[Hallicrafters] capacitors -

[Glen Zook]

The tantalum capacitors that were used in the late
1950s and well into the 1960s that were U.S. made had
all sorts of problems.  Motorola used thousands of
these in their early solid-state portable equipment
and pagers.  The failure rate after 2 or 3 years was
such that Motorola stopped using tantalum capacitors
in most of their equipment.

My senior year in college I established the first
portable and paging facility away from the Chicago
area plant (this was before the Florida and Texas
operations) at the Atlanta office.  Many of the low
frequency pagers (like 70 KHz, 102 KHz, etc.) that
were used in hospitals could not be economically
repaired due to the "leaky" tantalum capacitors.

These capacitors were also used in some of the old
"two gun" (separate transmitter and receiver)
portables (like the H13NBC-1100 transmitter and
H03BNC-1100 receiver).  Those units could be repaired,
but the tantalum capacitors were definitely a real
"pain in the posterior"!

Glen, K9STH


--- William L Howard <wlhoward at verizon.net> wrote:

It was pointed out that the author felt the German
tantalum capacitors were far superior to US made
capacitors however the cost of manufacture made them
too costly.

=====
Glen, K9STH

Web sites

http://home.comcast.net/~k9sth
http://home.comcast.net/~zcomco

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