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 In 1961, when these
tech-themed comics appeared in Electronics Illustrated magazine, the
"Space Race" was in full swing. That, along with home hi-fi stereo equipment, newfangled
color televisions, and - gasp - transistors, filled the headlines. They were also
the subject of many forms of humor. These four comics touch on many of those aspects,
all centered on the Space Race. Of course, everything is noticeably dated. "Flunking
the code test" means not much to Amateur radio licensees who earned their first
license (like me, in 2010) after the 5 WPM Morse code requirement was removed. Building
something in "kit form" was a good way to save some money and learn something...
 In our present "No user serviceable parts
inside" world of electronic products, it is easy to understand why very few people
have an appreciation for the technical prowess needed to troubleshoot and repair
them. When reading through these episodes of "Mac's Radio Service Shop" that appeared in mid last century editions
of Radio & Television News magazine, I am inspired to envy the skills
that small electronics repair shop owners had for working on the old vacuum tube
based radio and television sets. Digital electronics has its own unique set of quirks
and special knowledge requirements to troubleshoot, but when everything is analog
rather than merely being required to be a "0" or a "1"...
 "The U.S. Federal Communications Commission
(FCC) has announced that it is once again accepting applications for its
Honors Engineer Program. Initiated in 2018, the one-year development program
gives selected candidates an opportunity to work with FCC personnel on innovative
issues in the communications and high-tech arenas, including 5G communications technology,
the national deployment of broadband services, and communications technologies intended
to improve access to those with disabilities. Those selected to participate in the
Honors Engineer Program will be eligible for continued employment at the agency.
Application to the FCC's Honors Engineer Program is open to recent college graduates
with an engineering degree..."
 This week's crossword puzzle theme is
Amateur Radio. All RF Cafe crossword puzzles are custom made by me, Kirt
Blattenberger, and have only words and clues related to RF, microwave, and mm-wave
engineering, optics, amateur radio, mathematics, chemistry, physics, and other technical
subjects. As always, this crossword puzzle contains no names of politicians, mountain
ranges, exotic foods or plants, movie stars, or anything of the sort unless it/he/she
is related to this puzzle's technology theme...
 Submarines first proved their deadly capabilities
during World War II when Adolph Hitler's navy used them to torpedo not just
military ships but merchant ships in commercial trade routes between the Americas
and Europe. Hideki Tojo's navy used subs to conduct surveillance prior to the deadly
surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Their naturally stealthy environment - underwater
- proved to be a difficult realm both for detection and for attack. Fortunately,
sensor technology developed quickly during the war, and soon a combination of air
and sea based methods were in use and proved very effective. Submariners no longer
sailed in relative security from being treated to a violent, icy burial at sea...
 The leading website for the PCB industry.
PCB Directory is the largest directory of
Printed Circuit Board (PCB)
Manufacturers, Assembly houses, and Design Services on the Internet. We have listed
the leading printed circuit board manufacturers around the world and made them searchable
by their capabilities - Number of laminates used, Board thicknesses supported, Number
of layers supported, Types of substrates (FR-4, Rogers, flexible, rigid), Geographical
location (U.S., China), kinds of services (manufacturing, fabrication, assembly,
prototype), and more. Fast turn-around on quotations for PCB fabrication and assembly.
 As
the Soviet army closed in on the Peenemünde rocket base in March 1945, German engineers
led by
Wernher von Braun initiated a desperate evacuation of their revolutionary research.
Tasked by von Braun, engineer Dieter Huzel organized the transport of tons of top-secret
blueprints and records to avoid capture by the advancing Red Army. Amidst the chaos
of collapsing lines and aerial warfare, Huzel successfully secured the documents
in an abandoned, ironclad mine near Goslar, shielding them from Soviet hands. After
dynamiting the entrance to seal the cache, Huzel and fellow scientists fled westward
to surrender to American forces. Following their successful arrival in U.S. lines,
the location was revealed...
 Sending telegraph messages, whether by wire
or wireless means, has always been expensive, particularly considering charges are
determined by the character (letter, number, symbol). Accordingly, the Shakespearean
line from Hamlet declaring that "brevity is the soul of wit" can be reworked to
"brevity is the soul of economy." A telegraph wire, unlike a telephone call, is
a legally binding communiqué, as is of course a written letter, but a telegram is
immediate transmission of information for time-critical messaging. A series of "commercial codes" were developed enabling senders to save often
significant money by sending multi-character codes that represented entire phrases
and/or sentences. What struck me about this article that appeared in a 1948 issue
of The Saturday Evening Post magazine...
