|
 In all-too-typical style, the Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) decided to look for a scapegoat it could not just blame for but
strong-arm a solution for claimed problems plaguing
Citizen Band (CB) radio as it was rapidly becoming a popular hobby
in the 1960s. In the same manner in which bureaucrats blame gun and steak knife
manufacturers for the abusive actions of a minority of their products' users, the
FCC sought to curtail improper (maybe even illegal) operation of CB radios by imposing
type certification and feature restrictions on equipment manufacturers. To demonstrate
its magnanimity, though, the FCC offered to give companies half a year to deplete
their existing inventories. At the time and through 1977, CBs had 23 channels, after
which time 40 channels became the new mandate...
 "In the electronics industry, where complexity
and speed are essential, artificial intelligence (AI) stands out as a transformative
force poised to revolutionize the field. Yet, despite significant investments and
high expectations, many organizations find themselves grappling with an uncomfortable
reality: the true value of
AI for supply chains remains elusive at scale. Great expectations, harsh realities
Gartner research found that 65% of CEOs in supply chain-intensive sectors believe
the next 'business era' will be defined by AI. An impressive 73% believe that AI
will emerge as the most transformative technology for their businesses..."
 Pop Quiz: What is the contemporary name
we have given to the
voltage variable resistor (VDR)? Although VDRs are nowadays used
most familiarly for overvoltage protection due to spikes on a power or signal line,
they used to be functional parts of television display and power supply circuits.
They also made those newfangled field effect transistors - junction (JFET), and
enhancement mode and depletion mode insulated-gate (IGFET, aka MOSFET). Thermistors,
silicon-controlled rectifiers (SCRs), and varactor diodes are also discussed. Sylvania
was a prime user of all these devices back in the day as part of their effort to
modernize televisions and radio by abandoning vacuum tubes wherever possible...
 Sporadic E skip is an upper atmosphere
phenomenon whereby the "E" layer is ionized to where certain radio frequency (RF)
wavelengths are refracted to the degree that they are bent back down towards the
earth's surface rather than exiting into space. It facilitates long distance (DX)
communications to areas not normally available otherwise. Amateur radio operators
(Hams) have exploited sporadic E skip for nearly as long as there has been
Ham operators - even before anyone knew for certain that the upper atmosphere could
be ionized. Thus far there is no concrete correlation between sunspot activity and
sporadic E propagation, although sunspots definitely have other profound effects
on propagation when highly energetic electrons released from the sun's photosphere
interact with molecules in the ionosphere...
 Werbel Microwave began as a consulting firm,
specializing in RF components design, with the ability to rapidly spin low volume
prototypes, and has quickly grown into a major designer and manufacturer with volume
production capacities. Werbel is proud to announce its
WMQH-0.5-1-S is a 90° hybrid designed for the 500-1000 MHz octave band.
It provides a 3 dB power split with tight 90° phase shift and low amplitude
unbalance. Key features include high isolation, typically 26 dB, and excellent
return loss of 24 dB typical, ensuring minimal signal reflection and optimal
performance across the band. Products are designed and manufactured in our Whippany,
New Jersey, location. "No Worries with Werbel!"...
 After reading both this article and "The Sarasota Mystery First Follow-Up" article in the April 1966
issue of Popular Electronics, I'm convinced that the inventor Wallace Minto
either did not understand the phenomenon he describes, or he's out to punk the reader.
If this initial article had been printed in the April issue rather than March, it
almost certainly would have to have been a Fool's scam. Minto believes he has discovered
a new form of electromagnetic propagation that exploits molecular / atomic properties
of water to transmit the signal - without attenuation and without picking up noise.
If it sounds too good to be true...
 Robert Radford's (not to be confused with
Robert Redford) "Electromaze" is a unique - and weird - sort of word puzzle that
appeared in the April 1966 issue of Popular Electronics magazine. You will
probably want to print out the maze grid and find an old guy who should still have
a pencil stowed away somewhere you can borrow to use for filling in the boxes. Note
that in my opinion the answer given for clue number 2 is technically wrong. What
say you?...
 "Big tech is
redrawing the global manufacturing map. As Western technology giants strategically
pivot away from their longstanding reliance on China, a fundamental and likely irreversible
global technology supply chain recalibration is underway. What began as a shift
in the U.S.-China trade war from tariffs to the more intricate arena of export controls
is now a full-blown strategic imperative for major tech firms. The action has decisively
shifted to a 'China+N' manufacturing model, driven by persistent geopolitical tensions,
the erosion of China's cost advantage, and the stark operational vulnerabilities
exposed by the global COVID-19 pandemic..."
