AMRAD: A Brief Overview and Historical Context

Amrad, American Radio & Research Corporation, was based in Medford Hillside, Massachusetts and was founded in 1915 with funds from J. Pierpont Morgan. The company's first manager, Harold James Power, was an amateur radio enthusiast and built a research laboratory. In 1916, Amrad made its first broadcast to J. Pierpont Morgan Jr., who was aboard the ocean liner "Philadelphia."

Amrad received orders for military radio equipment during World War I, but discontinued these orders after the war ended. To keep the company afloat, Amrad produced items such as electric egg beaters and cigar lighters. In 1919, Amrad was awarded a contract to make 400 SE1420 receivers, and it began advertising components for amateur radio enthusiasts. Amrad's crystal set was a popular product and helped the company during difficult times.

In 1923, the company joined the Independent Radio Manufacturers Inc. and acquired the rights to the Hazeltine neutrodyne invention. However, Amrad went into receivership in April 1925 and was purchased by Crosley Radio Corp. for $39,000. Amrad also made gaseous rectifier tubes, including the S tube developed by Charles Grover Smith, which was used for transmitter voltage. Amrad's patents for the gaseous rectifier tubes were eventually sold to Raytheon.

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AI Technical Trustability Update

While working on an update to my RF Cafe Espresso Engineering Workbook project to add a couple calculators about FM sidebands (available soon). The good news is that AI provided excellent VBA code to generate a set of Bessel function plots. The bad news is when I asked for a table showing at which modulation indices sidebands 0 (carrier) through 5 vanish, none of the agents got it right. Some were really bad. The AI agents typically explain their reason and method correctly, then go on to produces bad results. Even after pointing out errors, subsequent results are still wrong. I do a lot of AI work and see this often, even with subscribing to professional versions. I ultimately generated the table myself. There is going to be a lot of inaccurate information out there based on unverified AI queries, so beware.

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