I took an electronic technician class at Compton College back in ’66, and the teacher gave us an assignment to work on the antique SCR RADAR sitting outside the classroom. We found that the antenna would rotate but it wouldn’t transmit. We had the schematics and diagrams for it, so I started looking for some points to measure the voltages. I found one that caught my eye as being suspicious, it was a dry cell battery that furnished the negative 45V ‘C’ voltage for the grid bias. So I measured the old Burgess battery in the cabinet, and it was dead. Even at that time, the old B and C batteries were no longer being used since most portable equipment was “transistorized”.<\/p>\n
So I looked around in the schematic for some other source of negative voltage and found a couple hundred volt line, and I put a resistor and a neon light in place of the battery. The neon light was conducting at about 50 or so volts, sort of like a regulator. When we powered up the RADAR, it started transmitting!<\/p>\n
But ol’ Sal Duarte, the teacher was angry, apparently because we had fixed the broken RADAR set. He made us shut it off. Later, at the end of the semester he was very displeased that I had received my FCC Second Class Radiotelephone License. He threw a tantrum and cursed me for getting the license. I found out later that others in the class had taken the test and flunked it! Taking the test was a requirement for the class.<\/p>\n
Later I started working for a community college, and found out that Sal Duarte was doing something that was illegal (at the time I was employed). The state education code prohibits a teacher from teaching more than 1 class at the same time. Sal would come in at the beginning of our class and give us assignments, then leave to go to the next classroom where he taught electronic assembly class. So Sal the cheating teacher was gaming the system. I don’t know if teaching two classes was prohibited at that time, but it was ten years later when I was working at a college.<\/p>\n
That wasn’t the only run-in I had with a community college instructor. But those will have to wait until later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I took an electronic technician class at Compton College back in ’66, and the teacher gave us an assignment to work on the antique SCR RADAR sitting outside the classroom. We found that the antenna would rotate but it wouldn’t transmit. We had the schematics and diagrams for it, so I started looking for some <\/p>\n (Read More…)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12231"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12231\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12236,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12231\/revisions\/12236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}