 "With all the many pressures you have as
a product designer, does
electromagnetic
compliance (EMC) always seem like a stumbling block to delaying product sales?
Is your product exhibiting one of the top three failures: radiated emissions, electrostatic
discharge, or radiated immunity? Are you continually cycling between design/fixing
- running to the compliance test lab - failing again - and back to shot-gunning
more fixes? Wondering how to attack these issues earlier in the design cycle? Would
you like to learn how to characterize and troubleshoot simple design issues right
on your workbench? Then, this monthly column is for you..."
 In 1938, the designers at Sears, Roebuck &
Company's, Silvertone radio division were truly thinking "outside the box" when
they came up with this "Rocket" model
Models 6110. It is an ultra compact tabletop design with a unique
rounded top and a huge tuning dial that comprised one entire end of the Bakelite
cabinet, along with a set of six pushbuttons for station recall. Also published
were datasheets on the
Allied Radio Knight Model E10913, the
General Electric Model GD-52,, and the
Zenith Models 6D302, 6D311, 6D326, 6D336, 6D360. An ever-growing
list of models is at the bottom of every page...
 What drew my attention with this
P.R. Mallory & Company advertisement was not an actual
electronic component that they are most noted for - potentiometers, capacitors,
switches, metal alloys, and of course batteries (later renamed Duracell). Philip
Rogers Mallory began his company manufacturing tungsten wire for lamps. Rather what
interested me was the huge variety of standard potentiometer and rotary switch extension
shafts. Unlike modern electronics where pots and switches are typically mounted
to the enclosure with wires running to the circuit assembly, many...
 The failure to recognize
Nathan B. Stubblefield as the primary inventor of radio is a classic example
of how institutional power, financial interests, and the legal machinery of the
telecommunications industry tend to favor those with corporate backing over solitary,
unconventional inventors. Stubblefield's technology, which he demonstrated as early
as 1892, utilized induction and conduction through the earth and water rather than
the electromagnetic wave propagation (Hertzian waves) that ultimately became the
standard for modern radio. Because his method was effective only over relatively
short distances and functioned on different physical principles, it was eclipsed
by the work of Guglielmo Marconi. Marconi was the superior marketing force. He was
backed by a massive corporate infrastructure and was savvy in securing international
patents...
 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 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...
 Here are a couple more
electronics-themed comics, this time ones that appeared in the October 1951
edition of Radio & Television News magazine. When is the last time
you saw a comic in a technical magazine? Note the AC power cord attached to the
"portable" television. Television was a big deal in the day (I assume the "His"
on the guy's towel implies that "Hers" is at the other end of the power cord). Color
TV was not commercially available until a few years later. Nowadays, a person would
have a smartphone, tablet, or notebook computer while on the can. There is a huge
list of other comics at the bottom of the page...
 "Once upon a time in Europe, television
remote controls had a magic
teletext
button. Years before the internet stole into homes, pressing that button brought
up teletext digital information services with hundreds of constantly updated pages.
Living in Ireland in the 1980s and '90s, my family accessed the national teletext
service - Aertel - multiple times a day for weather and news bulletins, as well
as things like TV program guides and updates on airport flight arrivals. It was
an elegant system: fast, low bandwidth, unaffected by user load, and delivering
readable text even on analog television screens. So when I recently saw it was the
40th anniversary of Aertel's test transmissions, it reactivated a thought that had
been rolling around in my head for years..."
 I have a confession to make regarding the
puzzle titles. While all
RF Cafe crosswords do in fact use only my hand-entered dictionary
of terms and clues (literally thousands accumulated over the years) that pertain
exclusively to science, engineering, chemistry, physics, mathematics, astronomy,
etc., the choice for a particular title is to help attract search engines to the
page. There is nothing deceptive going on, just an attempt to exploit the nature
of search engine algorithms that rank pages based on meta tags coinciding with relevant...
 Sam Benzacar, of Anatech Electronics, an
RF and microwave filter company, has published his
April 2026 Newsletter that, along with timely news items, features his short
op-ed titled "Bell Labs in Murray Hill Celebrates." Sam, whose company is located
not far from Murray Hill, extolls the many discoveries and inventions that took
place there since its founding in 1925 as Bell Telephone Laboratories. It was originally
a subsidiary of AT&T and Western Electric, later becoming part of Lucent Technologies
and Alcatel-Lucent before Nokia's acquisition in 2016. Sam reports on the facilities'
recent 100th anniversary celebration. The list of accomplishments would will volumes...
