Some Excerpts from W2DU's Reflections 3

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W2DU:
Hello Bruce,

To set the record straight, all three issues of 'Aerials' were published before Onnigian stopped writing the column, which is why the writings appeared to be by the same person. I don't remember seeing a bio on 'Lil Paddle', so I don't know if she even existed, except perhaps in Kurt's mind.

I too, am looking forward to the time when Reflections 3 will be on your bookshelf.

And a Happy New Year to you and yours.

Walt, W2DU

W2DU:
Continuing some historical aspects of the early space age, the picture in the attachment is of TIROS 4, showing the innards of the spacecraft. In the center you'll see the printed circuit board (with the hole in the center) containing the stripline circuitry of the RF matching networks.

The pic of the layout of the network circuitry appears in an earlier post, the one showing the description of the networks.

Three more pics coming up.

Walt, W2DU

W2DU:
During the 1970's I was an antenna consultant to AMSAT. The designers of OSCAR 7 wanted a 2.304 GHz beacon aboard and I was assigned the task of designing the antenna. I chose to use the familiar quadrifilar helix that later proved so successful on the TIROS N series of weather satellites.

The first picture shows me presenting the tiny quad helix to Jan King, W3GEY, one of AMSAT's lead engineers. The other two people, from the left are RCA engineer Randy Bricker and Walter Ozman, W2WGH. The room in which I presented the antenna is one of the clean room at Princeton's RCA Space Center, where all the TIROS and other spacecraft were built. At the right in the picture is one side of the new spacecraft, TIROS 9, the first TIROS using a flywheel for stabilization. With all previous TIROS models, 1 thru 8, the entire spacecraft was spinning for stabilization. The reason for changing the stabilization method was to allow the camera side of the spacecraft to face Earth continually to allow more camera time. Also in the picture you'll see an eigth-sided unit, which is a mockup of OSCAR 7 placed in the position where it will ride alongside the TIROS 9 spacecraft during the launch into orbit.

In the second picture the beacon antenna can be seen mounted at the bottom left of the OSCAR spacecraft.

The third picture is from Reflections 2, showing Tom Vorhies, K2EQU, presenting me with a 'double bazooka' at my retirement dinner. As you may know from reading the QST and Ham Radio articles I wrote explaining why the coaxial dipole, aka double bazooka, doesn't derive it's somewhat greater bandwidth than a simple dipole as a result of the reactance developed by the coaxial sections, but instead derives the additional bandwidth by virtue of the loss in the coax. My articles appeared in Ham Radio in August 1976, and the one in QST was in the Technical Department column in the September 1976 issue. The QST article is repeated in both the 1st and 2nd editions of Reflections. Hope you get a good laugh from the picture.

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