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 I have written
before about the love-hate relationship a lot of the buying public had with
television and radio repair shops and repairmen - similar to car owners and
mechanics. Lots of jokes and skits (what today is termed a "meme") were created
back in the heyday of in-home entertainment to make light of the situation.
These four
electronics-themed comics from a 1962 issue of Radio-Electronics
magazine are typical examples. The one from page 111 alludes to an issue that
would almost never be seen today on a TV, unless maybe the AC power supply was
on the fritz. A composite analog broadcast signal contained vertical and
horizontal sync[ronization] components which...
 "Electrostatic
discharge (ESD) protection is a significant concern in the chemical and electronics
industries. In electronics, ESD often causes integrated circuit failures due to
rapid voltage and current discharges from charged objects, such as human fingers
or tools. With the help of 3D printing techniques, researchers at Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory (LLNL) are 'packaging' electronics with printable elastomeric
silicone foams to provide both mechanical and electrical protection of sensitive
components. Without suitable protection, substantial equipment and component..."
 Mr. Bob Davis, a seemingly endless
source of little known and/or long forgotten
historical radio and television
technical trivia, apprised me of this short segment from the 1960s Dragnet
television series, starring Sgt. Joe Friday. It features a guy, who turns out to
be a ... well, I won't spoil it for you ... who proudly professes his thirty
year career as a radio repairman. "...started back in the days of the old Crosleys, Atwater-Kents, Farnsworths.
Those were real radios, well built, well designed. Nothing cheap about any of
them. They didn't have transistors in those days, just tubes as big as light
bulbs. That meant heavy chassis, heavy transformers, and we didn't fix them by
simply slapping in a new part, either. We fixed the old parts. I wish...
 A new word has been added to my personal
lexicon: "sphenoidal."
Author John Kraus used it to describe the wedge shape of a
corner reflector. The Oxford Dictionary defines "sphenoid" thusly: "A compound
bone that forms the base of the cranium, behind the eye and below the front part
of the brain. It has two pairs of broad lateral "wings" and a number of other projections,
and contains two air-filled sinuses." This "square corner" configuration - essentially
a "V" shape, is shown to exhibit up to 10 dB of gain while being relatively (compared
to a parabolic reflector) insensitive...
 Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity,
published in 1915, fundamentally reshaped the way scientists understand gravity,
space, and time. It extended his 1905 special theory of relativity, which described
how the laws of physics are consistent for all observers in uniform motion and how
light's speed is constant in a vacuum. However, the special theory did not address
accelerating reference frames or gravitational forces. Einstein's general theory
tackled these limitations by proposing that gravity is not a force in the traditional
sense, but rather a curvature of spacetime caused by mass and energy. This profound
insight would alter the course of 20th-century physics, influencing cosmology, black
hole theory...
 "The growing use of artificial intelligence
(AI)-based models is placing greater demands on the electronics industry, as many
of these models require significant storage space and computational power. Engineers
worldwide have thus been trying to develop neuromorphic computing systems that could
help meet these demands, many of which are based on memristors.
Memristors are electronic components that regulate the flow of electrical current
in circuits while also 'remembering' the amount of electrical charge that previously
passed through them. These components could replicate the function of biological..."
 Reading through the news items in the vintage
electronics magazines provides a mixture of important historical facts and figures
along with some predictions on the future of the industry. Some of the predictions
turn out to be amazingly accurate, even though in retrospect they might seem obvious.
Take, for example, Sylvania VP Dr. Robert Castor's foresight about how, "the future
growth of the semiconductor industry lies in a major switch from the production
of individual components to solid-state subsystems that can be used as building
blocks in electronic designs." "Well of course," you might be temped to say; however,
at the time there were still significant hurdles to overcome related to material
purity, wafer size, photolithography...
