GoKawiilHugo Gernsback - A Concise Biography Being a big fan of Hugo Gernsback's technical work through his many electronics-related publications (The Electrical Experimenter, Radio Amateur News, Radio News, Radio-Craft, Short-Wave Craft, Radio-Electronics, etc.), I decided to task a couple of different AI models with conducting a deep-dive research project on all aspects of his background - family, schooling, business, finances, politics, etc. Then, I had the AI combine all results, while avoiding duplication, and filtering out "facts" that cannot be validated. A lot of websites contain Hugo Gernsback bios of varying lengths, but this, I believe, is the most comprehensive and concise. Photos were collected across the WWW... Amateur Radio Crossword Puzzle This custom Amateur Radio crossword puzzle contains many words particular to Amateur Radio (labeled with an asterisk *). Each week for two decades I have created a new technology-themed crossword puzzle using only words (1,000s of them) from my custom-created lexicon related to engineering, science, mathematics, chemistry, physics, astronomy, etc. You will never find among the words names of politicians, mountain ranges, exotic foods or plants, movie stars, or anything of the sort. You might, however, find someone or something in the otherwise excluded list directly related to this puzzle's technology theme, such as Hedy Lamarr or the Bikini Atoll... How Audions Were Built If you have never read the story of Lee de Forest's journey from initial experiments to finally achieving success with his amplifying vacuum tube, the Audion, then you might want to take a few minutes to look over this article. It was published in a 1947 issue of Radio-Craft magazine as part of the 40th anniversary of the invention that changed the electronics world. With so many other things which are nowadays very commonplace, we tend to not think about or appreciate the ingenuity and effort that went into them. It is one thing to make incremental improvements in an existing technology, but to conceive of and created an entirely new realm of science is quite another. As with Albert... Student's Radio Physics Course - Series & Parallel Circuits Not everyone who visits websites like RF Cafe is a seasoned electronics veteran. While I and most likely you, too, can do series and parallel circuit analysis (and series/parallel for that matter, possibly using Fourier or La Place transforms for reactive AC circuits) in our sleep, many are recently getting into the wonderful world of electronics who are just coming of age or have suddenly at a later point in life developed a passion for the craft. Accordingly, this article from Radio News magazine provides yet another tutorial on the fundamentals of series and parallel circuit analysis. Only resistors and basic Ohms law are covered... Exodus AMP20005 18-40 GHz, 20 W SSPA Exodus Advanced Communications presents the AMP20005 is a solid-state RF power amplifier operating from 18.0 to 40.0 GHz with 20 W minimum power. Designed for EMI/RFI, laboratory, CW/pulse, and communication applications, the amplifier features instantaneous wide bandwidth, Class A/AB linear design, built-in protection circuits, and remote-control capabilities. Features Include * Designed for EMI/RFI, lab, CW/Pulse and all communications applications * Small form factor, rack-mounted system * Class A/AB linear design * High power advanced technology devices * Instantaneous ultra-wide bandwidth * Built-in protection circuitry... Thévenin's Theorem Quiz Thévenin's theorem stands as one of the most powerful circuit simplification tools in electrical engineering. It states that any linear, two-terminal network - no matter how complex - can be reduced to an equivalent circuit comprising a single voltage source (V TH ) in series with a single resistance (R TH ). To determine these parameters, engineers short all independent voltage sources, open all independent current sources, and calculate the equivalent resistance seen from the terminals. V TH is simply the open-circuit voltage across the terminals. This theorem proves invaluable when analyzing how different loads affect circuit performance, as the equivalent circuit remains unchanged... Comics with an Electronics Theme Here are a couple more tech-themed comics from a vintage electronics magazine (Popular Electronics). The one from page 101 reminds me again about how different the world of retail sales is today compared to just two short decades ago. Prior to the advent of online marketing and sales, you either walked into a brick and mortar (a term rarely heard before the Internet era) type store and walked out with your purchased product, or you thumbed through a catalog and placed an order either by mail or telephone. Most people opted to pay for a postage stamp rather than pay the long distance phone charge (a term rarely heard today). Free overnight or 2-day shipping from many e-stores makes... Ward Para-Con Antenna The word prefix "para" can mean "above and beyond" or "resembling" or "abnormal or incorrect." Ward Products probably preferred first two be inferred by potential customers when naming their PARA-CON television antenna, although it actually is a shortening of "parabolic." The "con" part is a shortening of "conical." After reading the text of this full-page advertisement from a 1951 issue of Radio & Television News magazine, I'm inclined to assign the third prefix meaning of "para" to it. Then, add in the "con" part where "con" can take on either the noun form meaning of "disadvantage" or the verb form definition of "to trick or defraud," and you get what this antenna truly represented in