tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7590176649168185428.post5841688477185682429..comments2024-03-27T17:14:31.032-04:00Comments on SolderSmoke Daily News: Some notes on the Herring Aid 5Bill Mearahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07662500663603350847noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7590176649168185428.post-75250733340070580062014-03-07T14:13:38.984-05:002014-03-07T14:13:38.984-05:00ON a different matter, "Ugly" wasn't...ON a different matter, "Ugly" wasn't formally described till later, certainly didn't have that name.<br /><br />But it was out there. Even before QST turned to the larger size and started building in tuna cans, I was definitely using circuit board as breadboard. I have no idea if I thought of it, or someone suggested it. It was easy, I had lots of 1/2 resistors with leads that I wouldn't use for "proper" construction, things could be changed endlessly. I was making circuit boards, but I was also using copper circuit board as breadboard.<br /><br />There was precedence. Circuit board had been shown in articles as a useful thing for tubes. Instead of building a converter on a sheet of metal (and using a chassis as the base) use a piece of circuit board. You'd still punch the holes for the tube sockets (though it was easier) but then all the grounds could be soldered directly the copper. No need to drill holes or find some existing hole for a solder lug. And if you needed to change things, it was easy to unsolder the old, and solder in the new.<br /><br />I remember an article in QST about that in the late fifties (well I saw it as a back issue in the early seventies). But Frank Jones was definitely using it for his nuvistor then transistor converters in the sixties.<br /><br />Bill Hoisington, K1CLL, was in "73" almost every issue, and virtually all of his stuff was built on copper circuit board, even a power amplifier. His was generally a hybrid, the board making for easy ground, but often he'd use other bits of circuit board to mount pieces in a more formal style.<br /><br />The local surplus place had endless circuit board scraps, some even drilled, that provided more than enough copper circuit board for breadboarding, and really cheap.<br /><br />Just as solid state meant you could add more stages without much cost or additional size, it meant you no longer needed a heavy chassis to hold up the big and sometimes heavy parts. Might as well build easy, and then cover it up with an external chassis that looks swell, than do everything perfectly from the ground up. <br /><br /> Michael VE2BVW<br />Michael Blacknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7590176649168185428.post-51556431591904828352014-03-07T14:00:29.196-05:002014-03-07T14:00:29.196-05:00I wasn't saying you shouldn't have built i...I wasn't saying you shouldn't have built it, just giving historical context. There were endless articles back in the early seventies about improving direct conversion receivers, and nothing seemed to be a significant change, until later, when it seemed like the solutions were all in the wrong direction.<br /><br />It's not unlike superregenerative receivers. Whatever was known in the early days was consolidated into a brief paragraph in the handbook by the sixties. A black box, the description didn't really say much. Yet in the sixties, lots of articles appeared about making superregens (and sometimes specificall7y the Heathkit Lunchboxes) narrower. And it was only by degree that any change happened. Then Charles Kitchin went back, looked at early material, converted them to solid state, and realized that by playing with the shape and size of the quenching that they could be narrowed up. Not really a surprise if you see a schematic where the quenching is done with a separate oscillator; then it looks like a regen modulated by another oscillator. Anyone knows that if you feed a square wave into an AM transmitter you get lots of sidebands, and that's some of what happened with superregens. Look at it later from a different angle, and one can apply a new solution that actually does give different results.<br /><br /> Michael VE2BVW<br />Michael Blacknoreply@blogger.com