I attended one of his three-day workshops, in Palo Alto, in 2004 or '05.
I found his many insights to be brilliant. I also was part of arranging
for him to present invited lectures at two national conventions of the
Audio Engineering Society. Henry was a (silent) member of the EMC WG of
the AES Standards Committee.
We had several dinners together over the years. One of the things he
talked about was breaking fundamental concepts in the simplest terms
possible to make them more understandable to those with less technical
education. He had always been very good at that -- I was very impressed
with how he did that in his workshop and talks.
I had already known that he had done consulting work for virtually every
major corporation on a wide range of issues. During that workshop,
things he said made it very clear to me that he had thought extensively
and had major insights into just about any problem faced by contemporary
designers in a very wide range of fields and applications, and had
thought through 6-8 different implications to every problem/mechanism.
As an example, thinking about traces above a "ground" layer or
sandwiched between two such layers as a transmission line, and that
transit time along those traces had become a fundamental limit on
processing speeds. Another important insight was that any break on one
of the "ground" layers acts as a break in the line, causing return to be
purely random based on physical construction, creating crosstalk and
causing emissions from the resulting radiation.
That one workshop was one of the most valuable education I received over
the years. I say one of the most, because I also had the opportunity to
study extensively under Richard Heyser, a scientist at JPL who worked in
space communications there. But I was studying in what was his "hobby"
-- pro audio, which he revolutionized in the '70s with his invention of
Time Delay Spectrometry, and with his many lectures and workshops. TDS
brought complex analysis to audio and acoustic systems with practical
instrumentation, a decade before anything comparable with dual channel
FFT. I bought one of the earliest production units in 1982, and it made
my career in pro audio. It cost me the $12,000 I had saved for a down
payment on my first house.
Dick was President-elect of the AES when he died in 1986 of cancer.
73, Jim K9YC
Jim, I took several of his courses.
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