terms... Transmission-Line Feed for Short-Wave Antennas When someone with the first name of "True" writes an article about transmission line feeds for short-wave antennas, you should probably take note. This very topic has been covered in detail many times since the use of impedance-matched transmission lines have been in use (more than a century), but since there are always people new to the concept, it is good to keep introducing the topic on a regular basis."Transmission-Line Feed for Short-Wave Antennas" appeared in a 1932 issue of QST magazine. Even in this era of prefabricated everything, it still often comes down to winding coils and adjusting cable lengths to get optimal impedance matches between transceivers and antennas... Electrodrome: Fog and Poison Gas Dissipator The 1934 Flying Aces magazine's "Electrodrome: Fog and Poison Gas" article described a device invented by William Haight that allegedly used high-voltage electrostatic fields to "precipitate" fog over a radius of about 1.5 miles and, by extension, might neutralize poison gas. The concept was based on a real physical phenomenon - charged droplets and aerosols can be moved, collected, or coalesced by electric fields - but the article's large-scale claims and Haight's atmospheric theory do not align with modern atmospheric physics. The likely outcome was failure as a practical outdoor fog-dispersal or poison-gas-defense system. I found no credible evidence that Haight's electrodrome was adopted by airports, the U.S. government, military... Electronic Crossword Puzzle This "Electronic Crossword" appeared in the September 1958 issue of Radio & TV News magazine. Its creator, John Gill, designed specialty theme crossword puzzles for many other editions of Radio & TV News and Electronics World (see the big list at the bottom of the page). He considered this crossword to be a "fooler" because he claims to include many "unusual definitions and a number of obscure words which you will have to work around if your vocabulary of 'exotic words' is rusty." It really doesn't seem so difficult to me, and anyone used to working my custom RF Cafe Crosswords will have no problem with it... Building Your Own Audio Frequency Choke Coils One very satisfying aspect of 'rolling your own' audio frequency coils (aka chokes, aka inductors), is how well the simple inductance equations match measured end results. Unless you really manage to mangle the job, if you use the right equation and are reasonably careful to observe wire size, spacing (including insulation), and core diameter, you will be amazed at how close practice matches theory. Although strictly speaking audio frequencies run from a few Hertz up to maybe 15 kHz for people with really good hearing. My experience is that similar success can be had even into the low MHz realm with just a little tuning required. It's not until you get into the realm of self-resonance... Heath Company: Heathkit Advertisement Heathkit's claim to fame was that it was able to offer user-assembled kits of high quality electronic products at a price lower than what equivalent factory assembled equivalents would cost. While that is probably generally the case, it is difficult to gauge what the relative quality really is. Some of the kits were easy to assemble for even people with little experience, but a good portion of them required familiarity with soldering and how electronics were put together. The instructions provided were very thorough, complete with photos and drawings of how each step should look. In fact, according to a 1972 installment of Mac's Service Shop entitled "Philosophy of a Kit Manufacturer," every Heathkit kit... RF Cafe Quiz #92: Electric Fields An electric field is a vector field that surrounds electrically charged particles and exerts a force on all other charged particles in the field, either attracting or repelling them. It is the fundamental manifestation of the electric force, acting as the intermediary through which charges communicate. From the static potential of a charged capacitor plate to the dynamic, wave-propagating fields of an antenna, electric fields are central to electronics, semiconductor physics, and electromagnetics. This Electric Fields Quiz explores the principles that govern these invisible forces, including the inverse-square relationship defined by Coulomb's Law, the concept of electric potential (voltage)... The Tecnetron: Competitor to the Transistor? Breaking news from May 1958: "Hardly a month passes nowadays without the announcement of some 'sensational' new amplifying device. The great majority of these startling inventions, after their brief flurry in the popular and technical press, disappear into oblivion. But we believe that the Tecnetron, just announced in France, has a brilliant and enduring future." Have you ever heard of a Tecnetron? I didn't think so; neither had I before reading this article in Radio-Electronics. I guess that pretty much negates the preceding prediction. The holy grail of the Tecnetron, whose etymology in and of itself is worth reading about (it's not what you would guess), is that its transconductance... Simpson Electric Company Advertisement Before the days of cheap stuff from China, the supply of most common items- particularly high technology - were the domain of relatively few companies. In some ways it was not entirely a bad thing because, at least theoretically, the economy of scale enabled larger producers to leverage bulk buying, well-equipped development labs and manufacturing equipment, and pooling of talent resources to sell quality products at a lower price. Of course it required that the company had serious