A Good Idea At The Time

A long time ago (1978-79 timeframe), I worked at RCA in Burlington, MA as an RF design engineer. I was on a team to develop an 18-GHz frequency extension for a US Army depot automatic test set, known as EQUATE. The senior member of the team, Mr. Edwin Richter (deceased), was a brilliant scientist-type who showed me an original paper he wrote on the subject of analog frequency synthesis using mixing techniques. The paper dealt with intermodulation products and how to calculate their relative amplitudes. He said this was a new concept back when he originally wrote the paper. I still have a copy in my library. He told me that when he was a young engineer at RCA, back in the early days of high-power radar transmitters, he and his colleagues would get a kick out of placing their hand in front of the high-power parabolic transmitter antenna when it was transmitting microwave energy, and feeling their hands warming up from the inside! He said back then, nobody realized what was happeningthey just enjoyed that phenomenon from the transmitter. We both had a good laugh over that story.

Bill Becker
Sales & Applications
Regional Manager
Synergy Microwave Corp.
Paterson, NJ