On Fri, 16 Apr 2010 03:33:52 -0700, "William Sommerwerck"
wrote:
I suppose you don't want to hear about my gasoline engine-
powered hard disk drive?
Does it meet EPA specs?
Nope. It was a Seagate ST225 20MB disk drive. (That's megabyte, not
gigabyte). It had a large flywheel spinning at the bottom. I
attached a rubber pully and model airplane engine to the drive. The
problem was that the laptops of the day had trouble making it through
a typical airplane flight. This would extend the operating time of
the laptop. Smoke and noise was not considered a problem on
commercial airplane flights at the time as this was before smoking was
banned on commercial flights.
The original pager was Motorola H04ANC (all germanium).
Really? Perhaps for the RF transistors, but not the rest of the device.
I'm fairly sure the H03ANC pager was all germanium xsistors.
I need to dig through a few file cabinet drawers to find the manuals.
Give me a day or so. I'm fairly sure these were all germanium.
I could be wrong, but my memory is that germanium transistors were "dead and
gone" by the early 70s. Certainly they'd disappeared in audio equipment.
I'm not sure. There were plenty of logic devices using 2N404 xsistors
well into the late 1970's. Also germanium audio output and power
supply switchers used in 2way radios. While everything I designed in
the 1970's used silicon, many of the radios I worked on during the
late 1960's and early 1970's were a conglomeration of tubes,
germanium, and silicon. For example, the Motorola Motrac series had
one model with a silicon receiver, germanium audio and HV PS switcher,
and tubes in the driver and RF power output stage.
Germanium devices had higher carrier mobility, so at that time (I believe)
they offered better performance at VHF and higher frequencies. (This pager
was UHF.)
The big advantage of germanium for portable equipment was that it
would operate at a lower voltage than silicon. For switching power
supplies (i.e. free running multivibrator with no regulation or
protection), the lower saturation voltage of germanium meant less loss
and less heating.
Is there really such a thing as a rechargeable mercury battery?
Nope. I think the author got confused as the Pageboy I would take
either battery, but only the NiCad version was rechargeable.
More later.
--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060
http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558