 Reactel has become one of the industry leaders
in the design and manufacture of RF and microwave filters, diplexers, and sub-assemblies. They
offer the generally known tubular, LC, cavity, and waveguide designs, as well as
state of the art high performance suspended substrate models. Through a continuous
process of research and development, they have established a full line of filters
of filters of all types - lowpass, highpass, bandpass, bandstop, diplexer, and more.
Established in 1979. Please contact Reactel today to see how they might help your
project.
 2012 came and went more than a decade ago.
The date was 50 years in the future back in 1962 when Radio-Electronics
magazine editor Hugo Gernsback asked industry leaders to cogitate on possibilities
of the
state of electronics in 2012. Let's see how they did. One guy predicted our
communications would be in the 100 THz to 1,500 THz band, using 2 decimeter
antennas. Nope. Another believed we would be communicating with aliens on a regular
basis. A military dude partly hit the mark by predicting 2- and 3-year-olds would
be sitting in front of "televideo screens" (cellphones) learning Esperanto and "other
basic studies." Bell Labs believed most audiovisual material, along with commerce,
would be done electronically; i.e., the World Wide Web. I'm not quite sure how to
interpret the IT&T guy's prediction of replacing microwave space transmission
with light wavelength waveguide transmission. Seems bassackward to me...
 Here is a unique approach to discouraging scam
callers. A lot of scam calls are themselves AI, so can one AI detect and aviod another?
"Gangster
Granny! Meet Daisy: O2's new weapon against scammers. O2 has unveiled its new,
unique weapon in its fight against scammers: Daisy, an AI-powered assistant designed
to keep fraudsters talking and waste their time. As part of Virgin Media O2's 'Swerve
the Scammers' campaign, Daisy's mission is to distract scammers with realistic,
rambling conversations, helping protect potential victims while raising awareness
about fraud. Her lifelike conversations, peppered with stories about family or hobbies
like knitting, have kept fraudsters on the line for up to 40 minutes..."
Albert Einstein's
special theory of relativity, a milestone in physics, transformed our understanding
of space, time, and energy (mass). The theory, published in 1905, stemmed from Einstein's
efforts to resolve inconsistencies in classical physics, specifically between Newtonian
mechanics and electromagnetism as formulated by James Clerk Maxwell. By reconceiving
space and time as interconnected and relative to the observer's frame of reference,
Einstein established a framework that had profound implications for science and
technology. To understand how this groundbreaking idea emerged, one must consider...
 Werbel Microwave's Model WM2PD-0.5-26.5-S
is a wideband 2-way in-line power splitter covering of 500 MHz to 26.5 GHz with
excellent return loss, low insertion loss, and high isolation performance. With
ultrawideband performance, amplitude balance is typically 0.24 dB and phase
unbalance is typically 2.6°. Insertion loss is low for the bandwidth, coming in
at a typical 1.2 dB above 3 dB splitting loss. Return loss 16 dB
typical. Isolation 18 dB typical. The device is precision-assembled and tested
in the USA...
 If you wanted a career as an
electronics technician at the end of World War II, the world was your oyster
- so to speak. Electronics and communications trade magazines and publications like
Mechanix Illustrated and Popular Science ran a plethora of ads
monthly that offered unlimited opportunity to men seeking a career servicing the
burgeoning market of postwar technological marvels. Even though the enclosures were
not yet being marked with "No user serviceable parts inside," that fact was most
people were not qualified - nor did they want - to monkey with the guts of radios,
televisions, and other household appliances... (I provide a simulation to show the
true zener diode circuit output)...
 Take time out of your busy workday to look
at these three
electronics-themed comics from the February 1962 issue of Radio-Electronics..
The page 32 comic reminds me of sometime in the late 1970s while working as
an electrician (prior to enlisting in the USAF) when I was doing side jobs, and
a guy had me wire up a receptacle for his big 25" screen (CRT) which he had mounted
in a wall, with the chassis sticking out the back. It was in an upstairs room in
a Cape Cod style house with lots of room behind the wall. He was a "man cave" pioneer
with a full suite of high quality audiovisual equipment - even a Betamax machine!
