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 Exodus Advanced Communications, is a multinational
RF communication equipment and engineering service company serving both commercial
and government entities and their affiliates worldwide. We are pleased to announce
model
AMP2074P-LC-8KW, a pulse amplifier designed for Pulse/HIRF, EMC/EMI Mil-Std
461/464 and Radar applications. Providing Superb Pulse Fidelity 1.0-2.5 GHz,
10 kW Typical and up to 100 μsec pulse widths. Duty cycles to 6% with
a minimum 69 dB gain. Available monitoring parameters for forward/reflected
power in watts & dBm, VSWR, voltage, current, temperature sensing for outstanding
reliability and ruggedness...
 In August of 1940, issue No. 24 of
the Radio Trade Digest had a couple major historical announcements. The first is
"F.C.C.
Authorizes Commercial F.M.," which assigned 40 UHF (42 - 50 MHz band) commercial
broadcast channels 5 non-commercial channels. Frequencies were changed to 88 - 108 MHz
in 1946. The second major announcement was that Philco (founded in 1892 as Helios
Electric Company, then changed to the Philadelphia Storage Battery Company in 1906)
had become a publically traded company. It required private stock holders to convert
and re-value their holdings to make some of them available for public sale, which
or course they voted for. I don't know how IPOs (initial public offerings) worked
back then...
 Have you heard of Douglas McDonald Perham
and his
Cavalcade of Electronics? Mr. Perham, born on May 22, 1885, in Duarte,
California, was a trailblazer in the development of early radio and electronic technologies.
His life and work not only advanced the fields of communication and electronics
but also laid the foundation for preserving the history of these transformative
technologies. Growing up in Southern California during the late 19th century, Perham
developed an early fascination with electricity and mechanics. This passion led
him to pursue studies in electrical systems during a period when wireless communication
was emerging as a revolutionary...
 A few years ago, one of America's big-city
mayors made the proclamation, "We're not going to make America great again. It was
never that great." There has been a big push in the last decade to not only erase
the significant accomplishments and sacrifices of America's and Europe's past, but
to vilify those people and institutions that make up that past. Purging the records
and rewriting history is a tried and true method of assuring few have easy access
to archival material documenting the
accomplishments of the nation's past. Along with desiring to provide useful
and interesting material to people seeking technical and historical information,
my motivation is also to keep in peoples' minds the facts of our heritage and who
it was that built the foundations of most of the modern world. To that end, I give
you this advertisement from the inestimable Bell Labs...
 "Taiwan's coast guard believes that a Chinese
freighter
severed a telecom cable off the island's northern coastline last week, and analysts
have flagged the possibility of a gray-zone attack - the same subsea security concern
that Baltic nations have wrestled with over the past year. On Friday at about 1240
hours, Chungwha Telecom notified Taiwan's Coast Guard Administration (CGA) that
a subsea communications cable had been severed just off the coast of Keelung. The
CGA sent a patrol boat to intercept the Hong Kong-owned freighter Shunxin-39, which
was just off the coast of Yehliu. The CGA ordered the freighter to reverse course..."
 Werbel Microwave's model
WM3PD-2-18-S is a wideband 3-way in-line power splitter covering a continuous
bandwidth of 2 to 18 GHz in a compact enclosure measuring 2.25 x 1.00 x 0.38 inches.
The device is RoHS compliant. A proven product in regular production since 2016.
This is a "true" three-way split; not an internally terminated 4-way, with excellent
insertion loss and amplitude balance. This is inherently advantageous over a terminated
4-way because you will save a nominal 1.2 dB of insertion loss and prevent
unnecessary heating within the master enclosure...
 It's always hard getting back into the swing
of the workaday routine after a long holiday week like Christmas through New Year's
Day. Now that you've finished trading stories with workmates about what you did
- or did not - do, take one last moment to lift your spirits by looking at these
electronics-themed
comics from vintage issues of Electronics World magazine. I particularly
like the step switches. BTW, these comics make good fodder for opening your technical
presentations. I took the liberty of colorizing them for you...