competitors or monopolistic tendencies resulted in gouging - it's human nature, unfortunately. Hewlett Packed, as much as I appreciate what the company did for electronics test equipment, had gotten... Varian Associates Radar Illustrations by C.E.B. Bernard Frequent RF Cafe visitor who goes by the moniker "Unknown Engineer" sent me a hyperlink to a PDF file on Amazon's CloudFront* content delivery network (CDN - basically a file server) that contains no fewer than 17 amazing radar and vacuum tube related line drawings published by Varian Associates' TWT Division, Palo Alto Tube Division, Solid State Division, Eastern Tube Division, Western Tube Division, Solid State West Division. These highly detailed and busy drawings were done around 1975 by British illustrator/artist C.E.B. Bernard; a search for his works did not reveal much. The events shown are fictitious, as are the accompanying hand-printed stories. Some of the puns...
Loading history... 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. Parlor Game, Popular Electronics When I ran across this article in a 1966 issue of Popular Electronics, it reminded me of a fairly recent situation that happened to me at home. People in the 1960's were at the beginning of the consumer electronics revolution, and anytime you could work some newfangled high tech gadget into an activity it was a good thing. A lot of the Carl by Jerry stories by John T. Frye, published in the same era, illustrate the point. My tale has to do with hearing an unidentifiable woman's voice coming from "somewhere" that seemed to be inside the house. There are some times when a combination of... TV Trouble Quiz Very few people these days would have any clue as to the causes of the CRT-type TV picture problems shown here - I certainly don't, even after looking at the answers (except for #4, which is pretty obvious given the choices offered). What I can claim is to have likely seen each one of those types of issues with all the cheap TV sets I've owned (especially #9). My current 26" LCD television (I only own one TV), which is ten years old this year, is still working fine and never displays any of those funny patterns. In the days of the Macs TV Service Shop stories, survival in the business... RF Cafe Engineering & src="../miscellany/homepage-archive/2019 Puzzle April 22 Each week, for the sake of all avid cruciverbalists amongst us, I create a new technology-themed crossword puzzle using only words from my custom-created lexicon related to engineering, science, mathematics, chemistry, physics, astronomy, etc. You will never find among the words names of politicians, mountain ranges, exotic foods or plants, movie stars, or anything of the sort. You might, however, see someone or something in the exclusion list who or that is directly related to this puzzle's theme, such as Hedy... Quasi-Peak Detector Measurements RF Cafe visitor Cris Schulze saw the Design News article I linked to titled, "EMI Emissions Testing: Peak, Quasi-Peak, and Average Measurements," and has given permission to reprint his brief response to it (originally posted on LinkedIn). The included notebook image includes an excerpt from Wikipedia's quasi-peak detector page, and he illustrates a block diagram of the test chain with de Forest's audion circuit that provides the fast rise-time and slow fall-time that characterizes it. A table of actual test data compares quasi-peak measurements to average measurements... Hughes Aerospace Division Employment Advertisement Hughes Aerospace Division (now part of Boeing Satellite Development Center) built the Syncom satellites for NASA in the early 1960s, at the dawn of the space communications era. Syncom is short for Synchronous communications, so named because it was the first operational satellite placed in a geosynchronous orbit. It was a big deal because its stationary positioning meant that not only was it constantly in view of earth-based communications stations, but earth-based antennas did not need to have expensive, sophisticated tracking systems to access the satellite. Once the Gold Rush had panned out (pun intended) in California, the booming aerospace industry was one of the largest attractions for the state. Hughes' advertisement in this 1965 issue of Electronics magazine targets circuit designers who were thinking of "high" in terms of getting a satellite high into outer space in geosynchronous... What Ground? Establishing a good ground connection is more important than ever with all the vulnerable electronics devices connected to house wiring for the Internet of Things (IoT). The old saying of "Ground is ground the world around" is only true if you actually have a good path to that ground potential. This article discusses methods for determining whether or not you have a low resistance ground interface, and how to establish one if needed. However, that is only the below-grade part of the equation [ground rod(s) and possibly conduction-enhancing chemicals]. Installing a low resistance and equally important low inductance path above grade to the below grade component(s) is essential for maximum protection. Lightning is a transient phenomenon, so the di/dt part of the v(t) = L * di/dt equation governing voltage across an inductor... Electronics in an Industrial Plant Factory automation has long been a point of contention between labor groups interested in retaining manual labor jobs and management groups interested in increasing production output rates and lowering operational costs. That beer bottle inspection job once performed by Laverne & Shirley at the Shotz Brewing Company is today handled by computer-controlled, networked