The page 81 comic exhibits the irony that would have existed in the day if
American-made electronics equipment had been promoted in Japan, which they probably
were not. In 1962, Japanese...
 Admittedly, I mostly posted this because
of the drawing. "While
direct-to-cell (D2C) satellite communications were a big topic at the recent
Brooklyn 6G Summit, the technology is already here, well before 6G's anticipated
2030 arrival. Apple and Google already offer D2C emergency messaging, and Starlink,
T-Mobile and others are anticipated to follow. D2C satellite communications will
be well established when 6G arrives. The 3GPP froze a 5G specification for Non-Terrestrial
Networks (NTN) in Release 17 in March 2022, which means that NTN-compatible chips
and components should be available now or soon. SpaceX has reduced the cost..."
 The subtitle of this article from a 1971
issue of Popular Electronics magazine, "From
Quackery to Speculation to Programmed People," could to some extent still be
applicable even though the author evidently meant to put an end to the "quackery"
and "speculation" part of it. Indeed, a lot of advancement has been made in the
fields of electrostimulation of weak or/or paralyzed muscles, healing of certain
types of soft and hard tissues, suppressing sporadic muscle twitching and epileptic
seizures, and other malady diagnosis and relief. Specifically tuned microwave frequencies
have proven useful in healing and symptom relief as well. As with most articles
on medical procedures, I cringe at some...
Anatech Intros 3
Filter Models for November
 Anatech Electronics offers the industry's
largest portfolio of high-performance standard and customized RF and microwave filters
and filter-related products for military, commercial, aerospace and defense, and
industrial applications up to 40 GHz. Three new
C-band cavity bandpass filter models have been added to the product line, including
a 4994 MHz BPF with a 50 MHz bandwidth, a 4950 MHz BPF with a 10 MHz
bandwidth, and a 5785 MHz BPF with a 100 MHz bandwidth. Custom RF power
filter and directional couplers designs can be designed and produced with required
connector types when a standard cannot be found, or the requirements are such that
a custom...
• 5G
Is 42% of Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) in 2024
• Robert Dennard,
DRAM Pioneer, Dies at 91
• TSMC's Energy
Demand Drives Taiwan's Geopolitical Future
• Semiconductor
Packaging Market on 5.6% CAGR 'Till 2028
• Altering
Asteroid Trajectories with Nuclear X-Rays
 Albert Einstein, one of the most renowned
physicists in history, was born on March 14, 1879, in Ulm, in the Kingdom of Württemberg,
part of the German Empire. His father, Hermann Einstein, was an engineer and salesman
who ran an electrochemical factory, and his mother, Pauline Koch, managed the household
and supported her son's education. Einstein had one sister, Maja, who was born in
1881 and with whom he had a lifelong close relationship. Einstein's extended family
included several relatives who would play various roles in his life, both personally
and professionally. His early family life was comfortable, though his parents moved
frequently as they sought economic stability. Hermann Einstein's business ventures
had varying success, and eventually, the family moved to Italy in 1894...
 Here is the second part of a series of articles
about
stepping switches appearing in 1967 issues of Radio-Electronics magazine.
A standard (at the time) dial rotary phone was used as a familiar example in the
part one. It delivers a single pulse for each number / letter set from 1, 2 (ABC),
3 (DEF), through 9 (WXY), 0 (Operator). On some phones, you can hear the clacking
of the switch contacts as the spring-loaded dial rotates from the selected number
back to home position. The stepping action as the result of dialing occurs at the
telephone system switching and call routing equipment at central locations. There,
stepping switches increment with each pulse received, and when the full number of
pulse sets have arrived, the circuit is complete and the call put through to ring
the phone...
 "Results are published, and the numbers
are in. They paint a picture of a very active
2024 ARRL
Field Day. Nearly 1.3 million contacts were reported during the 24-hour event.
