Radios — Dream Realized

Trigger alert: Some content may be hazardous to your mental health.

You may recall I wanted to get into Radar when the Army drafted me. It was the most advanced radio technology that I knew about. But the army sidetracked me with their kind offer to send me to school to learn to be redacted… 😀 That worked out fine for the short term. The best aspect of my assignment was living in an apartment with a view up on Twin Peaks in San Francisco. The rent was $128 a month, split three ways. We had an allowance to cover food and other expenses like that. (I imagine you’d pay at least $3,500 a month to live there now.)

We had a grand time in San Francisco. To start with, everyone in our special unit was a college graduate. Our work situation was unusual too. We worked 40 hours a week, and the rest of the time was our own. We were enlisted men, but we lived like officers (except on a fraction of the pay). Tough duty.

I was having such a good time that it never occurred to me to move my amateur radio equipment to San Francisco until Marcia and I were married. But I had already decided that I wanted to go back to school to learn electronic engineering.

I went over to UC at Berkley to see about taking the courses I needed to change my vocation from chemistry to electronics. They were amenable at first, but it turned into a Catch 22 situation when we got down to the courses I wanted to take.

I couldn’t take the graduate level courses I needed until I took the prerequisite courses. (I could have done fine without them, but that wasn’t the rules.) But I wouldn’t be able to take the required undergraduate courses because I already had an undergraduate degree.

I probably could have worked something out at KU, but I wasn’t sure, and Marcia and I didn’t want to leave San Francisco. So I decided to get the courses I needed for another major at Heald Engineering College. You may have heard of Heald College during recent kerfuffle about the ATT Tech & Corinthian for-profit schools.

Heald Engineering College, which no longer exists, had a remote connection to Heald (business) College in my day, but student loans had not yet been invented by the government. Anyway, it all worked out well for me, including the Master of Electrical Engineering degree I eventually earned at Stanford.

Marcia and I left San Francisco with our new daughter Nancy after I graduated from Heald Engineering College. We literally had one thin dime between us. We did have a place to stay while I looked for a job though, thanks to “Grandpa” Charlie Clark and “Grandma” Kay (Marcia’s sister Jane’s new in-laws). The economy was in a depression, but I soon landed a job at Hewlett-Packard. Not as an engineer, but as a technician.

I was soon working with microwave test equipment. Microwaves are just very short radio waves, and the instruments we produced were used by the military and AT&T (very, very remotely connected to ATT Tech) to develop and maintain — get this — Radar and microwave links (for long distance calls). This was before the solid-state era, and those vintage instruments relied on vacuum tubes instead of transistors.

Fortunately (for me), problems in producing that test equipment emerged. HP temporarily moved me to the R & D Lab, and I was able to solve those problems with simple, solid solutions. Soon they asked me if I wanted to be a product development engineer. Boy, did I.

The first development project I worked on was HP’s first all solid-state product. It measured the noise figure of Radar receivers. The team leader, Marco Negrette, had previously worked at AT&T. Transistors had been recently invented there. He had picked up the basic idea there of how to use them. We all learned more together, and soon I was well prepared to move on to newer projects, which would use transistors.

I had my own project team in a year or two. We were developing a higher frequency version of the Wave Analyzer that Barney Oliver had developed. This new one was basically an instrument-grade radio. I was in seventh heaven.

The best thing at HP was an open collaboration culture that Bill and Dave established. I even had occasional opportunities to work with Bill and Dave directly, along with Barney Oliver, a true genius, who was VP of Product Development.

Another couple of dozen engineers of similar caliber were there too. I learned more from them in a few years than most engineers learn in their whole career. (Years later I heard that some of the younger engineers viewed me as a legend too.)

My next project was an opportunity to develop an instrument that drew on virtually all my knowledge. For me, the best thing about it was that I had dreamed of building something like that in my Amateur Radio days. My project engineers were recent college graduates, so I was also their mentor.

The product we developed was the 8552/53 Spectrum Analyzer. That’s just the name for a wave analyzer that extends to microwave frequencies. In the legacy domain, radio waves extend to a few tens of megahertz. AM is 0.5 – 1.5 Mhz, FM is 100 Mhz, and TV is 200 – 400 Mhz. Microwaves fall in the 300 – 300,000 Mhz range. After that comes infra red, light waves and more.

What does it take to make a spectrum analyzer? That’s covered in a dozen or so math and engineering books, but here’s a practical list: A few precision oscillators, mixers and filters, half a dozen amplifiers, a logarithmic network, a precision power supply, a video amplifier, and a bunch of solid-state switches to control the whole thing.

Many of the elements of that spectrum analyzer came from ideas I picked up from engineers at HP. Perhaps my Amateur Radio experience was the most important factor in getting it done in record time.

I know I did a good job because HP produced that spectrum analyzer for 20 years. That is an unprecedented run in the world of electronics. These days they do the job with digital circuits. (Mine used analog and radio-frequency circuits).

That spectrum analyzer required a little over 100 transistors. The digital approach requires billions of transistors. I’d have had to start all over again to learn how to do it the digital way, but that was a long way off.