 It appears that maybe Abraham Lincoln had
a son who was an electrical engineer working at Motorola Semiconductor back in the
1960's. Put glasses on Honest Abe (I did) and author Irwin Carroll's a spitting
image of the Great Emancipator. Seriously though, this article is a great introduction
to the fabrication and use of variable capacitance (aka varicap and varactor) diodes. They have
been - and still are - used widely for electrically tunable oscillator and filter
circuits. Topics such as temperature and figure of merit ("Q") are discussed as
well. This edition of Electronics World ran a series...
 Sam Benzacar, of Anatech Electronics, an
RF and microwave filter company, has published his July 2025 Newsletter that, along
with timely news items, features his short op-ed entitled "3GPP
Release 20 Gets Us Closer to 6G." In it, he states, "One of the most significant
areas of emphasis in Release 20 is integrating artificial intelligence (AI) and
machine learning into the radio access network (RAN) and the core network." I have
seen numerous news items in the last few months reporting on the melding of AI and
network communications. This type of AI "intelligently" controls the global and
local systems by optimizing traffic flow via real-time tower and control center
analysis. A major feature is device-to-device (D2D) communications that can bypass
the network...
 It is hard to imagine a time when integrated
circuit (IC)
comparators were a big deal, but as recently as 1973 when this
article appeared in Popular Electronics, they were new to a designer's
bag of tricks. Prior to an IC solution, comparators needed to be constructed from
opamps and a handful of peripheral biasing components. As with other integrated
circuits, not only does the overall price go down, but so does circuit board real
estate, cost, temperature variability, and electrical parameter variance between
devices. The first comparator circuit I remember designing was a temperature sensor
that went in an oven used for curing the potting...
 Here is an area of electronics that will
be foreign soil to most Gen-Xers and Millennials -
troubleshooting your malfunctioning radio, phone, television,
garage door opener, kitchen appliance, etc. Admittedly, most modern devices are
designed and priced to be replaced rather than repaired. Relatively cheap product
replacement and service plans keep them going for a year or three until they are
obsoleted by newer devices with whiz-bang additional features. However, there are
many of us still around who are born to tinker and are too cheap to bear the thought
of throwing something away before at least attempting to fix it. I have written
often about how many...
 "The low-cost, scalable technology enables
seamless integration of high-speed gallium nitride transistors onto a standard silicon
chip. Gallium nitride is an advanced semiconductor material that is expected to
play a key role in the next generation of high-speed communication systems and the
power electronics that support modern data centers. However, the widespread use
of gallium nitride (GaN) has been limited by its high cost to incorporate it into
standard electronic systems. To address these challenges, researchers from MIT and
collaborating institutions have developed a
new fabrication process that integrates high-performance GaN transistors..."
 At least 10 clues with an asterisk (*)
in this
technology-themed crossword puzzle are pulled from "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...
 Innovative Power Products has been designing
and manufacturing RF and Microwave passive components since 2005. We use the latest
design tools available to build our baluns, 90-degree couplers, directional couplers,
combiners/dividers, single-ended transformers, resistors, terminations, and custom
products. Applications in military, medical, industrial, and commercial markets
are serviced around the world. Products listed on the website link to detailed mechanical
drawings, electrical specifications, and performance data. If you cannot find a
product that meets your requirements on our website, contact us to speak with one
of our experienced design engineers about your project.
 Just yesterday I posted an article titled
"Understanding Your Triggered Sweep Scope," that appeared in the May 1973 issue
of Popular Electronics, so I figured this "Scope-Trace Quiz" would make a good compliment. It is from a 1965
issue of Popular Electronics. Driver circuits all include a sinewave source
in parallel with a series resistor and diode, connected to the vertical and horizontal
o-scope inputs. The resulting Lissajous waveforms resemble hands on a clock face
thanks to the diode. Shamefully, I only scored 70%, but in my own defense I'll say
I didn't take the time to draw them out on paper. Pay careful attention to the scope...
 "Advanced alien civilisations could discover
human life on Earth by picking up
technosignatures given off inadvertently by civilian and military radar, new
research shows. The study investigated how hidden electromagnetic leakage might
look to extraterrestrials up to 200 light-years away if they had advanced radio
telescopes like those on Earth. It also suggests this is how far humans would be
able to look to spot extraterrestrials who have evolved to use a similar level of
technology. Preliminary results revealed at the
Royal Astronomical
Society's National Astronomy Meeting 2025 in Durham show how aviation hubs such
as Heathrow, Gatwick and New York's JFK International Airport give off clues to
human existence..."