That is up from 2023's 1.25 million contacts. That's likely indicative of the continued
rise of Solar Cycle 25 leading up to the event, but more people also participated
this year. Entries were received from all 85 ARRL and Radio Amateurs of Canada (RAC)
sections, as well as from 27 different countries from outside the US and Canada.
'It is encouraging to see a rise in participation year to year,' said ARRL Contest
Program Manager Paul Bourque, N1SFE. 'ARRL Field Day is amateur radio's premier
event, and the hams turned out for it..."
 After searching for the first mention of
Nikola Tesla in U.S. newspapers, I performed a similar search on
Albert
Einstein, again using editions available in the NewspaperArchive.com database.
I was utterly surprised to find it in a 1919 issue of the The New York Times.
His theory of Special Relativity was published in 1905 and his theory of General
Relativity was published in 1915, so it took The NY Times four years to
mention it. There is a reference to Dr. Einstein's' work on relativity in a 1915
edition of The Manitoban, from Winnipeg, Canada. The NY Times article
is an actual interview with Albert Einstein, wherein at one point it is stated that
there were perhaps only a dozen people in the world at that time who understood
general relativity. Interestingly, Einstein uses the term "difform motion" to describe...
 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
the model
AMP2103P-LC, dual-mode (CW & pulse) amplifier covering 800 to 3200 MHz.
1000 watt peak pulse power, or 500 watts CW. Ideal for automotive pulse/radar
EMC-testing & commercial applications. Pulse widths to 560 μsec, duty cycle
to 10%, 60 dB gain, and outstanding pulse fidelity. Monitoring parameters for
forward/reflected power in watts and dBm, VSWR, voltage, current, and temperature,
with unprecedented reliability and ruggedness in a compact 7U chassis...
 Sally Mason was the soldering iron-wielding
heroette (heroine sounds too much like the narcotic) of Nate Silverman's "Sally,
the Service Maid" series that ran in Radio-Craft magazine during the
years of World War II. As I noted in the previous episode, many of the nation's
women were left behind to run their husband's, father's and/or son's electronics
sales and repair businesses when they went off to save the world from aggressive
Communists, Socialists, Maoists, Nazis, and other nasty types. Some of those ladies
had already become very adept at troubleshooting, component replacement, and aligning
radio and television sets, while some were left to learn at the School of Hard Knocks.
Sally's father, Gus Mason...
 Crane Aerospace & Electronics' products
and services are organized into six integrated solutions: Cabin Systems, Electrical
Power Solutions, Fluid Management Solutions, Landing Systems, Microwave Solutions,
and Sensing Components & Systems. Our Microwave Solution designs and manufactures
high-performance
RF, IF and millimeter-wave components, subsystems and systems for commercial
aviation, defense, and space including linear & log amplifiers, fixed &
variable attenuators, circulators & isolators, power combiners & dividers,
couplers, mixers, switches & matrices, oscillators & synthesizers.
 The AN/MPN-13|14 mobile radar system I worked
on while enlisted in the U.S. Air Force was designed and fielded around the time
this
Electronic Navigation in Flight article appeared in a 1962 issue of Radio-Electronics
magazine. It had been upgraded a few times by 1979 when I was in Air Traffic Control
Radar Repairman technical school at Keesler AFB, Mississippi; however, the original
system did not featured a Doppler capability. The fully RF analog system could not
provide air traffic controllers with speed data, but it did use physical mercury
delay lines to provide a stationary target (ground, and to some degree, rain, clutter)
cancellation by inverting and summing a real-time radar...
 Decisions, decisions, decisions. As the
title states, color television manufacturers were, in 1965 when this Electronics
magazine article was published, finding themselves between a rock and a hard place,
as the saying goes, regarding a change
from vacuum tubes to transistors. The buying public (aka consumers) had mixed
emotions about the newfangled semiconductors based at least partly on bad information
about transistors. Transistors had been designed in various circuits for a decade
and a half and were gaining rapidly in performance and reliability. The price was
coming down, but as reported here, still cost $5 to $10 apiece compared to a $1
vacuum tube. Company management needed to decide whether to delay implementing the
new engineering and production methods required to deal with transistors...