 The March 1967 issue of Radio-Electronics
magazine presented these two circuit challenges in their "What's
Your EQ?" feature. Arriving at the correct answer for the Crystal Mike Input
problem requires an intimate knowledge of crystal microphones. I took a stab at
a guess, and was kinda right, but for the wrong reason, technically. Failure admitted.
Black Box type problems can be tricky. Pay attention to what components are excluded,
and don't be afraid to think "outside the box" to figure out what is going on inside
the box...
 "The
Manufacturing Outlook Q4 survey - carried out between 28 October and 27 November
- showed business confidence dipping at the sharpest rate since the pandemic. Despite
output and employment on the rise, and investment levels remaining stable, overall
optimism fell for the first time since Q4 2023. Increased costs are fingered as
the main culprits for the decline, compounded by further cost rises ahead due to
the recent Labour budget. According to the survey, 70% of manufacturers have seen
costs increase by up to a fifth in the last year, while almost one in ten saw costs
rise..."
 People are entering the field of electronics
all the time and many want to learn not only circuit theory and troubleshooting,
but design as well. With all the pre-packaged integrated circuits available that
perform just about every function imaginable, there are still times when you either
want or need to set about designing your own circuit. Interfaces between two circuits,
or to displays and sensors are examples of the kinds of applications that might
need a custom design. That applies not only for RF type circuits that require
impedance matching, but also to low frequency analog and digital circuits. This
article...
 Do you know what this is? It and others
like it can sometimes be found in electronics labs. In fact, for many years these
were in my places of work both as a technician and as an engineer. Most people have
probably never seen one. Hint: It is involved with a liquid solution of a specific
chemical makeup, starting out pure and then often other elements are added as doping
agents as required to achieve a specific result. If you think you know what this
mystery item is, or give up, click
here
for a photo of it in its native environment, and an explanation.
 You would be forgiven in this era of ubiquitous
cellphone usage for thinking maybe Citizen Band (CB) radios are only used these
days by techno-throwbacks like myself, but the fact is many truckers still use them
for convenience as well as to avoid having all their communications intercepted,
monitored, and recorded by government agencies. It can be a deceiving sense of privacy
though, because police officers often monitor
CB radio transmissions while in patrol cars, and even solicit the assistance
of other CBers in identifying and apprehending suspected transgressors - an advantage
of public, unencrypted conversation afforded law enforcement...
 Death by a thousand cuts - Lingchi. That
idiom is often used to describe the slow, sure demise of a person, place, or thing.
This "Electronic
Weather Control" editorial by Hugo Gernsback from a 1963 edition of Radio-Electronics
magazine predicts mankind's ability to control weather on Earth via instruments
in orbit around the planet. Part of the scheme entailed constructing large reflecting
mirrors (the Oberth spatial mirror) to selectively direct sunlight toward Earth
to directly heat the atmosphere. Here is a rare instance where I do not believe
Mr. Gernsback fully thought through the long-term effects of the plan. Whilst the
intention was to minimize...
 Are you old enough to remember when in order
to make a measurement on a circuit board it was necessary to physically connect
an oscilloscope probe to a trace or component lead? "Wait," you say, "What are you
talking about? You still do have to physically connect a probe." Right you are,
but 50 years from now your progeny will be asking that question, just as today I
ask you do you remember when in order to get a "screen shot" of an o-scope or spectrum
analyzer display it was necessary to connect a camera to the front of the CRT? Some
instruments had an(a) output port(s) for driving a
pen plotter, but getting a plotter set up and calibrated...
 "When your car breaks down, you take it
to the mechanic. When a computer chip fails, engineers go to the
failure-analysis team.
It's their job to diagnose what went wrong and work to make sure it doesn't in the
future. The International Symposium on the Physical and Failure Analysis of Integrated
Circuits (IPFA) is a yearly conference in Asia attended by failure-analysis engineers.
