna which,
being fed by orthogonal signals, can emit waves of various polarizations, over a
wide bandwidth, and can be steered individually in a manner that would otherwise
require a multielement
 phased array. It is an interesting read
as the writer describes the trial and error path to success for a cost-effective
antenna. Whilst exploring the ED2 website I ran across this "Barrel Cactus" antenna
- very fitting for a company based in Arizona!
 "We are standing on the threshold of
the
Age of Television!" "Television will enliven and broaden your life more than
you can now appreciate. It will become part of your daily life just as radio is
today." "The best evidence that the public thinks well of television is the universal
response that comes from those who have a chance to see it." "Broadcast television
which will add a new dimension to home entertainment and will provide one of the
most powerful mass advertising media ever developed." So proclaimed spokesmen for
Dumont, Farnsworth, Philco, and General Electric, respectively, per this 1945 issue
of Radio News magazine 1945. GE clearly had its future pegged on the real revenue
potential of any mass media: advertising dollars. I wrote recently of the near doubling
of time allocated to each broadcast hour for commercials today compared to the in
the 1960s. Companies reportedly paid $7 million for a 30-second spot for Super Bowl
LVI this year...
 ABI Research recently published a white
paper entitled "70
Technology Trends That Will - and Will Not - Shape 2022." Per its opening statement:
"The year 2021 was a tumultuous one full of challenges. It is clear that 2022 will
continue along that vein and perhaps see some of the trends of 2021 become further
exacerbated. The ABI Research team of analysts has taken a position on some of the
most telling trends that they expect to happen in 2022 and those that they don’t
expect to materialize, despite the hype, column inches, and mass media focus ...
Supply chain issues look set to continue, 5G will continue to struggle in the enterprise
sector and won’t be seen on the production line, UWB will start to bring precise
location to the fore, and the Chinese vendor community will retain its stranglehold
on the IoT module market. These are among the 35 predictions of what will happen
and 35 predictions of what will not happen..." The link provided above should go
to the PDF file w/o needing to register. If not,
try here.
 The advent of
metal-encapsulated vacuum tubes was supposed to be the death knell for traditional
glass tubes. This 1935 article from Radio-Craft spelled out the many virtues of
"metal" tube and how in short order their superiority would obviate the need - even
desire - for "glass" tubes. I'll let you read the article for the details, but want
to make note of an evidently archaic term used that could potentially be really
popular in today's manufacturing world if duly resurrected - "quantiquality" (aka
"quanti-quality" or "quanti quality"). The connotation is a process of high quantity
in conjunction with high quality. The only references I could easily find to quantiquality
was from late-19th-century newspaper archives. If sometime within the next few years
you start seeing some form of quantiquality appear in marketing copy and scholarly
papers, remember that you heard it here first...
 It was a lot of work, but I finally finished
a version of the "RF & Electronics Schematic & Block Diagram Symbols" that
works well with Microsoft Office™ programs Word™, Excel™, and Power Point™.
This is an equivalent of the extensive set of amplifier, mixer, filter, switch,
connector, waveguide, digital, analog, antenna, and other commonly used symbols
for system block diagrams and schematics created for Visio™. Each of the 1,000 or
so symbols was exported individually from Visio in the EMF file format, then imported
into Word on a Drawing Canvas. The EMF format allows an image to be scaled up or
down without becoming pixelated, so all the shapes can be resized in a document
and still look good. The imported symbols can also be UnGrouped into their original
constituent parts for editing. Check them out!
 Since 2003, Bittele Electronics has consistently
provided low-volume, electronic contract manufacturing (ECM) and turnkey PCB assembly
services. It specializes in board level turnkey
PCB assembly
for design engineers needing low volume or prototype multi-layer printed circuit
boards. Free Passive Components: Bittele
Electronics is taking one further step in its commitment of offering the best service
to clients of its PCB assembly business. Bittele is now offering common passive
components to its clients FREE of Charge.
Tuesday the 29th
 I'm not too proud or vain to admit that
until I saw this advertisement in a 1946 issue of Radio News magazine,
I did not know (or don't remember knowing) that "Amphenol" is a compact form of
the
American Phenolic Corporation. Phenol formaldehyde is the technical name for
phenolic. Bakelite, the trade name for polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride,
is probably the most familiar form of phenolic since it was used in many types of
electronics for both enclosures and internal component boards and the components
mounted on them, connectors, and more. Modern plastics, fiberglass, and resin compounds
have replaced most or all phenolic components. This particular promotion is specifically
directed toward amateur radio operators (aka Hams), who composed a fairly large
fraction of the magazine's audience. BTW, Amphenol is one of the diminishingly small
number of American companies still around going by their original name. Even more
rare is that it appears to still be a U.S.-based concern...
 "Wireless sensors can monitor how temperature,
humidity or other environmental conditions vary across large swaths of land, such
as farms or forests. These tools could provide unique insights for a variety of
applications, including digital agriculture and monitoring climate change. One problem,
however, is that it is currently time-consuming and expensive to physically place
hundreds of sensors across a large area. Inspired by how dandelions use the wind
to distribute their seeds, a University of Washington team has developed a
tiny sensor-carrying device that can be blown by the wind as it tumbles toward
the ground. This system is about 30 times as heavy as a 1 milligram dandelion seed
but can still travel up to 100 meters in a moderate breeze, about the length of
a football field, from where it was released by a drone. Once on the ground, the
device, which can hold at least four sensors, uses solar panels to power its onboard
electronics and can share sensor data up to 60 meters away..."
