Page 39 - The Art and Science of Analog Circuit Design

We Used to Get Burned a Lot, and We Liked It

to this problem. Employers do not encourage nor support the engineer's
development outside his narrow field, so breadth seems something best
developed by hobbies before college, and a more varied engineering train-
ing during college.
But we digress. Somewhere around 1964 I saw the first transistor ra-
dios. They were kind of a novelty; they didn't work too well and were
notoriously unreliable. They replaced portable tube radios, which were
just smaller than a child's lunch box. They weighed about seven pounds,
and used a 45V or 67V battery and a couple of "D" cells for the fila-
ments. The tubes were initially normal-sized but had low-power
filaments in the portables, but the latest were socketless and had cases
only VA" long and M" diameter. These tubes were also used in satellites
and were quite good. Even so, the transistor radios were instant winners.
They were cheaper than any tube radio, were truly portable, and could
be hidden in classrooms. The miniature earphone really made it big.
The transistor radio easily doubled the audience for musicians and
advertisers. Perhaps it was the portable transistor radio that accounted for
the explosive growth of rock music.... While it's true that rock-and-roll
was popular as hell in the late 50s and early 60s, the sales of records and
the number of radio stations just didn't compare with the activity at the
end of the 60s.
As I said, the transistor radios were unreliable. I made spending money
repairing radios when I was in grade school. Attempting to repair them;
my hit ratio was only 50%. These repairs were on bad hand-soldered
joints, on broken circuit boards (they were made of so-called Bakelite—a
mixture of sawdust and resin), and unreliable volume controls. Replace-
ment parts were grudgingly sold by TV repair shops; they'd rather do the
servicing, thank you. The garbage line of 2SK-prefix transistors was of-
fered. These Japanese part numbers had nothing to do with the American
types and surprisingly few cross-references were available. I had no
equipment, but most of the failures were due to gross construction or
device quality problems.
Only a few years after the transistor radios emerged they became too
cheap to repair. They made for a poor hobby anyway, so I turned to ham
radio. This was the world-wide society of folks who like to talk to each
other. The farther away the better; it's more fun to talk to a fellow in
Panama than one in Indiana. People were more sociable then, anyway.
The world community seemed comfortably far off and "foreign" had an
attraction.
I didn't have enough money to buy real commercial ham gear. Luckily
for me, many hams had the same inclinations as I and a dynamic home-
construction craze was ongoing. Hams would build any part of a radio
station: receivers, transmitters, or antennas. They were quite a game
group (of mostly guys), actually; grounded in physics and algebra, they
used little calibrated equipment but actually furthered the state of radio
art. Congress gave them wide expanses of spectrum to support this re-
naissance of American engineering. We got a generation of proficient

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