The gathering is mostly technical, but there's also a fun part: The Art of Failure
Analysis contest. 'It's all about creativity and strong imagination,' says Willie
Yeoh, chair of the Art of Failure Analysis..."
 Radiosondes are essential instruments in
atmospheric science, providing critical data for weather forecasting, climate research,
and military operations. These lightweight, battery-powered devices are carried
aloft by weather balloons to measure atmospheric parameters such as temperature,
pressure, and humidity. The rawinsonde, an extension of this technology, also measures
wind speed and direction by tracking its position during ascent through the atmosphere.
Together, they have significantly advanced meteorological science since their invention.
The radiosonde was invented in the 1920s by French meteorologist Robert Bureau (known
in meteorologist circles as the weather Bureau - LOL) and independently by Russian...
 It seemed weird to read of
microelectronics device density expressed in parts per cubic foot of semiconductor
substrate. Describing density that way makes some sense when considering 3-dimensional
devices with vertically stacked elements, but this was in a 1963 article in
Electronics World magazine, so that could not have been the case. The motivation,
evidently was to be able to compare microcircuit density with that of the human
brain in terms of neuron density. In fact, there is an interesting chart presented
that shows the evolution in circuit density beginning with vacuum tube circuits,
progressing through the state of the art in 1963, projecting for future years, and
finally peaking with the brain's...
 The News Briefs section in the May 1967
issue of Radio-Electronics magazine carried a few noteworthy items. The
biggest happening in my book is an increasing manufacturing and use of
solid state laser devices (I didn't know they had been around that early). It
had not been very long ago that lasers consisted of rather bulky assemblies with
high voltage power supplies and arrays of mirrors and lenses. The state of the art
has progressed significantly since then to the point that laser diodes cost pennies
apiece and are far higher quality than the one shown here. A public cry about the
cost of television servicing - an average of $8.95 (B&W)...
 It might not surprise you that "Classic
Radio" is
my
favorite column in the ARRL's QST magazine. The January 2025 issue has
an article entitled. "Building
a 1965 Heathkit SSB Transceiver Kit in the 21st Century," (p98) wherein author
Scott Freeberg (WA9WFA) describes how he re-kitted a vintage HW-12 radio - and its
external power supply - which had been built decades ago. He totally unsoldered
and unassembled every component, then cleaned, repaired, and replaced parts as required.
He even placed everything into envelopes, boxes, and bags as would likely have been
the case when originally shipped from Heathkit's warehouse. Unfortunately, you need
to log in to see it, or borrow a copy of QST from a Ham freind.
 The claim of a "non-conducting metal sheet"
as a substrate for
drawing electronic circuit traces seemed suspicious, so I did a search for non-conducting
or at least low conductivity metal, and there is no such thing. The advertisement
says components can be soldered directly to the board without effecting a connection.
Even low conductivity metals to which solder will adhere are good enough electrical
conductors to prevent components from being attached on a common surface without
significant conduction (i.e., short circuits) between them. A pen with conductive
ink...
 I saw this image on the Gab website. It
originated on "The
Ultimate Eighties" page on Facebook, so I linked to there. Isn't that amazingly
clever? It's probably a good guess that the person responsible is not a DEI college
graduate with a degree in <fill in the blank> Studies. The order of the exit
spectrum is correct, with red bent the least and blue bent the most. There may also
be a string of infrared lights at the very top and a string of ultraviolet lights
at the very bottom, but if so, I can't see them :-) A search for similarly
technology-themed Christmas light display did not turn up much - not even this one.
 Battery technology experienced a major technology
evolution in the late 1950s similar to the one that took place in the late 1990s.