 Here is a unique type of article from a
1974 issue of Popular Electronics. Author Ralph Tenny presents a
poor-man's environmental test chamber constructed with a Styrofoam
picnic cooler, a dry ice sump, a heater, a thermocouple, and a bunch of input/output
ports for making electrical measurements. While working on my senior project at
college - an electronic remote weather station - I needed to verify functionality
up to 150°F and down to 0°F. Having the Torture Box would have been handy, but instead
I used the kitchen oven and freezer with the interconnect cable mashed between the
door gasket and frame. Unfortunately I don't have any...
 The transition from vacuum tubes to semiconductors,
and from black and white to color televisions was in full swing by 1973. Accompanying
the change in components was a re-thinking of the most effective and profitable
method of manufacturing and servicing the new equipment.
Modularization was thought to be key to future success even though
production costs were slightly higher. Reliability improvements were already reducing
the need for service calls and highly trained technicians who could troubleshoot
failures down to the component level. Swapping out suspect modules with known-good
modules, in Mac's words, results in "a quickly trained module swapper who knows
only 'how' and not..."
 The
first thing I learned (or re-learned) in reading this article is that in 1967, "Hertz"
had only recently been assigned as the official unit of frequency. According to
Wikipedia, International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) adopted it in in 1930,
but it wasn't until 1960 that it was adopted by the General Conference on Weights
and Measures (CGPM) (Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures). Hertz replace cycles
per second (cps). The next thing that happened was that I was reminded of how images
such as the op-art tracing of
antenna oscillation that are routinely generated today by sophisticated
software, required huge amounts of setup time and trials to yield just a single
useful and meaningful image using actual hardware...
 San Francisco Circuits has published a comprehensive
guide on the
8 most essential types of PCB vias, helping designers, engineers, and procurement
teams navigate the challenges of modern board manufacturing. This is a guide to
the 8 different via types. As electronic devices continue to shrink in size while
increasing in complexity, PCB vias play a critical role in enabling multi-layer
interconnections, high-speed signal integrity, and thermal performance. The 8 main
types of PCB vias each serves a specific function depending on the board's structure,
component density, and electrical requirements...
 This is Part 3 of a series of articles on
atomic radiation that appeared in Electronic World magazine
in 1969. It deals with measurement techniques and equipment. Shippingport Atomic
Power Station, the first full scale nuclear power plant in the U.S., went operational
in 1957. It marked the dawn of a new era of electric power generation that was filled
with grandiose predictions of limitless, non-polluting, dirt cheap power. Everything
was going to be powered by electricity - air heating and cooling, lighting, automobiles,
water heating. Atomic power was going to be a figurative and almost literal beating
of swords into ploughshares as the destructive energy...
• FCC
Power Shift Underway
• Global
Foundry Market Sees Milder Dip in 2025
• U.S.
Renegotiating Chips Act Awards
• Recalls Can Create a
Multitude of Legal Problems
• Why
ChatGPT's Essays Don't Fool the Experts - Yet
 TGIF, as the saying goes. Here are a couple
new vintage
electronics-themed comics for your enjoyment as you wind down
the work week. They appeared in a 1944 issue of Radio-Craft magazine. My
favorite is the one with the lady in the vacuum cleaner repair shop. Look at her
request! Her husband must have put her up to it. The other comic is pretty good,
too. Having lived toward the end of the vacuum tube era, my appreciation of the
equipment is more for the nostalgic quality than memories of having to wait for
the tubes to warm up and re-tuning the radio and TV set at intervals while listening
and/or watching...
 Amateur Extra-class teenagers Calvin Nolten
and Phineas Thorin embark on a mission to track down the source of spurious signals
in the 70 cm Ham band which threaten DX contesting on Field Day. The story
is
Saving Field Day, wherein, Calvin Nolten, a pint-sized shockwave of
teenage pandemonium, slammed open the front door of his home with a report that
could've been mistaken for a misfiring capacitor, the frame shuddering as if protesting
the assault. At fifteen, barely scraping five-and-a-half feet, Calvin was a bundle
of raw energy. His school backpack was a chaotic jumble of ham radio manuals, a
late-model Galaxy smartphone, and lunchtime leftovers. He stormed the kitchen, raided
the fridge for a quick snack, and before the light inside had a chance to go out,
Calvin was out the back door, bound for Phineas Thorin's basement "shack." Mrs.