 The transformative role of ferrites - crystalline
structures composed of iron oxide and metallic additives - in advancing modern electronics,
is reported in this 1961 Electronics Illustrated magazine article. Ferrites
uniquely combine magnetic properties with electrical insulation, enabling high efficiency
at frequencies where standard iron cores fail due to eddy current losses. This "electronic
wonder material" proved critical for television development, allowing for larger
picture tubes through efficient flyback transformers and deflection yokes. Furthermore,
ferrites revolutionized computing by providing reliable, compact memory cells, replacing
failure-prone vacuum tubes in machines like the Whirlwind I. Beyond these core
applications, the material facilitates innovations such as ultrasonic ...
 "In 1627, a year after the death of the
philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon, a short, evocative tale of his was published.
The New Atlantis describes how a ship blown off course arrives at an unknown island
called Bensalem. At its heart stands Salomon's House, an institution devoted to
'the knowledge
of causes, and secret motions of things' and to 'the effecting of all things
possible.' The novel captured Bacon's vision of a science built on skepticism and
empiricism and his belief that understanding and creating were one and the same
pursuit. No mere scholar's study filled with curiosities, Salomon's House had deep-sunk
caves for refrigeration, towering structures for astronomy, sound-houses for acoustics,
engine-houses..."
 Werbel's new
WM2PD-1.5-20.5-S-ECO, 2-way power divider covers 1.5 to 20.5 GHz and is
designed for engineers who need wideband performance in a compact, cost-efficient
package. Optimized for size, bandwidth, and manufacturability, it is well suited
for high-volume applications, lab use, and general-purpose signal distribution where
extreme port match is not required. Designed, assembled, and tested in the USA.
"No Worries with Werbel!"
 The radar system I worked on in the USAF
used two early memory types described in this 1956 Popular Electronics
magazine article. In fact, the radar was designed during that era, so it is no surprise.
Our IFF secondary radar had a whopping 1 kilobyte of
magnetic core memory in its processor circuitry. It consisted of 1024 tiny toroids
mounted in a square matrix with four hair-width enamel coated wires running through
them as x and y magnetization current lines, sense, and inhibit functions. If my
memory serves me (pun intended) after three decades away from it, the TTL circuitry
(no microprocessor) stored range values to calculate speed and direction from sample
to sample. The other memory type was a mercury acoustic delay line contraption having
a piezoelectric transducer at one end to launch an electrical pulse along its length
and another transducer at the other end to convert back to an electrical pulse...
 These are the schematics and parts list
for vintage vacuum tube radios
Westinghouse Model H-133;
Arvin Models 150TC, 151TC; and
Admiral Model 7C63, Chassis 7C1 as they appeared in the December
1947 issue of Radio News magazine. I scan and post these for the benefit
of hobbyists and historians seeking such information. As time goes by, there is
less and less likelihood that records of these relics from yesteryear's archives
will be made available. As with all historical information, it takes someone with
a personal interest in preserving the memories in order to fulfill the mission...
 KR Electronics has been designing and manufacturing custom filters
for military and commercial radio, radar, medical, and communications since 1973.
KR Electronics' line of filters includes lowpass, highpass, bandpass, bandstop,
equalizer, duplexer, diplexer, and individually synthesized filters for special
applications - both commercial and military. State-of-the-art computer synthesis,
analysis, and test methods are used to meet the most challenging specifications.
All common connector types and package form factors are available. Designed and
manufactured in the USA. Please visit NIC today
to see how we might be of assistance.
 Here is another electronics quiz for you
to try. Intuition from experience goes a long way here, but if all else fails you
can work out the details of the rectifier circuits to determine
which lamp received the most current. Keep in mind that the diode
symbols are not LEDs; it is the "A," "B," and "C" symbols inside circles
that are the lamps whose brightnesses are being considered. LEDs did exist at the
time this quiz was created in 1969, but the circuits would perform differently if
in fact LEDs were used for double duty of rectification and illumination...
 The more things change, the more they stay
the same. That saying applies to many recreational activities. Pick up a copy of
QST magazine that was published in the last year and look at
reader comments and you will find laments about the dwindling
participation of youngsters, an increased degree of incivility and rule breaking
during engagement, the high cost of getting into the hobby, yadda yadda yadda. I
witness it regularly in the model aircraft world, too. That is not to say the issues
are not true or irrelevant, just that they are persistent. Each generation, it has
been said, tends to think...
