Re: Keeping up with the theory (was is Corum and Corumforbidden topic?)

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: "Ed Phillips by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <evp-at-pacbell-dot-net>

Tesla list wrote:
> 
> Original poster: "Ray von Postel by way of Terry Fritz
<twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <vonpostel-at-prodigy-dot-net>
> 
> Terry and All:
> Hurray, so far I agree with everyone's comments.  At the risk of starting a
> controversy:
> 
> The subject of amateur radio, and it's recognition was mentioned in a recent
> post. Originally, Hams designed and built there own equipment.  There were no
> commercial suppliers.  Eventually they could obtained ready made
transformers,
> capacitors, coils, etc.

	I have a complete collection of QST magazine, going back to the
December, 1915 first issue.  The more advanced hams of those spark days
could teach us all something, I suspect.  Note that a lot of hams were,
and still are, engineers or physicists or the like who know the subject
matter very well and who contributed a lot to the state of the art. 
Harold Beverage of antenna system was a ham, as was Frank Terman of
Stanford.  It's still possible to build your own gear, but with
commercial stuff relatively cheap and "ready to go", very few of us do. 
It's almost as much trouble to design and build one modern transceiver
as it would be to put it into production, so just ain't worth it.  I buy
stuff now myself, but always feel guilty about not building it....
  
> During the vacuum tube days there were two types of hams.  Those who designed
> and built their own equipment and those who enjoyed having the ability to
> communicate with others.  Each group enjoyed the hobby and respected the
> other.  It seems to me that Tesla coilers are at the
> point in history where we build our own equipment partly from commercially
> available components.

	TC's are so simple that there's no justification for buying a complete
TC from anybody.  From the beginnings of radio there were such things as
transformers and transmitting capacitors available, and many of the guys
did buy them to build their gear.  Before 1912 there were a number of
stations running as much as 5 kW!  There were complete receivers
available from about 1910 on, but it was still worth while to roll your
own.

Ed