robots. Ever-advancing technology has significantly enhanced the ability to monitor and control processes that help reduce scrap, remove workers from dangerous environments, and create higher quality goods. YouTube is full of videos showing factory automation for all sorts of tasks from forming springs to machining intricate surfaces to performing final inspection measurements on electronic, mechanical, and pharmaceutical products. In the last decade the Internet of Things (IoT) philosophy... Electronic Crosswords, April 1960 Electronics World 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... "Tunnel Diodes" - Experimental Semiconductors Tunnel diodes came onto the commercial, military, and aerospace scene in the late 1950s. Exploiting the phenomenon of quantum-mechanical tunneling, the device exhibits a negative resistance region which makes it suitable for amplifier and oscillator applications. It also permits operation into the tens of gigahertz realm, which was new ground at the time. X-band and above was the exclusive realm of laboratory-based experiments using klystrons and exotic chemical oscillators (pseudo-maser - microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation). Tunnel diodes quickly became a part of miniaturized radar units, battery-powered communications systems, undercover (spy) operations, and many other applications... How to Spot and Eliminate Mobile Radio Noise Electrical noise problems in automotive environments is almost never a problem now that most forms of communications therein are fundamentally immune to ignition and even computer interference. We relics who still listen to AM radio still sometimes suffer noise from lightning static, extreme arcing from electric service connections, and, yes, even from ignition sources. In fact, occasionally while listening to AM radio in my 2011 Jeep Patriot I will detect a whine that is proportional to engine speed. It is not annoying enough to warrant going to the trouble of chasing down and mitigating the source; I can live with it. This 1966 Popular Electronics magazine article presents a very thorough treatise on ignition noise causes and cures. The techniques are still applicable to modern vehicles... Westernizing Japan Here is an editorial excerpt from a 1965 issue of Electronics magazine that could be from a contemporary news publication: "If U. S. manufacturers continue to abandon their engineering and production for Japanese products, they are headed for oblivion because they cannot compete with the purely merchandising organizations such as Sears, Roebuck & Co. and Montgomery Ward* which buy Japanese products too." Of course you could easily substitute South Korea, China, Taiwan, or any other now-prominent technology company in place of Japan. American economic "experts" assured us in the 1990s that we no longer needed to manufacture anything; rather, we would become a service and retail economy. That worked out real well, eh?... RF Cafe Engineering Crossword Puzzle w/Weekly Headlines for August 5 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 list related to engineering, science, mathematics, chemistry, physics, astronomy, etc. At least 10 clues with an asterisk (*) in this technology-themed crossword puzzle are pulled from the past week's (7/30 - 8/3) "Tech Industry Headlines" column on the RF Cafe homepage. You will never find among the words names of politicians, mountain ranges, exotic foods or plants, movie stars, or anything of the sort. You might, however, see someone or something in the exclusion list directly related to this puzzle's theme, such as Hedy Lamar or the Bikini Atoll, respectively. Enjoy!... Electronic Measurements Quiz Popular Electronics ' master quizmaster Robert P. Balin created this "Electronic Measurements Quiz" to test your ability to match the indicated component with one of the commonly associated parameter units. For instance, if a carbon resistor was illustrated, you would choose, if offered as an option, the temperature coefficient of resistance unit of ppm/°C. I erroneously swapped the units for item A and item H (80% score). Oh well, there goes the cumulative quiz GPA. Maybe you will do better... Mac's Service Shop: Servicing Amateur Equipment According to sources I can find, it wasn't until the early 1970s that most (>50%) of homes in America had air conditioning. Many homes on my boyhood street, including ours, didn't get their first window unit until the late 1960s. We suffered through some pretty miserable hot, humid summers just a few blocks from the Chesapeake Bay in Annapolis, Maryland. Going into stores - especially grocery stores, was a great relief from the oppressive heat. The A&P frozen foods aisle, with the open freezers, was my favorite spot. It's kind of gross, in retrospect, to imagine all the sweat that dripped off people and onto the icy packages lying in the freezers. Electronics service shops of the era definitely required air conditioning to keep all the vacuum tube TVs and radios cool while troubleshooting and aligning them... Electronics Math Quiz 1965 was near the beginning of the transition from vacuum tubes (plasma state) to semiconductors (solid state). If you are not familiar with tube circuits, when deciding what type of mathematical operation is being performed by each circuit, mentally replace the tube with a FET or a BJT. The tube plate becomes the transistor drain or collector, the cathode is the source or emitter, and the control grid is the gate or base, respectively. Don't worry about biasing. Circuits A, D, and I should prove to be the easiest. Circuit F is pretty obvious if you look at the input and output waveforms...