 "At 8:30 p.m. on 16 May 1916, John J. Carty
banged his gavel at the Engineering Societies Building in New York City to call
to order a meeting of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. This was no
ordinary gathering. The AIEE had decided to conduct a live national meeting connecting
more than 5,000 attendees in
eight cities across four time zones. More than a century before Zoom made virtual
meetings a pedestrian experience, telephone lines linked auditoriums from coast
to coast. AIEE members and guests in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, New York,
Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco had telephone receivers at their
seats so they could listen..."
|
 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, and
more. Page templates are provided with a preset scale (changeable) for a good presentation
that can incorporate all provided symbols...
 The monthly "Solid State" column in Popular
Electronics reported on all the wonderful new germanium- and silicon-based devices
being prepared for the brave new world of electronics. It is a good resource for historical
research. For instance, did you know that the unijunction transistor was originally going
be called a "double-base
diode?" How about a feeble attempt to integrate solid state and vacuum tubes by incorporating
a "semiconductor cold cathode" to replace the standard 6.3 V or 12.6 V heated
cathode for supplying an electron source? Have you ever heard of a "spacistor?" A 1957
edition of "Proceedings of the IRE" published a paper by Pucel and Statz titled, "The
Spacistor, A New Class of High-Frequency Semiconductor Devices." The summary
statement says..."
 One aspect of advertising on the RF Cafe
website I have not covered is using
Google AdSense.
The reason is that I never took the time to explore how - or even whether it is
possible - to target a specific website for displaying your banner ads. A couple
display opportunities have always been provided for Google Ads to display, but the
vast majority of advertising on RF Cafe is done via private advertisers. That is,
companies deal with me directly and I handle inserting their banner ads into the
html page code that randomly selects and displays them. My advertising scheme is
what the industry refers to as a "Tenancy Campaign," whereby a flat price per month
is paid regardless of number of impressions or clicks. It is the simplest format
and has seemed to work well for many companies. With nearly 4 million pageviews
per year for RFCafe.com, the average impression rate per banner ad is about 225,000k per
year (in eight locations on each page, with >17k pages)... '
 Fellow
USAF radar technician Charles Pritt
checked in with a plethora of info and photographs about his time in the 3rd MOB
(aka 3CCG or 3rd Combat Communications Group). Says Charles: "I attended Technical
training at Keesler, from April to September 1973, for Radar Repair. My first assignment
after Technical school was to the 1837th E&I squadron at Yokota AB, Japan starting
in October 1973. Since we were not supporting a daily operational radar system and
the only time we worked on Radar was when we went on TDY, we usually just sat around
the office, talking, drinking coffee or studying radar books for our promotions..."
 According to Electronics
magazine editor Lewis Young in mid-1964, the industry was entering into a slump
in business opportunities. The boom times provided during the war years of WWII
and Korea had resulted in, according to Mr. Young, a lax attitude toward operational
strategy that led to wasteful spending and poor accountability for project results.
It wasn't just the defense contractors' fault because government bureaucrats - from
relatively low ranking military personnel to elected lawmakers - had (have) a habit
of making sudden changes to contract requirements. Maintaining the resources needed
to keep up with ever-evolving demands necessitated a lot of the excess. Fortunately,
the military-industrial complex, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower dubbed it,
was on the verge of being thrown another huge monetary bone - the Vietnam War. President
Kennedy was already pumping lots of equipment and manpower into it, and LBJ would
follow suit with vigor ...
 Do you detect any (probably unintended)
irony in the page 76 comic from a 1947 issue of Radio-Craft magazine? It
shows a husband and wife shopping for a new radio and has the husband telling the
salesman, "I don't care if it is FM - I want one that plays in the P.M.!" I'll let
you think on it for a moment. As with many of the comics that appeared in the magazine,
the scenarios were suggested by readers. The other comic played on the common music
programming schedule that included times of "dinner music," "evening music," etc.
