Not for wide publication , but as a co-op engineer at the old AVCO/CROSLEY
electronics division ,(circa 1955) the guys I was working with used to train
a little S band radar on guys up on ladders painting the pipes etc - thye
thought it was fun to watch the guys start to sweat - pull out their
bandannas and wipe off the sweat and go back to painting .
We did a lot of stuff that is verboten anymore - like cleaning everything
with carbon tet - hands and all - and I worked on the first VRC12 radios
with a conduction cooled tube in the PA and if it did not fit the BeO block
, we would sandpaper the BeO out until the tube fit !!!!!
I did some antenna pattern measurements during the development of the feed
horn on a secret (at the time) height finder radar that had two 50 KW
klystrons parallelled -you had to wear xray radiation badges in the
transmitter room -- average power was something like 80 kw - the peak power
was in the megawatt range - beam was 0.7 degrees high by 4 degrees wide in
the 5 ghz region -(43 db gain !) it would kill birds as they flew by like
they were shot with a gun ! I was told it had to be blanked if it passed
over any inhabited stuff within a mile . Funny thing was that feeding the
transmitter into the feedhorn by itself to check the power handling/heating
of the quartz window - you would sometimes get a ball of fire out about 3
feet singing at the rep rate of the radar. Feeding the bannana peel dish ,
it would not arc. The waveguide had to be pressurized with Sf6 to keep it
from arcing .
More fun !!! Rgds-- Hank K7HP
By the way , my Centurion crapped out big time after about 11 qso's and
after a couple days of talk back and forth with TT it went back to TT . It
blew the bias transistor , but before that it would show normal everything
grid current/plate current / voltage etc etc but no Po either on its
multimeter or the antenna coupler. Acted like the qsk relay was not throwing
but when I pulled the connectors to it and the other reed relay both acted
just fine with an external supply- plus never heard any arcing or anything -
I was running it pretty easy at about 500 watts or so ). But when it was
working I had a couple of really nice rag chews with full qsk and it was
great - making a convert out of me quick !.
The Orion seems to have settled out - nothing funny in past week and half -
(but have kept the sweep off to see if that cured any of the strange no p
out or no rx problems. )
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