November 1963 Popular Electronics
Table of Contents
Wax nostalgic about and learn from the history of early electronics. See articles
from
Popular Electronics,
published October 1954 - April 1985. All copyrights are hereby acknowledged.
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I
have to admit to not remembering (or ever knowing) that Radio Corporation
of America (RCA) manufactured electrical test equipment, so seeing this
full-page advertisement in a 1963 edition of Popular Electronics was
a surprise. RCA made a few types of analog multimeter kits, some project
and experimenter kits, and even an oscilloscope kit. A little more thumbing
through other Popular Electronics editions revealed the RCA Institutes,
which was a mail order electronics training program similar to the ITT
Institute and
National
Radio Institute (NRI, from whom I took a course many moons ago). Knowing
that if you wait long enough, just about everything shows up on eBay,
I did a quick check and found a few vintage RCA Institutes items, including
an
RCA Institutes Ham Radio Signal Generator Kit.On a whim,
I looked on eBay for the
10 MHz oscilloscope kit that came with my NRI course, and there
one was, but it had already been built (on left). I remember that the
time base was calibrated by clipping a ceramic capacitor to the probe
and sticking it in the wall receptacle and adjusting for 16.67 ms.
Amplitude calibration was done by measuring a battery voltage with a
voltmeter and adjusting accordingly. Close was good enough at the time.
See all articles from
Popular Electronics.

Posted 1/6/2013
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