If you like these comics, then you'll appreciate the huge list at the bottom of
the page of others with tech themes.
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...
One aspect of advertising on the RF Cafe
website I have not covered is using
Google AdSense.
The reason is that I never took the time to explore how - or even whether it is
possible - to target a specific website for displaying your banner ads. A couple
display opportunities have always been provided for Google Ads to display, but the
vast majority of advertising on RF Cafe is done via private advertisers. That is,
companies deal with me directly and I handle inserting their banner ads into the
html page code that randomly selects and displays them. My advertising scheme is
what the industry refers to as a "Tenancy Campaign," whereby a flat price per month
is paid regardless of number of impressions or clicks. It is the simplest format
and has seemed to work well for many companies. With nearly 4 million pageviews
per year for RFCafe.com, the average impression rate per banner ad is about 225,000k per
year (in eight locations on each page, with >17k pages)...
 The
American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) was founded as part of the
Bell Telephone System to build a nationwide wired, long distance communications
service. When this advertisement was printed in a 1917 issue of The Saturday Evening
Post magazine, many American households still did not have a telephone installed,
and most of those that did subscribed to "party line" hookups. Party lines were
a service sharing agreement whereby multiple users were connected to the same telephone
number and agreed to share the line. The upside was a discounted phone bill, but
the downside was the any other member of the "party" could listen in on your conversation.
I remember back in the 1960s when our house had a party line. My sister and I (both
preteens) would sometimes carefully pick up the phone receiver and listen in hopes
of ...
 In March of 1958 when this article appeared
in Popular Electronics, learning of semiconductor devices other than
transistors was usually new to experienced professionals as well
as to hobbyists. Vacuum tubes still dominated electronic products in the day. Companies
like General Electric, Sylvania, and RCA were the pioneers for development of Zener
diodes, photodiodes, SCRs, thyristors, etc. Relatively simple compounds like selenium,
germanium, silicon, and lead and cadmium sulphides were used. The exotic witch's
brew of elements in modern semiconductors - particularly those used to
photovoltaics - were likely not even envisioned in 1958. This article discusses
some of "new" devices using simple compounds...
 If you are shopping for a new television
set and are willing to spend $500, you can get a fully assembled and ready to play
Samsung 55" 4K UHD LED Smart TV with Alexa Built-in, or maybe a Vizio 50" 4K UHD
LED Smart TV (UHD = 3,840px x 2,160px = 8,294,400 px^2). The same $500 in 1982
got you a
19" CRT with 525 horizontal scan lines (only 480-490 actually visible), but
theoretically an infinite number of points across each line due to the analog nature
of the signal. Come to think of it, an argument could be made that the old CRT displays
had a higher resolution than the UHD modern digital TV (infinite versus 8.3 million,
respectively). Ditto for the total number of color levels - infinite for analog
versus 16.8 million for digital (8 bits per color = [28]^3). Fully assembled and
ready to play 19" TVs could be bought in 1982 for about the same price, so the motivation
for going to the trouble of building your own set was mostly pride and personal
satisfaction...
 An age-old meme is used in the first of these
vintage electronics themed comics from Radio & Television News magazine.
It shows a husband attempting to repair some domestic device (a TV in this case)
in order to avoid being ripped off by a professional repairman. I'm guessing that
the use of the term "gyp," which is a pejorative referring to gypsies, would not
be allowed in today's politically correct environment. In order to "get" the other
comic, you need to know about the stacked plates used in selenium and copper-oxide
type rectifiers that preceded silicon and germanium semiconductor models. Electronics
magazines of the era published many articles about selenium rectifiers...