 I have long-maintained that the vast majority
of electrical problems on consumer products can be attributed to bad connector or
switch contacts. Just yesterday, I restored a 1970's-era TI talking kids' toy to
working order just by cleaning the plug-in program module and mating motherboard
contacts. RF Cafe website visitor / contributor Bob Davis sent this suggestion for
curing intermittent or non-responsive front panel buttons on test equipment and
other electronic gear like radios, remote keypads, games, tools, vehicles, keyboards,
locks, etc. His problem was with a R&S spectrum analyzer. He found a solution
from ButtonWorx, who manufactures replacement
pressure contacts for a large range of products. Some are entire arrays to replace
original parts, and others are individual switches for custom requirements.
 You wouldn't know it from the schematic,
but this
Coronet
Model C-2 tabletop radio has a very unique feature: The tuning scale/pointer,
and volume and tuning knobs are on the top of the case, that is, the face of the
radio points upward when properly displayed. When searching for photos of the Coronet
C2, I found a few examples where the radio was sitting on a surface with the face
situated vertically like a standard model, but the feet are clearly on the side
opposite the face. The schematic and parts list for the Coronet C2 radio appeared
in the February 1947 issue of Radio News magazine. There are still many
people who restore and service these vintage radios, and often it can be difficult
or impossible to find schematics and/or tuning information. I keep a running list
of all data sheets to facilitate a search...
|
 • UK
Secure Quantum Communications Boost
• 2026
PC Sales down 11.3%, Tablets down 7.9%
• Starlink
Becoming Mainstream Option
• U.S.
Engineering
Ph.D. Programs Losing Students?
• What
Hormuz Exposed About Semi Supply Chain
 The
RF Cafe Homepage Archive
is a comprehensive collection of every item appearing daily on this website since
2008 - and many from earlier years. Many thousands of pages of unique content have
been added since then.
 I was very surprised to find an example of
a rather significant flexible printed circuit substrate in this "Printed
Circuits Are Here to Stay," article appearing in a 1959 issue of Radio-Electronics
magazine. That era was when much debate, particularly amongst service people, was
occurring regarding whether printed circuits would be a welcome replacement for
the previous point-to-point wiring method of connecting components and cables. Proponents
appreciated the neatness and compactness, while opponents didn't like the lack of
robustness and intolerance to heating and pulling off mounted components. What was
even more interesting was the mention of a "Persister" element, that was made by
Ramo-Wooldridge - the "RW" part of "TRW" (Thompson Ramo Wooldridge, which merged
in 1958). A Web search on persister turns up only biological cells which resist
antimicrobial treatments...
 Comics in modern magazines are a rather
rare phenomenon for some reason, but they were fairly regular features up until
a couple decades ago. This set of
comics from the July 1963 edition of Popular Electronics deals with
high fidelity (Hi-Fi) stereo equipment, which was considered somewhat exotic and
high-end for many people's budgets in the day. Inexplicably (not), that is about
the time that increases in hearing losses among younger people were first being
noticed in audiograms.
 Windfreak Technologies is proud to announces
the availability of our
FT108, an innovative
programmable bidirectional filter bank spanning a frequency range of 5 MHz
to 8 GHz in 15 bands. Band selection can be controlled through USB, UART or
at high speeds through powerful triggering modes. Each unit is factory tested via
network analyzer with unique data stored in the device to help with its use. Crossover
frequencies are stored so the user can send a frequency command and the FT108 will
utilizes Intelligent Band Selection logic to automatically toggle the optimal
filter path based on minimum insertion loss. Readback of FT108 insertion loss at
any frequency between crossover points allows for easy amplitude leveling...
 Would you work a 44-hour week for $127? That's
$6,600/yr, or $2.89/hr for a highly skilled
electronics technician in 1969. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics'
Inflation Calculator, the equivalent pay in 2017 would be $45,703.89/yr, or $19.98/hr. A
quick look at the current pay rate for an E4 pay grade in the USAF is $2,139/mo ($25,668/yr).
That does not factor in free housing, meals, and medical care (including for all dependents)
- which has significant value. GlassDoor reports the average salary for an
electronics technician in 2017 was $42,390. That amount is actually a bit lower
than the 1969 average. Assuming the present...
