Electrical Engineer interested in many subjects.
In the 1950's in grade school I started winding motors with enamel wire around nails on a board, built the Knight-Kit Crystal set and Space Spanner 3-tube regenerative HF receiver kits. I religiously watched the Saturday Mr. Wizard show by Don Herbert, the original and gold standard of science presenters.
I got my Novice Ham licence as a high school sophomore in 1961, General in '62 and Extra in 2000.
After High school i attended US Navy Electronics Technician School, Great Lakes Illinois. Then, as a Communications Technician, maintained and repaired a wide variety of electronic and electro-mechanical equipment.
BSEE '71 U of Illinois Chicago - Major: Control Theory (Feedback, Phase & Gain Margin, Stability, Overshoot, Damping, Settling Time, Nyquist, Nichols, Bode plots, Poles and Zeros, Root Locus, etc.)
As an Engineer, I had a broad range of design responsibilities and learned much from associates during my 36+ years at (the old) Motorola. Though I specialized in PLL Frequency synthesizer design for a while. I also had design responsibility in: RF PAs, Audio, Power supplies, digital, Pulsar Car Phone terminals, MOL (Maintenance of the Line - sustaining Engineering), a 350 W. DC brushless motor drive, car phone circuitry, early cell phone synthesizers, early cellular base linear power amplifiers and a wide variety of other products. I was on the team that started cell phone system development is 1973.
I worked with many other engineers and other companies and assisted in setting up cellular systems in several U.S. cities, Tokyo Japan and Beijing China.
Finished as Engineering Manager of a Radio Base Systems Design Integration and Validation department of between 12 and 20 engineers including Engineering prototype automated testing, FCC Certification (self certified radiation facility), UL certification and design validation approval for production.
In 1973 I designed what my research shows was the first frequency synthesizer inside a hand held Amateur Radio transceiver for 144 MHz. It had a very low current drain of under 8.1 ma. and transmit spurious of -70 dB compared to the -43 dB of the crystal controlled original radio (Motorola HT-220)
As a hobby in the 1980s, I designed the hardware and the software for a compact Laser Light Show Engine with multiple image capability and control of image motions using a command and control system enabling close choreography to music.
I later became interested in Polynomial Interpolation for the laser light show system. The two primary areas for its use being image smoothing and automated In-betweening for Key Frame Animation , both for reducing the artist workload. After much study, mostly on the Usenet newsgroup Computer.Graphics.Algorithms, and amassing an extensive collection of notes on the various interpolation techniques and types (as well as developing a few things I hadn't seen before) I put my notes together into the very book I couldn't find when I started. The book explains the fundamentals of Piecewise Polynomial Interpolation and shows the basics of many common interpolation types, as well as some developed by me and others on the net, and has examples of most of the techniques that are described in the book, in the appendix.
The full text, The Fundamentals of Piecewise Polynomial Interpolation, is available for free download. Manuscript, Appendix and other related material: Currently available HERE .
Taught as Adjunct Faculty at two county colleges, the full gamut of Electronics, DC, AC up to radio and microprocessors.
I also wrote VBA code in Excel that uses a Serial/USB port for memory management and control of amateur radio transceivers and other devices as well as simply general serial I/O such as reading GPS sentences. Full details with spreadsheets available upon request as well as HERE: K9DCI on The Internet Wayback Machine .
Now retired, I have done just a little consulting. Some recent projects: extensive power line noise investigation in a hear-by town working with both the utility and a manufacturer of power line hardware; the design of a 2.5 GHz direction finding antenna for a custom hand held system for a major U.S firm; and Excel VBA code for extracting data for analysis from a test system for a unique design of a green energy device for my son, the Chief Engineer at a start-up firm.
Starting in 2013, I volunteered as Science and Technical Advisor for the Challenger Education Center of Illinois, one of about 45 such centers in the U.S and Europe. These are educational centers providing realistic Simulated Space Missions and other STEM activities for students. The centers were initiated, by the families of the crew that died in the Space Shuttle Challenger, to be an ongoing legacy of the educational mission that was to be Shuttle Mission 51-L http://www.challenger.org/
This center had a very sophisticated, full cockpit 737 flight simulator donated to it by a local aircraft controls company owned by members of the city council. It had a 180 degree projection view out the cockpit windows. I took over management, we had the computers updated and had 5th and 6th grade students landing the shuttle at Kennedy. Photo HERE .
Because of this I decided to brush up on some aviation related things including lift physics and found so much terrible information in the web and being taught, that I studied it in depth including consulting with some leading experts in aerodynamics to get it right.
As a disciple of Don Herbert's Mr. Wizard Science Presenter, I currently do STEM demos and talks at local schools and groups such as scouts.
Reside in N.E. Illinois with my Wife in the house we designed and built in the late 70's. Other interests include Astronomy, Astro Photography, Photography, Playing Guitar, Amateur Radio, Grand Children and wife (sort-of in reverse order) and any other thing that may from time-to-time grab my attention (such as the very common misconception about Bernoulli's Principle.
Steve,
- Previous edits were mine. I forgot to log in. -- Steve -- (talk) 05:31, 26 June 2019 (UTC)