A Crummy Commercial

 I was looking for a movie I saw in grade school science class (which I haven't found) but came across this film from World War II: https://archive.org/details/VoiceofV1944 voice of victory scr299 hallicrafters https://archive.org/details/VoiceofV1944_2  part 2 Screen cap of title card for Voice of Victory   Not exactly sure what the purpose of the film was, after all they were selling / making all the radios possible.  But it is interesting to see how the transmitter was assembled and tested - at least for an engineer :) Ham radio and ham radio operators are mentioned early and often.  The bc-610/scr-299 evolved from the HT-4 transmitter.  I suspect that one way this rig helped win the war was to help produce many young men strong enough to lift it !   Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm

 I saw this cover on Facebook: intriguing but not online and was intrigued.  I remember the government pamphlets on fallout shelters: https://archive.org/details/familyfalloutshe00unitrich/mode/2up I was a kid during this time.  And it always worried me a little: we never had a house with a basement !  That seemed to be a prerequisite for a bomb shelter (although I wasn't aware of the dig your own in the backyard type of shelter).  The other thing was that you had to stock the shelter with a bunch of stuff (like food, water and so on) but also a battery powered radio with a telescoping antenna !  All the portable radios we had were AM only with loopstick antennas !  In fact the only portable AM battery powered radio with a telescoping antenna I ever saw was the one from Gilligan's Island: source: https://gilligan.fandom.com/wiki/The_Radio But apparently the antenna (and handle) on top were added on by the prop person on the show, so nobody had such a ...

The RCA 1802 was (I *think*) the original CMOS microprocessor chip.  But I was surprised to learn that the design was prototyped using TTL logic (196 chips!): http://www.cosmacelf.com/publications/books/system-00-manual-orig.pdf Why was this a surprise ?  Because RCA was the originator of the 4000 series of CMOS logic chips, I would have bet money that the breadboard version of the 1802 processor would have used 4000 series CMOS but NOPE. On the 4th page of the document it mentions that the unit uses 100 watts of power, 60 of which are for the display !   The document was dated 1971, the circuitry was eventually converted to CMOS and put onto a single chip.  That 1802 chip was used in home computers: The COSMAC ELF home computer used the RCA 1802 microprocessor but found a very important niche in aerospace applications, many by NASA.  The CMOS process could be adapted to SOS (Silicon on Sapphire) which rendered it immune to the problem of latch-up which was a b...

a screen cap from: "The Bit Player"  I remember taking a design class in college where one of the assigned books was: "The Making of Star Trek" https://archive.org/details/makingofstartrek00whit One thing I remember from that book was that the short bit of action at the start of each episode (teaser) was also called "the hook".   would you rather be teased or hooked ? A time honored show business way to get you to stay tuned.  In "The Bit Player" they also have an effective hook at the beginning.   I'd heard the name Claude Shannon and knew he was important to communications but never really knew just how important.  When I was in college I took a course on communications and the professor gave us a choice:  emphasize the current, practical methods used in communication OR look at the "statistics".  Nearly all of us wanted to learn how TV, radio and so on worked except for one guy (the smartest guy) - he wanted the "statistics...

There was a small study hall on the 2nd floor of the UW-Milwaukee engineering building.  One day I came in and this was on the blackboard: a proclamation from the 20th century I had to record it for posterity, would have been some time during the period of fall 1973 to spring 1977. That's all for today :) Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm

I was fooling with old brower bookmarks and tried the one for BG Micro and got this: the dreaded error 404, 5-7-2022 Yikes, punched bgmicro into the wayback machine and found that their last capture was this on October 20, 2021: sounded like they would be back ?   Going back through 2021 the last capture without the renovation note was April 23, 2021: still in business April 2021 ? So they've been gone a year, was it the pandemic ?  Did they lose a vital person to sickness or death ?    They used to send out emails but I haven't purchased anything recently (obviously).  That happens - I still get email sale notices from Electronic Goldmine (a LOT of them each week) and once a week from All Electronics, so there are still some folks in the surplus field that are active. One nice thing with sites like bgmicro.com (and my wb9kzy.com site, too) is that the wayback machine does a good job of capturing them, when the more modern, dynamic sites die off there will ...

  the 4007 (turned up the contrast on the laser marking) The CD4007 CMOS device is really quite a unique part.  It can be connected to form three CMOS digital inverters but the p-channel and n-channel transistor of two of those inverters must have their leads connected externally to the chip.  The result is that there are many applications where matched MOSFET transistors can be used other than just for digital inversion.  There are a number of resources on the internet for the CD4007, here are a few: https://www.ti.com/lit/gpn/cd4007ub   data sheet https://www.ti.com/product/CD4007UB  ti page https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/analog/article/21754492/whats-all-this-cd4007-stuff-anyhow    Bob Pease article https://wiki.analog.com/university/courses/electronics/electronics-lab-28    Analog Devices cd4007 page http://schematicsforfree.com/files/Components/Semiconductors/ICs/CD4007%20Applications.pdf    Ray Marston art...