 Considering that not much more than a year
before this article was written in 1950 for Radio & Television News
magazine that the transistor had been invented, it is impressive that already Raytheon
was producing a commercially available
CK703 "crystal triode." That nomenclature was a natural extension of the preceding
crystal diode already being widely adapted in circuit design. If you have wondered
how the transistor schematic symbol came to be as it is, you will learn why here
where the emitter and collector symbols actually both have arrows on the ends that
contact the base, indicating the "point contact" physical arrangement of the semiconductor
junctions. Shortly thereafter the arrow on the collector port was eliminated, primarily,
I suppose to avoid confusion when the E, B, and C labels are not present...
 Rohde & Schwarz hereby cordially invites
you to their next webinar, "Off
to New Shores: Requirements of Modern HF Wideband BLOS Communications for Shore
Stations." This webinar follows on from the last one, "HF in a nutshell," from
January 2022. In this session we will reveal the secret that we have already hinted
at the end. The new webinar highlights the requirements of high-performance HF wideband
technology for modern BLOS communication. Rohde & Schwarz experts will focus
on shore stations and consider their typically exposed location on the coast and
in the mountains. They will explain, how the innovative technology from Rohde &
Schwarz in the new HF high-power transmitter ensures reliable and robust BLOS communications
with maximum availability and minimum total cost of ownership (TCO). This overcomes
the challenges of the currently deployed generation of high-power transmitters...
 Paul Huntsinger wrote a nice introductory
article on
amplitude
modulation (AM) in a 1931 edition of the ARRL's QST magazine. At the
time, frequency modulation (FM) was still a laboratory curiosity, and many "experts"
believed that FM would not provide any advantage over AM broadcasting. You might
be tempted to think that sources of electrical noise that would interfere with AM
were less at the time, thus negating the need for noise-immune FM, but the fact
is by 1931 there was a lot of static caused by brushed motors, lousy automobile
ignition systems, and arcing transmission lines, along with natural sources like
lightning. Figures 6, 7, and 8 were missing in the original article, but fortunately
I was able to get them from the next month's issue of QST...
 With more than 1000
custom-built stencils, this has got to be the most comprehensive set of
Visio Stencils available for RF, analog, and digital system and schematic
drawings! Every stencil symbol has been built to fit proportionally on the included
A-, B-, and C-size drawing page templates (or use your own page if preferred). Components
are provided for system block diagrams, conceptual drawings, schematics, test equipment,
racks (EIA 19", ETSI 21"), and more. Test equipment and racks are built at a 1:1
scale so that measurements can be made directly using Visio built-in dimensioning
objects. Page templates are provided with a preset scale (changeable) for a good
presentation that can incorporate all provided symbols...
 Windfreak Technologies designs, manufactures,
tests and sells high value USB powered and controlled radio frequency products
such as RF signal generators, RF synthesizers, RF power detectors, mixers, up /
downconverters. Since the conception of WFT, we have introduced products that have
been purchased by a wide range of customers, from hobbyists to education facilities
to government agencies. Worldwide customers include Europe, Australia, and Asia.
Please contact Windfreak today to learn how they might help you with your current
project.
These archive pages are provided in order to make it easier for you to find items
that you remember seeing on the RF Cafe homepage. Of course probably the easiest
way to find anything on the website is to use the "Search
RF Cafe" box at the top of every page.
About RF Cafe.
Homepage Archive Pages
2024:
Jan |
Feb |
Mar |
Apr |
May |
Jun |
Jul |
Aug |
Sep |
Oct |
Nov |
Dec
2023:
Jan |
Feb |
Mar |
Apr |
May |
Jun |
Jul |
Aug |
Sep |
Oct |
Nov |
Dec
2022:
Jan |
Feb |
Mar |
Apr |
May |
Jun |
Jul |
Aug |
Sep |
Oct |
Nov |
Dec
2021:
Jan |
Feb |
Mar |
Apr |
May |
Jun |
Jul |
Aug |
Sep |
Oct |
Nov |
Dec
2020:
Jan |
Feb |
Mar |
Apr |
May |
Jun |
Jul |
Aug |
Sep |
Oct |
Nov |
Dec
2019:
Jan |
Feb |
Mar |
Apr |
May |
Jun |
Jul |
Aug |
Sep |
Oct |
Nov |
Dec
2018:
Jan |
Feb |
Mar |
Apr |
May |
Jun |
Jul |
Aug |
Sep |
Oct |
Nov |
Dec
2017:
Jan |
Feb |
Mar |
Apr |
May |
Jun |
Jul |
Aug |
Sep |
Oct |
Nov |
Dec
2016:
Jan |
Feb |
Mar |
Apr |
May |
Jun |
Jul |
Aug |
Sep |
Oct |
Nov |
Dec
2015:
Jan |
Feb |
Mar |
Apr |
May |
Jun |
Jul |
Aug |
Sep |
Oct |
Nov |
Dec
2014:
Jan |
Feb |
Mar |
Apr |
May |
Jun |
Jul |
Aug |
Sep |
Oct |
Nov |
Dec
2013:
Jan |
Feb |
Mar |
Apr |
May |
Jun |
Jul |
Aug |
Sep |
Oct |
Nov |
Dec
2012:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 (no archives before 2012)
- Christmas-themed
items
|