Prior to the 50s, most common portable batteries were of the carbon-zinc type and
were not rechargeable. Nickel cadmium (NiCad) cells existed, but were not in widespread
use largely because little was known about the chemistry and how it responded to
various charge and discharge cycles. Mercury, NiCad, NiMH, alkaline-manganese, began
gaining popularity in applications requiring longer battery life and more consistent
discharge characteristics. In the 2000s, LiPo and LiIon underwent a similar evolution.
Still, all the aforementioned battery types are in use today, so this Electronics
World magazine...
• 7
Troubling Tech Trends of 2024
• Private
5G Going Mainstream in 2025?
• Canadian
Startup Strengthens Supply Chain
• ARRL
Kids Day - January 4, 2025
• Wolfspeed Wins
$750M Chips Act Award
 If I told you I just learned that there
exists an ionized region of the upper atmosphere which affects electromagnetic waves,
and is modulated in intensity and size by activity on the sun, you would understandably
respond with something like, "Where have you been. Tell me something we haven't
known for half a century." Sure, but in 1960 when this "Ionized
Band Encircles the Earth" article was printed in Radio-Electronics
magazine, it was news to most people. The presence of an ionosphere had been theorized
and shown to be existent based on ground-based experiments beginning a few decades
earlier, but it was not until the IGY space...
 "On 18 February 2024, a missile attack from
the Houthi militants in Yemen hit the cargo ship Rubymar in the Red Sea. With the
crew evacuated, the disabled ship would take weeks to finally sink, becoming an
symbol for the security of the global Internet in the process. Before it went down,
the ship dragged its anchor behind it over an estimated 70 kilometers. The meandering
anchor wound up severing three fiber-optic cables across the Red Sea floor, which
carried about a quarter of all the Internet traffic between Europe and Asia. Data
transmissions had to be rerouted as system engineers realized the cables had been
damaged. The world's
submarine fiber-optic
lines carry more than 95 percent of intercontinental Internet communications.
These tiny, drawn-out strands of glass fiber..."
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 The newest release of RF Cafe's spreadsheet
(Excel) based engineering and science calculator is now available -
Espresso Engineering Workbook™. Among other additions, it now has a Butterworth
Bandpass Calculator, and a Highpass Filter Calculator that does not just gain, but
also phase and group delay! Since 2002,
the original Calculator Workbook has been available as a free download.
Continuing the tradition, RF Cafe Espresso Engineering Workbook™ is
also provided at no cost,
compliments of my generous sponsors. The original calculators are included, but
with a vastly expanded and improved user interface. Error-trapped user input cells
help prevent entry of invalid values. An extensive use of Visual Basic for Applications
(VBA) functions now do most of the heavy lifting with calculations, and facilitates
a wide user-selectable choice of units for voltage, frequency, speed, temperature,
power, wavelength, weight, etc. In fact, a full page of units conversion calculators
is included. A particularly handy feature is the ability to specify the the number
of significant digits to display. Drop-down menus are provided for convenience...
 February 1953 was just a little more than
four years since Messrs. Brattain, Shockley, and Bardeen announced their invention
of the transistor. This full-page advertisement by Raytheon ran in Radio-Electronics
magazine announcing the world's first commercially available
PNP germanium transistors. It was a big deal. Model numbers CK721
and CK722. CK721 handled about twice the collector current (12 mA) as the CK722,
both with collector voltages maxing out at around 8 volts. The introductory
price for the CK722 was $7.60, which in 2018 money is equivalent to $72.27* At that
cost, it is hard to believe they got anyone to replace vacuum tubes with transistors.
Fortunately, economy of scale rapidly brought prices down. Interestingly, CK722
inventor Norman Krim promoted a business...
 If you are not in the habit of listening
closely to the words of songs, you could easily miss the the fact that many make
passing mention of topics on
science and mathematics,
while others integrate it as the primary theme. There are a lot of songs written
and produced by people whose primary vocation is in the sciences; their songs are
a secondary "hobby" type of endeavor - often with a touch of humor. Don't miss Tom
Lehrer's incredible "Elements Song."
