[BC] Re: Hello

[Johnson, Richard]

Hello,

I'm a new reader of this list. I was googling the net looking
to see how Harris had rewritten the broadcast transmitter history
and saw that they had taught everybody that they were "first"
with solid-state radio transmitters. But, naturally this is not
true. The survivors often claim the spoils and often rewrite the
history. The very first 1 kilowatt solid-state AM broadcast
transmitter ever type accepted by the FCC was the Cetec/Sparta
SS-1000. This was designed by me while I worked for Paul Gregg
and Bill Overhauser. That company produced many other firsts
including an all solid-state 250 watt FM broadcast transmitter.
It is possible that Harris (Gates Radio Company) was running
their experimental 1 kW transmitter at a test site earlier.
They claimed that they had one running in Kalamazoo for many
years before they decided to produce it. There is possibly
some slight element of truth to the story.

This stuff was designed in the days where every transistor was
different, making design extremely difficult, and the FCC's
rules were slanted toward vacuum tubes, making type acceptance
difficult.

By the way, the engineers at Cetec/Sparta are the ones who
got the FCC to change the rules about meter scales of 40
divisions, crystal oven thermometers, metering plate voltage
and plate current, etc, so that we could type-accept solid-state
equipment. The survivors take the spoils, but we laid the
groundwork.

After the Broadcast Transmitter industry bust, I went on to
designing phased-array ultrasound equipment at GE. I have
been in the medical electronics equipment business ever since.

If anybody remembers me, maybe you should check out my
web-site. It's to sell my new book.

 	http://www.AbominableFirebug.com

Cheers,

Richard B. Johnson
Project Engineer
Analogic Corporation

P.S. Please excuse the junk the IT Department puts after this
email.


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