"Michael A. Terrell" wrote in message
...

Jim Wilkins wrote:

"Michael A. Terrell wrote:
?
? Our engineers already knew the proper names. After all, some of
? the parts had been in the inventory database for over 30 years.
? They had about 40 variations in the stockroom. We used quite a
? few with coaxial inserts, since we built modular microwave
? receivers.

You were lucky. I was push into microwave radio in the 1990s when
the
smart old guys were leaving and and a younger group was replacing
them. There's a lot of hands-on detail to learn in that business!


There are definitely a lot of tricks to that trade. Things that HF
designers had no clue about. They were put to work on the IF and
video
stages.

Some of it made sense after designing and troubleshooting digital
circuits operating above 1 GHz. Reflections from mismatched
terminations are easier to observe and understand as deformed pulse
transitions than as SWR. You can see those clumps of unabsorbed
electrons bouncing back to mess up the next pulse, like ocean waves
reflecting off a seawall instead of dying on the beach. I thank all
you taxpayers for the $20,000 oscilloscope with the bandwidth to
capture that stuff that the Air Force bought for me.

jsw