 As mentioned in an earlier article, National
Radio Institute (NRI) was one of the first companies to exploit the burgeoning field
of electronics in the early part of the last century. They invested heavily in facilities
and resources for producing educational material for both classroom and correspondence
courses. Up until sometime in the early 1990s when throw-away electronics and almost
total offshore manufacturing became the rule rather than the exception, there were
always large advertisements in magazines offering to rescue floundering career seekers
with promises of untold opportunities and riches from servicing radios, televisions,
home appliances, and more. That is not to say the courses were not valuable
- they were...
 Usually an article about
clean layout techniques would be about printed circuit board layout; however, this
one refers to chassis layout. Having built many electronics chassis in my days as an
electronics technician (prior to earning an engineering degree), I have a great appreciation
for a professional-looking job. Some of the work done by hobbyists that appear in magazines
like QST, Nuts & Volts, and the older titles like
Poplar Electronics looks pretty darn nice - both for kits and homebrews. It's a
short article, but worth a quick look...
 This assortment of custom-designed themes
by RF Cafe includes T-Shirts, Mouse Pads, Clocks, Tote Bags, Coffee Mugs and Steins,
Purses, Sweatshirts, Baseball Caps, and more, all sporting my amazingly clever "RF Engineers - We Are the World's Matchmakers"
Smith chart design. These would make excellent gifts for husbands, wives, kids,
significant others, and for handing out at company events or as rewards for excellent
service. My graphic has been ripped off by other people and used on their products,
so please be sure to purchase only official RF Cafe gear. I only make a couple bucks
on each sale - the rest goes to Cafe Press. It's a great way to help support RF
Cafe. Thanks...
 Banner Ads are rotated in all locations
on the page! RF Cafe typically receives 8,000-15,000 visits each
weekday. RF Cafe
is a favorite of engineers, technicians, hobbyists, and students all over the world.
With more than 17,000 pages in the Google search index, RF Cafe returns in
favorable positions on many types of key searches, both for text and images.
Your Banner Ads are displayed on average 225,000 times per year! 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. If you need your company
news to be seen, RF Cafe is the place to be...
 This
RF Electronics Basics
quiz targets those of you who are newcomers to the world of radio frequency
(RF) electronics, but seasoned vets are welcome to give it a go as well. People
have reported using material from these quizzes as fodder for interviewing
potential candidates. All quizzes are multiple choice and answers are
provided...
 At least 10 clues with an asterisk (*)
in this technology-themed crossword puzzle are pulled from this past week's (2/12 - 2/16)
"Tech Industry Headlines" column on the RF Cafe homepage (see the Headline Archives page
for help). For the sake of all the avid cruciverbalists amongst us, each week I create
a new technology-themed crossword puzzle using only words from my custom-created related
to engineering, science, mathematics, chemistry, physics, astronomy, etc. Enjoy...
 Swan Electronics was another of the many
electronics equipment companies that was started in the founder's garage - literally
- and built a loyal customer following in their areas of specialty. Probably the
most famous example is Bill Hewett and Dave Packard's garage (known affectionately
among enthusiasts as "The HP Garage"). As evidenced by this RF frequency counter
advertisement in QST magazine (six pages worth), Swan manufactured a line of products
for the radio amateur including transceivers, antennas, and a few pieces of test
equipment. Swan Electronics merged with Cubic Corporation in 1967. Information on
this frequency counter and some of the other accessories sold by Swan Electronics
can be found on this Swan Virtual Museum website...
 Credit for being the first to accomplish any notable
feat, whether in sports, medicine, science, aviation, etc., is constantly being challenged.
Some contestations are worthy of consideration based on documented facts, while others
can be readily dismissed as crockery. Gustave Whitehead, per anti-Wright Brothers zealots,
made the first powered airplane flight. The Vikings landed in America centuries prior
to Columbus - supposedly. Many stories have been written claiming that Dr. Mahlon Loomis,
a dentist, beat Guglielmo Marconi in the wireless communications race by using a system
of kites that took on a charge from overhead clouds. A keying device opened and closed
a conductive path to ground for effecting the Morse code...