Nolten, unperturbed by the familiar maelstrom, took solace in know that the chaos
meant her boy was home safe - and likely already plotting some radio mischief with
his partner in crime next door...
|
The RF Cafe Homepage
Archive is a comprehensive collection of every item appearing daily on this
website since 2012 - and many from earlier years.
 I swear when I perused the December 1955
issue of Radio-Electronics there was a good reason that I tagged this "Your
Receiver as an Audio Generator" article for posting, but I'll be danged if the
motivation for it is obvious now. There's nothing undeserving about the subject
from the perspective of a reader back in the day when test equipment could be hard
and/or expensive to come by. In fact, as with many of the articles selected this
one demonstrates the old maxim about how necessity is the mother of invention. No
less an authority on the value of being able to cobble up test equipment from magazine
articles and a box of spare parts than Mac McGregor, proprietor of Mac's Radio Service
Shop, promotes the practice as an essential skill. Even if you don't find the article
useful, at least there's an
electronics-related comic on the page to entertain you.
 Walt Miller drew a lot of
comics for electronics magazines like Popular Electronics,
and he did the cover art for Astounding Science Fiction magazine. No doubt
there were others. I could not find any detailed information about Mr. Miller's
personal background, such as whether he was a Ham radio operator, but clearly he
enjoyed electronics and science topics. This group of comics, which appeared in
the May 1967 issue of Popular Electronics, touches on many scenarios that
would have been familiar to hobbyists of the day. I like the one where the guy sneezes
and scatters carefully counted and sorted resistors all over the floor. Another
refers to installment plans for purchasing equipment. That was from a time when
credit cards were not handed out like candy and only people with provable credit-worthiness
could get them...
 Unlike the Roll Your Own Foil Capacitors
article in the same issue of Popular Electronics magazine, this one advising
how to reactivate leaky capacitors might be of use to a lot more people. The process
is called "reforming," and consists of applying a DC voltage to the faulty capacitor,
beginning at a very low voltage, and then slowly raising the voltage until the rated
working voltage (WVDC) is reached. Doing so, if the capacitor is not beyond rehabilitation,
will reconstitute the oxide layer that serves as the dielectric. This particular
item was presented as the answer to a question posed by a reader. A Google search
on "reform
capacitor" will turn up more detail about the procedure. Most people recommend
against reforming unless you have no other option, as this writer from India might
have faced at the time...
 During my electronics technician days at
the Westinghouse
Electric Company's Oceanic Division in Annapolis, Maryland, I spent the first
couple years building printed circuit boards, wiring harnesses, and system-level
assemblies for U.S. Navy sonar systems. We had some really slick stuff like towed
vehicles with transducer arrays along the sides, nose cones for smart torpedoes,
flow sensors, proximity fuse elements, etc. Exposure to all that, and the super-smart
people that designed it, fuelled my desire to go to the trouble of earning an engineering
degree. One of my tasks for a while was to build the transducer arrays, which entailed
building the hundreds of tiny transducer elements. One of the phased array acoustic
antennas was mounted on each side of the AN/AQS-14 towed sonar vehicle...
 Those of us old enough to remember the classic
Simpson volt-ohmmeter (VOM) from the 1970s will look at this 1949 model appearing
in Radio-Electronics magazine and probably not notice much if any difference.
The basic case design is similar and it appears to be about the same physical size.
The selector switches and potentiometer knobs look familiar as well. The primary
difference is what is inside - a vacuum tube rather than a field-effect transistor
(FET). The
Simpson Model 303 is a vacuum tube voltmeter (VTVM - actually a VTVOH). Prior
to the availability of FETs with their very high input impedance characteristic
(10 MΩ or greater), a vacuum tube input stage was needed to isolate the device
(or circuit) under test (DUT) from the relatively low impedance of the resistor-based
volt-ohm meter (VOM - as with the Simpson Model 260) meter circuitry. The problem
is that a low VOM impedance...
 Shipboard radio operators have
been a crucial part of commercial and military transport since first being implemented
in the early 20th century. Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company's operators
(John "Jack" Phillips and Harold Bride) onboard the
RMS Titanic are credited for saving the ship after it ran into an iceberg
in the north Atlantic, as are the radio operators aboard the RMS Lusitania after German
U-boats mercilessly torpedoed it. Today's sailing vessels, as well as aircraft, are as
reliant upon skillful radio operators and radio equipment as back then. Much has been
automated, but ultimately it is the human element...