 Maybe it comes from having crossed the half-century
Rubicon, but with increasing frequency I find myself seeking out vintage magazines
to learn how the world used to be. I am a realist who has no misconceptions about
how idyllic things used to be and that today is utter debauchery, but it is apparent
from a lot of the publications that we surely have changed significantly in the
last 50+ years - better in some ways, worse in others. For many years I have been
purchasing of WWII era
QST magazines off eBay. As I have been doing for a while on my Airplanes and
Rockets website, I am going to begin scanning and posting vintage electronics magazine
advertisements and articles. A lot of the information is timeless in its application,
especially since vacuum tubes are still in widespread use in the Amateur Radio realm.
Of course electronics...
 In his April 1946 Radio-Craft editorial
column, Hugo Gernsback reflected on the great advances made during the past half-decade's
war efforts, and predicts that the
field of radio-electronics will see explosive growth. Of course it didn't require
Mr. Gernsback's usual extraordinary visionary skills to make such a claim at
that time. Cyclotrons, Betatrons, VHF, UHF, and microwave amplifiers and vacuum
tubes, cathode-ray tubes, transmission lines, waveguide, and countless other technologies
had recently been developed anew or improved from pre-war designs. Engineers and
technicians were to benefit greatly from the advances, as would, eventually, consumers
who would be buying the wonderful new products made from those newfangled devices.
Coming soon - likely much to his surprise...
 Believe it or not,
cathode ray tubes (CRT's) are still manufactured for specialty products and
for replacement parts. Even with a high level of automation, there are still steps
in the manufacturing process that require human handling. A comparison between CRT
plants in the USA and Germany show the similarity but distinctly different processes
in Sylvania and Telefunken operations, respectively. The photos shown are from an
article in a 1958 edition of Popular Electronics. At the bottom of this page are
videos of a modern CRT manufacturing process and a CRT recycling effort. As you
will see, properly recycling a CRT is about as manually intensive as manufacturing
one (but with no quality control and functionality concerns). I am not sure where
the profit is in recycling unless inflation over the 10-20 years since manufacturing
makes the value of materials worth the effort. A très cool documentary film on the
designing...
 The March 1954 issue of Radio-Electronics
magazine provided five
electronics-themed comics for readers to enjoy. Thanks to a certain individual
who has posted hundreds of these vintage comics, you are able to also able to benefit
from them. The themes are a bit dated and might not be familiar to those of you
not familiar with the issues of concern to people of the era. Television was a fairly
new technology for most households, and there was a mixture of joy and frustration
by owners because while they were thrilled with being able to watch TV, signal reception
and equipment reliability could be a real headache. Just as with today's rapid advance
in electronics technology, the pace of new and wonderful products being introduced
to the market was impressive, although many ideas were too far ahead of reality
to facilitate a successful market introduction - like for instance the video-phone
featured in the comic on page 106. Stereo sound was another high-end feature addressed
in the page 104 comic. I won't even comment on the nudist colony comic...
 This
Electronics "B" Quiz by the Popular Electronics magazine's quizmaster
Robert Balin appeared in the July 1969 issue. Most of his quizzes are fairly easy
to score well on, some are pretty darn difficult, and some are a cinch. This one
falls into the latter category. That said, I could not get item #2, and honestly
even after seeing the answer at the bottom of the page, it still doesn't seem familiar.
Don't let the sketch for item #1 throw you because it shows a vacuum tube; just
mentally substitute a FET. Item #6's answer is not "bulb;" it refers to the base
type. You'll need some familiarity with color TV analog signals to get item #9.
If you don't know about color TV signals, then calculate your score as [number correct]/9*100%....
 An article with instructions relating to
subjects like overthrow, balance, friction, and cleaning could very well be about
a country's revolutionary struggles. In this case, it is an article about how to
rejuvenate a persnickety or inaccurate mechanical (aka analog)
meter movement. W.R. Triplett, relative (I assume) of meter manufacturer Ray L.
Triplett, is the author (Triplett is now owned by Jewel Instruments). There are
a lot of analog meters around in labs, workshops, and garages. Unless they have
been burnt out, most probably still work like new. Occasionally, however, the movements
get sticky because of accumulations of dirt and dust, bug filth, or even from corrosion.
This article offers some great tips for making them serviceable again...
 It was a lot of work, but I finally finished
a version of the "RF &
Electronics Schematic & Block Diagram Symbols"" that works well with Microsoft
Office™ programs Word™, Excel™, and Power Point™. This is an equivalent of the extensive
set of amplifier, mixer, filter, switch, connector, waveguide, digital, analog,
antenna, and other commonly used symbols for system block diagrams and schematics
created for Visio™. Each of the 1,000+ symbols was exported individually from Visio
in the EMF file format, then imported into Word on a Drawing Canvas. The EMF format
allows an image to be scaled up or down without becoming pixelated, so all the shapes
can be resized in a document and still look good. The imported symbols can also
be UnGrouped into their original constituent parts for editing...