Other songs are created by mainstream popular groups and happen to integrate themes
of science, mathematics, engineering, etc. One of the earliest examples I can recall
noticing was produced by the Moody Blues - "The Word." At the time, I did not fully
appreciate the profoundness of the lyrics in terms of how they described the electromagnetic
spectrum in its entirety, but an examination of the lyrics (below) reveals the profundity
of the words...
 A few days ago I posted an old ad for Radio
Shack and mentioned the tube testers that used to be in the stores for customers
to use free of charge. Of course they also had a nice stock of replacement tubes
for you to buy if needed. This advertisement for a typical
vacuum tube tester by Century Electronics appeared in the December 1958 edition
of Popular Electronics magazine. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor
Statistics' inflation calculator, that $134.50 price in 1958 (the year I was born,
BTW) would be equivalent to $1,287.24 in 2021 money - not too bad really if it were
still made in the USA as it was then...
 It is probably safe to say that the vast
majority of cellphone users never consider that their cherished devices are fundamentally
radios, and with that capability they would be merely powerful PDAs. Even less likely
to be thought about is that as wireless devices, an antenna is needed to establish
communications. Up until the early 2000s, most cellphones had some form of
obvious antenna protruding from the case - either an extendable type or a molded
stub around an internal antenna. Operational frequencies at the time were
primarily in the 850 MHz, 900 MHz, 1800 MHz, and 1900 MHz bands ,with 1/4
wavelengths of about 3.5 inches, 3.3 inches, 1.6 inches, and 1.5 inches, which
was convenient given the physical size of phones. Always seeking to develop new
features to outclass the competition, manufacturers decided...
 A vertical antenna can have a significant
advantage over a horizontal antenna from a maintenance perspective, since, depending
on how high the antenna is mounted off the ground, the "business end" where electrical
connections are made are more accessible. The configuration shown here would be
difficult to implement if a mast rotator is to be used because of the stabilizing
guy wires on the lower frame. Although it should be possible to achieve the necessary
rigidity without guys by using an aluminum or fiberglass tubing frame rather than
wood, preventing weathervaning in strong winds could prove difficult. A nifty feature
of this "reversible
beam" antenna that appeared in a 1940 issue of QST magazine is that
reciprocal directivity is implemented simply by swapping out a short length of wire
between the director and reflector elements...
 Often I have said I would like to have been
born three decades earlier to have lived during the
golden era of radio and TV, and owned a local service shop. Having arrived on
Earth in 1958, by the time I was old enough to consider electronic servicing as
a career, the industry was in full transition mode to solid state electronics. I
remember the TV repair guy working in our living room with tools and test equipment
spread out on the floor. Growing up in a lower middle class (or maybe it was an
upper lower class) household, our television and radios (both in the house and in
the old 6-cylinder Rambler) used vacuum tubes until sometime in the 1970s. Transistorized
stuff was for the rich folk in the neighborhood over. Upon enlisting in the USAF
in 1978, the air traffic control radar I worked on used vacuum tubes for the primary
airport surveillance (ASR) radar and for the precision approach radar (PAR)...
 The October 1952 issue of Boys'
Life magazine story entitled "Tiny
But Tremendous Transistors," contained the first mention of transistors I can
find in the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) flagship publication. Germanium was still
the primary element used for semiconductors at the time, although silicon would
soon replace it - and at a much lower cost. Whereas silicon is found on beaches
all over the world (and everywhere else for that matter) in the form of sand, germanium
at the time was obtained as a by-product of smelting zinc ore (which I didn't know
until reading this story). Today, of course, both elements are abundantly available.
Mr. Cavanaugh points out that although wonderful things are being done with
transistors in the way of improving performance, lowering power requirements, and
reducing product sizes and weights...