 John Gill published many
electronics-themed crossword puzzles in Electronics World
magazine in the 1950s and 1960s. Unlike the weekly RF Cafe engineering crossword
puzzles, some of the words used herein are not directly related to science, engineering,
mathematics, etc. You will find the level of difficulty much less than that of a
Sunday edition New York Times crossword, but there are some challenging
clues, particularly given the era that it was created. Bon chance...
 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 is another example of one of those
advertisements you likely would not see in a modern electronics magazine. There
is nothing fundamentally problematic about its content or message, but politically
correct standards would condemn any depiction of a woman expressing such excessive
appreciation for a man's efforts. It might, after all, convey the idea that all
television antenna servicemen should expect such treatment from all women. It also
implies that only men can be TV antenna servicemen / servicepersons. If that sounds
nutty, well, what can I say. It's the world we live in as evidenced by news items
of late. Keep firmly in mind that what is accepted as a social norm today might
be considered to be a crime in a few decades, so exercise caution in all you do
in the presence of witnesses be it written, videoed, spoken, or acted out...
 Dr. Lee DeForest might have had something
like National Public Radio (est. 1970) in mind when he penned this article in 1933.
In it, the famous vacuum tube amplifier inventor lamented and criticized the commercialization
of broadcasts because of all the paid product announcements (aka commercials) that
had been steadily increasing over the years. He also was critical of the "hit-or-miss,
higgeldy-piggeldy mélange program basis" of programing; i.e., the same station playing
a mix of jazz, opera, swing, syndicated story-telling, etc. The good doctor did
not elaborate on where funding for such dedicated, uncorrupted broadcasts would
originate if not from paying advertisers, and I do not recall ever reading about
a DeForest Radio Network paid for by his vast fortune. I don't like commercials
any more than the next person, but a company deserves time to pitch its products
and/or services if it helps deliver a source of entertainment to you that...
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...
 Wikipedia claims there are about 350 species
of electric fish. Jerry tells fellow electrical and electronics experimenter Carl
that the electric eel is not an eel at all, but a fish. Actually, the eel is a fish
(a knifefish); however - and I needed to look this up - a true eel is a member of
the fish order Anguilliformes, which the electric eel is not. Having no expertise
in the field of eels, I'll leave it at that. Jerry's uncle, who is an active duty
Navy guy, somehow managed to ship an electric eel to him for experimentation purposes.
Doing so might have been possible in 1956 when this episode of "Carl &
Jerry" appeared in Popular Electronics magazine, but today it is doubtful.
Besides that, how to you mail an electric eel to somebody? The pair's measurements
of voltages and pulse widths jive pretty well with modern data. Here is a story
about how electric eels curl to obtain higher voltages for stunning prey...
 In this article from a 1942 issue of
QST magazine, author T.A. Gadwa employs a
standing wave mechanism analogy that I don't recall having
read before - that of a dam on a river. The river is the transmission line with
a lake as the source (presumably) and then he imagines a dam load. The dam
standing waves, per his description, have phase and amplitude characteristics
that depend on how tall the dam wall is relative to the surface height of the
dammed river. An extensive array of graphs is provided showing how the current
of the dam standing waves react to the dam transmission line termination
impedance. I always wonder when seeing electrical-mechanical parity examples
whether, as with this case, there are any dam magazine articles out there that
use an electrical transmission line to help fellow civil engineers...
 No matter how proud I was of my family name,
I do believe I would refrain from using "Kluge" as a company moniker. Maybe the
word did no connate the same meaning in 1946 when this advertisement for the
Kluge Electronics "California Kilowatt" Amateur Radio Station appeared in Radio-Craft
magazine. An extensive WWW search turned up no examples of any surviving Kluge "California
Kilowatt" Amateur Radio Stations. One QRZ website discussion supposed that none
were ever manufactured. Per Wikipedia: "A kludge or kluge (klooj) is a workaround
or quick-and-dirty solution that is clumsy, inelegant, inefficient, difficult to
extend and hard to maintain." It has an interesting etymology. I found references
to the term "California Kilowatt" meaning a transmitter putting out more than the
legal power limit. California Kilowatt is also nowadays the name of a Canadian rock
band...
 A few (many, actually) new terms have been
added to the
transistor lexicon since 1958, but this list from Radio-Electronics
magazine contains more than 150 definitions that are still useful today. It is amazing
that this list was created just a decade after the transistor was invented, and
now half a century later the most commonly used terms have not changed much. A huge
number of elemental compounds, configurations, and process terms have been added
since then, though. All of these are included in my custom dictionary used for creating
the weekly crossword puzzles - compiled over more than two decades... |
