[Lowfer] Rememberances or "I was a bootlegger too!"

[Ed Phillips]

That's similar to Sir Jagadis Chandra Bose's millimeter-wave sources of 
the late 1800's. He used tiny spark gaps in waveguide to generate mm-waves.

73, Zack W9SZ

On Sat, 6 Sep 2008, Ed Phillips wrote:

Speaking of spark-excited transmitters I should probably mention that in 
the past few months I've been experimenting with a microwave gadget. 
Spark gap in 7/8" diameter copper pipe, driven by a solid state pulser. 
Puts out pulses of the order of a couple of nanoseconds long at a rep 
rate of 20 kHz. Peak pulse power appears to be of the order of a half 
watt [no average power of course] and frequency is of the order of 8 to 
12 GHz. [All at once of course.]

Ed"

Except for the solid-state pulser instead of Bose's induction coils this 
stuff is nowhere near as sophisticated as his. I'm using a regular WR90 
diode mount for a detector but he rolled his own and appears to have 
invented and characterized the first real point contact detectors - 
haven't seen anything earlier. All in all a remarkable guy who did 
fantastic work over 100 years ago and I'm surprised he hasn't received 
much attention until the past few years. One of my college profs [1945] 
had told our class about him and his demos but there weren't any 
pictures of his apparatus. I've always thought it would be interesting 
to try to duplicate his experiments exactly as he did them, at his 
original wavelength, but no ambition. Have played with duplicating 
Hertz's experiments with considerable success except that I cheated and 
used a diode detector in place of his tiny spark gaps.

Ed