 Here's a good article for the train lovers
out there (there are many). According to an article I found in the Allentown
Morning Call, the world's first
radio broadcast from a moving train took place on Sunday, March
27, 1932. The feat was accomplished by radio station WJZ out of New Jersey, while
aboard a Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) train. As reported in Radio News
magazine a decade later, radio was being used for reliable communications between
not only the attached cars (which also often had some wired interconnections), but
between other trains and between the train and depots and switch yards. Given the
era, no doubt the accomplishment relied at least partly on technology developed
during World War II. Radio facsimile allowed printed messaging to replace the
previous method of using a hook to snatch...
 Thank God It's Friday (TGIF) again. What
better way is there to wrap up a week than to get a good laugh at these
electronics-themed comics from a few of my vintage Electronics World magazines
from the 1960s? If you still need more to help recover from the past five days and
prepare you for the weekend, a huge list of other webpages with similar comics is
at the bottom of this page. They would make good additions to in-house presentations.
 Once World War II was over and the
peoples of the world could breathe and start enjoying life again, television, which
had just begun to take off before the war, quickly gained widespread adoption in
homes. As with so many areas of technology and science, advancements in electronics
and wireless communications during the war years redounded very beneficially to
the
TV industry. Early schemes for television combined both electronics and mechanical
elements using rotating discs, vibrating mirrors, and other far-out schemes to convert
electrical signals to moving pictures. Due to the small size of the first cathode
ray tubes (CRTs), commonly called kinescopes at the time, light beams were launched
toward physically maneuvered mirrors to steer the image onto the back of a larger
glass screen - basically the first projection screen televisions ...but I digress.
TV's popularity grew so fast in the late 1940s and early 1950s that the Federal
Communications commission (FCC) issued a moratorium on the building of new broadcast
stations until a scheme could be devised to deal with signal overlap (interference)
from too closely spaced stations...
 Decibels
always have been and always will be a daunting subject to a lot of people. For electronics
types, the issue of when to multiply the
logarithm of the ratio by 10 or by 20 seems to be the biggest stumbling
block. After many years of working with decibels, it becomes second nature. There are
still instances, though, where I see seasoned engineers and technicians routinely confuse
unreferenced decibel units (dB, the logarithm of a ratio) with logs of ratios referred
to some base value (dBm, dBV, etc.). The bel unit was originally created to quantitatively
assign changes in perceived levels of sound loudness...
 Amateur radio operators, as with hobbyist
participants in many other realms, historically have contributed significantly to
the efforts of their professional counterparts. I have written of it often. This
particular instance is where signal measurements in the Ham bands during a
total eclipse of the sun (August 31, 1932 in this case) were used to assist
scientists debating the merits of rival theories relating to origin of ionization
in the Kennelly-Heaviside Layers of the E and F regions, both of which were proposed
in 1902 (yes, the Heaviside of step function fame). Long distance (DX) communications
are dependent upon such ionization to reflect radio signals that would otherwise
pass through the atmosphere and into space. The test at hand would settle the argument
since the one should fail if ionization was unaffected during totality.
 When this article on ionospheric and tropospheric
scatter radio communications was published in 1960, satellite communications was
in its infancy and only a very few subsea telephone and telegraph cables had been laid
between continents. Wideband communications was typically considered to mean a few hundred
kilohertz worth of data. Less than two decades had passed since it was discovered that
the theoretical prediction of cripplingly high attenuation above a "smooth earth" would
ultimately limit the usefulness of over-the-horizon (i.e., not line-of-sight) HF, VHF,
and UHF transmissions to a few hundred miles. In fact, so thoroughly had the commercial
broadcast community...
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...
 Part 1 of this "All About IC's" trilogy titled,
"What Makes Them Tick," author Bob Hibberd introduced the concept of semiconductor physics
and doped PN junctions. In Part 2, he discusses methods used to
fabricate monolithic, integrated circuits (IC's) on silicon chips.
