[Collins] Unbelievable

[Gerald]

On Wed, 2005-11-30 at 12:12 -0800, Adam Farson wrote:
>  Hi Jerry,
> 
> To quote: 
> 
> "But engineers weren't allowed to type...or to use a desk calculator..." It
> is amazing how things have changed in the business world over the decades.
> Managers today could never get away with the arbitrary "idée fixe" their
> forerunners exercised in the past. The resulting litigation would bring a
> company to its knees - or drive it offshore.

Though they may as often guilty of the opposite, letting engineers chase
parts and materials instead of designing, and of having engineers do lab
tech assembly and test. Sometimes that's productive, sometimes its not.
> 
> Whilst working at Racal in South Africa in the 1960's, I designed and
> prototyped a 30 ~ 75 MHz log-periodic antenna for a tactical military radio
> system. Using the design procedure in "Antennas" by Jasik, I ran the
> calculations on an Olivetti electromechanical multi-function calculator; the
> beast even had a memory of sorts. After clunking away for 15 minutes on each
> run, the machine disgorged a paper tape containing number of elements,
> element lengths and inter-element spacings. I was able to borrow the
> calculator from our accounts department for the duration of the project.

When computing meter circuit resistors to make good use of 1% resistors,
I was able to shoulder the bean counter away from his calculator. Never
did get it to my desk. My challenge that was was designing a meter
circuit with no switching and two inputs. One with 3 volts sensitivity
and the other with 10 volts sensitivity, each with 10K load on the
connected circuit. One meter. That took a lot of iteration since each
input affected the other. 100 microamp meter with 1K resistance.

I had that same typing question come up at Collins. But I biased things
a little as my boss had to read my scribbled weekly report. Then one day
we were working up a drawing format for schematics for the 821A-1 (250
KW am) for interconnecting cables (part of my diagnostic panel was a
1200 pin cable termination and interconnect set of Christmas tree
telephone blocks). We discussed a change in column order or adding
columns and I trotted around the enclosed offices to my desk in the
bullpen and took my portable (manual) to my boss's desk and banged out a
ten line (or so) sample in a minute (having already set the tabs for the
proposed format I suspect) and he said, "Now I see why you type." Anyway
finish typing was to be by his secretary which was fine with me, my
quality wasn't as good as my speed.
> 
> Measurements on an old Rohde & Schwarz SWOB Polyskop (ever seen one of
> those?) showed that the VSWR excursion fell within the design limits over
> the required frequency range. 

We had one of those in the transmitter department in Cedar Rapids. Nice
to use, but probably not portable and it didn't have enough dynamic
range for the output network of a 250KW PA.
> 
> We did not type, however. We wrote our notes out in longhand and sent them
> down to the typing pool by internal courier. Our chief engineer had a
> dictum: "Engineers design things, and typists type." Political correctness
> was unknown in those days. Oh yes, our courier did double duty as
> tea-wallah.

At one point in my graduate career the project (with a couple grad
students) turned up much research published in German and French. I read
enough to see which articles were interesting, but not for good
comprehension, so the project hired other grad students from those
countries to translate on the fly, making tapes of their transcriptions,
then hired a typist to put them on paper. Her husband was a power
company lineman and she'd heard the term Kilovolts so every Kilo,
whether kilowatts, kilohms, kiloamps, kilovars, or kilovolts came out as
kilovolts. We made her listen more closely when she retyped them.
> 
> Cheers for now, 73,
> Adam VA7OJ/AB4OJ
> Retired RF and telecom engineer
> 

-- 
73, Jerry, K0CQ, Technical Advisor to the CRA
All content copyright Dr. Gerald N. Johnson, electrical engineer