On 10/29/2010 8:45 PM, Gene Heskett wrote: > On Friday, October 29, 2010 08:26:57 pm Kent A. Reed did opine: > >> <blah blah blah> >> My vacuum tube-era engineer-dad once said to me, "you whippersnappers >> will never know how good you have it." I wonder what the technology >> will be like when you find yourselves saying it to those who follow you. >> >> Regards, >> Kent >> > I would liked to have met your dad, Kent. He sounds like an old warhorse > I'd like to trade battle stories with. >
I know he would have enjoyed it, Gene. Before Parkinson's disease made it impossible to have face-to-face conversations, his favorite activity was the weekly coffee-club gathering of local hams and electronics enthusiasts. He was overjoyed when I got him hooked up with a PC driving his radio gear so he could communicate with his friends via RTTY...and then he discovered email! He wasn't opposed to progress. Far from it, he was an engineer focused on making the present better, but he wanted us to know how hard it was to get to the present. > For some things, it wasn't till we shut down the analog transmitter 18 > months ago that the last vacuum tube was allowed to cool down for good. I > saved a dud, non-rebuildable final tube from our old GE transmitter just so > I could show it off to the younger set who will today, cheerfully use 8192 > transistors in parallel to do what this tube did when it was fresh. A > water cooled anode that required deionized water in the coolant system > because the tubes anode had 7200 volts on it. This tube was rated to make > 85 kilowatts (sync tip peak) of power in the low vhf band, but our > transmitter let it relax with its feet up on the coffee table because we > only needed 26.7 sync tip peak to make our power. > > Most 'engineers' don't know how to baby those big tubes& use one up every > 6 months at $7000 a rebuild. In the time since I became the CE at WDTV in > 1984, I only used 3 of them. That was a significant reduction in the > stations C.O.D.B. > I think we've talked before about Eitel-McCullough aka EIMAC. I never got to the power levels you dealt with and their ceramic tubes were too expensive for a young experimenter, but I will always remember fondly the glow of filaments in the night. I regret not keeping a couple of the "glass bottles" I had scored from military surplus. I could easily imagine a desklamp or two! Regards, Kent ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Nokia and AT&T present the 2010 Calling All Innovators-North America contest Create new apps & games for the Nokia N8 for consumers in U.S. and Canada $10 million total in prizes - $4M cash, 500 devices, nearly $6M in marketing Develop with Nokia Qt SDK, Web Runtime, or Java and Publish to Ovi Store http://p.sf.net/sfu/nokia-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
