A Crummy Commercial

My aversion to these Collins radio machines was mentioned before: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2022/09/collins-s-line.html Saw these photos on the K9YA Face page: source:  https://www.facebook.com/k9ya.telegraph See those RCA jacks (3) and plugs (2), especially in the middle picture ?  All a bad actor has to do is lift the hinged lid and then unplug or swap the RCA plugs around and voila, radio not working.   That was a "welcome to the real world" moment :( Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm  

I was reminded recently of the author, Paul de Kruif - one of his most popular books was called: Microbe Hunters which I read as a kid.   https://archive.org/search?query=microbe+hunters+de+kruif&sin=   (you can tell it was a popular book by all the copies on archive !) Hunger Fighters was another of de Kruif's books and has a Wisconsin connection in the last three chapters: https://archive.org/search?query=hunger+fighters+de+kruif&sin= I made it through four years of college at UWM (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) with an Electrical Engineering degree.  But the University of Wisconsin at Madison is the biggest school in the state and arguably the best.  It has a long history of accomplishment.  One of the tellers of those tales of UW history is Professor Dave Nelson.  Here is one of Prof. Nelson's lectures on PBS Wisconsin: source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0axP7Hq6HzQ   (Tom Zinnen must be a dad because he does tell dad ...

I downloaded the April 2025 issue of QST.  First I should mention that I don't really miss the paper copy.  One thing that would be nice is an email letting me know when the new issue is available - there are now four ARRL publications so there is a lot of website checking involved.  Yes, the ARRL sends out an email called: The Current: The Current is nice but it's also a little tardy, The Current moves at the speed of Newington not near the speed of light :) The first thing I noticed was the ad for DaVinci video editing software: It seemed quite unusual for QST to have an ad for free video software.  At first I wondered if this was the April Fools article ?  Either the ARRL has good salespeople OR someone at Blackmagicdesign is a ham. The second thing I noticed was an article by WB9LVI: Dr. Steber was my advisor when I started at UWM.  I will say this: not sure what Dr. Steber taught in EE but the thing I learned from him was persistence.  He (like t...

An interesting video on an Altair 8800 that Curious Marc got running the original Microsoft BASIC: source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxU_3dEJ2nM Here is the part of the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics: source: https://archive.org/details/197501PopularElectronics/mode/2up After inflating the number I can see why I never got one - kind of expensive for what it did ! and you had to pay extra for the Microsoft BASIC I was in college then too just like Bill Gates, but I didn't drop out and end up a billionaire !  I will probably read his new book but I'll wait for the hoopla (and price) to go down :) Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm

I was reminded of calculators this week (see this previous blog: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2024/04/7th-posting-charm.html   I remember sitting next to a guy on a plane once while traveling to the IEEE Cherry Hill (NJ) Test Conference.  It turned out that he worked at HP in Corvalis OR, the calculator part.  I remember telling him about my HP-25 and how it was "nice" - he said that a lot of people applied the word: nice to the HP products  :) Before getting the HP I went through the usual suspects like a 4 function TI calculator and later a TI SR-10 (SR stood for square root ? - no: slide rule).  I also had an aluminum Pickett slide rule but rarely used it.  It was a Dutch-auction time in the 1970s for calculators, if you were willing to wait the prices were sure to come down OR the new models would have more features for the same money. One calculator I didn't purchase was this Rockwell model from Sears (58770): source: https://www.si.edu/object/sears-80...