 It
is the opinion of historians that in order to understand the present, you need to
know the past. Searching for one's roots in this world is big business. Online family
tree type websites are used by thousands of people to research their family histories,
and some services don't come cheap. You can even pay someone to dig into your past
to assimilate all available information and put it in a bound, printed volume. Here
on RF Cafe, I research and post a lot of our profession's past.
While the individual topics themselves might no bear significantly on the
present, having an insight into the people's mindsets and progression of
technology is...
 Here is an advertisement by
Emerson Radio and Television from the November 6, 1948, edition of the The Saturday
Evening Post. By 1948, America and the free world was well into the
conversion of wartime production back into commercial and consumer products.
After many long years of allocating factory space, personnel, and resources to
beating back the forces of Communism, Marxism, Socialism, and other evil forms
of 'isms," the good times were returning. FM radio broadcasting stations were
increasing rapidly in number, providing static-free listening even in areas of
weak reception. Television was still a relatively new phenomenon for most
households. The tabletop Model 571 "Image Perfection" television carried a price
of $299.50 in 1948, which is the equivalent of a whopping $4,076* in 2025!!! No
wonder not many homes had TV sets...
 There is a physical limit to how small of
a distance may separate two distinct objects (line, dots, etc.), generally agreed
to be about half a wavelength of the color being observed, and be seen with perfect
human eye. Applying that rule of thumb to blue light with a wavelength of approximately
4000 Å (400 nm) yields a distance of 200 nm. Accordingly, there is
no amount of magnification possible which will allow a healthy human eye to resolve
objects closer together than that. Even with perfect optics, magnifications of greater
than about 1500x are not able to render greater detail. To resolve smaller distance
requires shorter wavelengths, but we cannot see them directly and need a device
to transform the detected image into a visible image. That is what an
electron microscope does to enable molecule sized particle to be "seen." The
SARS-CoV-2 particle has been measured by electron microscopy and found to range
between 50 to 140 nm, so it cannot be viewed directly with an optical microscope.
Cigarette smoke is about 400 nm in diameter...
 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...
 Bell
Telephone Company played an important role in the development of the aviation industry
by providing communications systems for airlines. As intimated in this promotion
in Boys' Life magazine, in 1961, Bell introduced the
"air-ground-air" radio system, which allowed pilots to communicate directly
with air traffic controllers on the ground, improving safety and efficiency in air
travel. This system was a major technological advancement, as it replaced the earlier
system of communicating via Morse code, which was slow and prone to errors. The
air-ground-air system allowed pilots to communicate in real-time with controllers,
enabling faster and more accurate instructions for takeoff, landing, and navigating
airspace. Bell Telephone Company continued to innovate in the aviation industry,
introducing new technologies such as satellite-based navigation systems and weather
radar systems, which have greatly improved air travel safety and efficiency...
 As radio equipment builders and operators,
we still battle two fundamental issues that have been around since the beginning
of time (well, from Marconi's time, anyway) -
grounding and power supply fluxuations. Both topics are addressed briefly here
in this editorial column from a 1932 The Wireless World magazine. Back
in the day, grounding was referred to as "earthing," and was/is essential to optimal
wireless and wired performance. Line voltage fluxuations are generally much less
severe today than in the 1930s thanks to better transformers, automated monitoring
and adjusting of line voltages, and better distribution designs. The worst type
of power line fluxuation - a lightning-induced surge - has been greatly reduced
thanks to superior engineering, primarily by the simple running of a grounded neutral
"static" wire running at the top of all the lines below it on utility poles and
transmission towers...
 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...
 It hasn't been just Miss America contestants
that have wished for world peace over the years. In April 1967, this article entitled
"World
Peace and Amateur Radio" was published in Popular Electronics magazine
extolling the efforts of Ham radio operators in attempting to break through communications
barriers erected by governments. Amateur signals could reach into the USSR, Cuba,
China, North Korea, and all the other hopelessly oppressed regions of the world
- even Chicago ;-) - to let people know that there is hope beyond the Iron Curtain
of Communism. This particular story reports on one Ham's outreach to the people
of Japan which, fortunately for them, was not a member of the "Red club." When this
article was first posted in 2013, Yemen and North Korea prohibited amateur radio
communications with the United States. According to the FCC website, there are currently
no countries on the banned list... |