Transistors, diodes, resistor, capacitors, and to some extent, inductors, can be
built using a combination of variously doped junction regions, metallization,
and oxidation (insulators). Technology has come a long way since 1969, including
mask techniques, 3-D structures, doping gradients, feature size, dielectric
breakdown strength, current leakage, circuit density, mixed analog, RF, and
digital circuitry, and other things. Part 3, covered in the August issue, goes
into more detail about how passive components are realized in silicon...
 Meissner was one of many electronics manufacturers
that re-tooled their facilities for defense production during the war years. They
made RF coils and transformers (and a few radios). Company public relations offices
were sure to make their contributions known to people who used their products and/or
services. In this 1944 full-page ad in Radio-Craft magazine, Meissner touted its
coveted Army-Navy "E" rating, awarded for "excellence" performance. According to
the Wikipedia entry, only 2% of companies earned the distinction, so it really was
a big deal. The term "precision-el" was used throughout Meissner promotions, and
it took a bit of work to determine what it meant. Turns out precision-el (i.e.,
precisionel) is a play on personnel (i.e., personn-el). Such things were considered
clever back in the day...
 When you think of "pirate radio," most likely what comes to mind is a rogue, unlicensed
transmitter that is re-broadcasting copyrighted material, syndicated shows, etc.,
on radio or television. Nowadays that would also include the Internet as a medium.
Did you know that, at least decades ago, the British government (and maybe others)
charged citizens a fee for listening to broadcasts on their household radios? That's
right, if you wanted to listen to the BBC, you would kindly remit a fee of 10 shillings
($2.50 in U.S. dollars at the time) per year. Otherwise, you were apt to have government
inspectors descend upon you and padlock your radio set - or collect the requisite
10 shillings on the spot. After a growing number of suspected dishonest British
subjects finally exceeded the reasonable level of tolerance of the government, a
clever scheme was devised to trick evil citizens into divulging their nefarious
crimes. Author Austen Fox does a great job of telling the tale. The stunt would
make a good candid camera ploy for a good laugh today, but in the 1930s when radio
waves were mysterious and even feared...
 As I have pointed out in the past, by the
end of 1944, everyone - at least in the United States - was pretty much convinced
that World War II was all but done. Advertisements and articles in most of
the magazines were going full force with promoting a
plethora of great new consumer products that would soon be
flowing from post-war factories and into the homes of the families who had
sacrificed life, limb, fortune, and opportunity on the parts of fathers,
brothers, boyfriends, and husbands who fought Axis powers during the past four
and a half years. Parents, children, and wives of those who went "Over There"
played an invaluable part back home in the success by managing single-parent
households and filling in on jobs formerly performed by the servicemen. Life was
difficult at home and on the battlefield but they persevered. We still refer to
them collectively as "The Greatest Generation." Interestingly, one of the main
impediments to implementing the aforementioned grand plan was difficulty in
transporting raw materials and piece parts to manufacturing plants, and then
distributing finished goods to the stores. Recall that...
 Here is a really interesting animation of
the world's top 20 country ranked by the
number
of Internet users in those countries. It runs (as of this posting date) from
1990 through 2019. I have not verified the numbers used by the Animate Stats producers,
but the results do not seem unreasonable. Given the the U.S. Department of Defense's
research arm, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), created the Advanced
Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) that eventually became the Internet,
showing the U.S. as the run-away leader in the beginning is not surprising. Around
1996, things begin to change quickly as Japan advances, but it is in 2000 when the
Internet user landscape really becomes dynamic ...
 This "Electronic
Alphabet Quiz" from a 1963 issue of Popular Electronics magazine is a bit trickier
than others because it requires you to think abstractly rather than concretely.
Quiz-maker Robert Balin presents a series of circuits and components along with
the first letters of the related topics. Your mission, should you decide to accept,
is to match the item to the letter. The example provided is matching the letter
"J" to a drawing of that type of half-wave antenna. I have to admit that my attempt
at matching all of the items and letters was taking a lot of time, so I quit before
finishing all of them; my hard head is better at concrete thinking... |