 Mac McGregor, owner of
Mac's Radio Service Shop, can always be counted on to provide
his apprentice technician, Barney, with a lesson from his own life-long attendance
at the School of Hard Knocks. Barney is your stereotypical young buck whose level
of seriousness needs occasional alignment, just as do the radio and television sets
he services. In this episode, I can't find where Mac actually solved the intermittent
electrical condition believed to be causing the problem - weird. The "Mac's Radio
Service Shop" series ran in Radio & Television News magazine for many
years prior to a similar electronics story series called "Carl & Jerry" that
appeared in Popular Electronics. Both were created by consummate storyteller
John T. Frye.
 Many topics of the
electronics-themed comics which appeared in Radio-Craft were suggested by the
magazine's readers. Staff artists like Frank Beaven turned those suggestions into
cartoons. For a while there was a special feature called "Radio Term Illustrated"
where, as the name suggests, terms like "Signal Generator" and "High Potential"
are rendered in farcical form. These four comics, two of each type, appeared in
a May 1947 issue of Radio-Craft. I have to admit that even with my familiarity with
vintage electronics memes I do not get the Television "Organ" comic (yes, I understand
the organ grinder, but not how it applies to TV).
 Declaring any kind of straight LC tank circuit
to be high stability is a bit of a stretch when compared the Q available simply
by adding a crystal, even in 1958. Tone modulation was an early method for achieving
remote control of model airplanes, boats, and cars. The number of channels with
these
tone modulation systems is two times the number of modern proportional
systems in that moving the rudder left took one channel and moving it right took
another. Up and down elevator likewise took two channels. Therefore, this four
channel system is only two channels by today's terminology. Technology evolved
into fully proportional ...
 It has been a while since posting on of these
Radio Data Sheet 333 that often appeared in vintage electronics magazines like
Radio-Craft. This one is for
General Electric Radio Models 100, 101, 103 and 105. The RadioMuseum.org website
has a very nicely restored General Electric Model 103 radio. Per their description:
"The General Electric 103 is an AC/DC operated 5 tube BC band receiver. The BC band
frequency tuning range is 540-1600 kHz. Has built-in loop antenna with provisions
for connecting an external antenna. The following models use the same schematic
and chassis but have different cabinets..." A few Model 100 versions show up on
eBay in case you might be interested in acquiring one...
 "The Radio Month" was a regular feature
in Radio-Electronics magazine in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It contained
news items from around the industry and across the world. The entire two pages are
included in the included scan, but a couple items in particular stand out that are
worth mentioning. The first is announcing the soon to be available rectangular cathode
ray tubes (CRT) for television. Until then, the actual CRTs had round faces even
though the displayed image was rectangular. A 4:3 aspect ratio was the standard,
which required the tube diameter to be roughly 25% larger than the horizontal size
of the picture. In fact,
that is how TV display sizes came to be rated by their "diagonal" dimension
rather than the picture width, and the standard stuck even after rectangular tubes
were available. For instance, the 4:3 aspect ratio conveniently produces a diagonal
length of 5 (the 3:4:5 triangle), where the hypotenuse...
 There is still a lot of vintage ham radio
equipment in use both by the original owners and by newcomers who buy the equipment
at Hamfests and on eBay. User's manuals are hard to come by, since they often were
separated from the original gear a long time ago. Knowing how to operate, repair,
and align everything properly is still necessary, especially as the airwaves get
ever more crowded and the FCC gets more serious about prosecuting violators. Old
editions of QST are the perfect resource for locating such information.
This article covers some of the
basics of oscillators - tritet types in particular - used for CW keying. The
tritet oscillator gets is name from having been designed originally to efficiently
generate third and fourth harmonics, per James Lamb's June 1933 QST article "A More
Stable Crystal Oscillator of High Harmonic Output." ARRL members can download the
article... |
