Now I have an xray machine to play with at work, I can take photographs of the insides of things. I shall make full use of this. Here’s an old transistor to start with.
Image details : Mullard OC44 PNP Germanium transistor, glass envelope. 90kV polychromatic xrays, filtered with 1.5mm Al and 0.2 mm Cu. CsI scintillator, 6 sec exposure.
I needed a GPS antenna for a frequency standard I bought. So I built one.
Spotted in the adverts in this months Radcom.
A few days ago I built a radio receiver out of junk, because my usual radio had died a death and I wanted to listen to a specific part of the shortwave bands around 3.5 - 4 MHz.
Last night I scanned up and down the band and located what sounded like a fax transmission, a short while later and I’d recorded several minutes of the signal. A litter later still and I’d decoded it using some software I wrote nearly 10 years ago.
It looks a little messy, but it is quite obviously a weather map showing iso-bars and weather fronts over the Atlantic, the UK and Europe. Not bad for random DIY experiments.
On on Dec. 16, 1947 - sixty years ago today - the world’s first transistor was constructed and tested at Bell Labs, New Jersey, USA. Those responsible for the device were William Shockley, the theorist and John Bardeen and Walter Brattain who actually constructed the first one.
What started life as a heap of precariously balanced parts…
…ended up kick-starting the microelectronics revolution.
Today’s equivalent to Bardeen and Brattain’s part is one of the myriad sub-millimeter sized black specks you’ll find on the PCB of just about any modern electronics. Yet even these dwarf their tiny sibblings on the silicon die of a CPU, where they are packed with more than 150 million to the square centimeter.