My wife, Silvia, and I occasionally visit the Kiwanis Thrift Sale here in Ann Arbor. Over the years, I’ve purchased all manner of things there that have proven useful in my amateur radio operations. I have purchased computer keyboards for $2, hand weights that I use to anchor the ends of my inverted-V doublet on POTA activations, and a roll of 300 Ω twinlead.
My latest purchase, as you can see from the photo at right is the 1953 edition of Allied’s Radio-Formula and Data Book. This little booklet contains a wealth of information, much of it still very useful, and it only cost 50¢! The table of contents list the following:
- Bare copper wire table, which lists the dimensions, resistivity, and weight for copper wire from 1 gauge to 44 gauge.
- Resistor and condenser color codes
- Algebraic formulas, trigonometric relationships and a three-place log table. There were no electronic calculators back in 1953@
- Decibel table
- and much more
For example, on the page titled “Miscellaneous Formulas, there is a formula for calculating the capacitance of a vertical antenna shorter than a quarter wavelength. There is also a page for calculating the characteristic impedance, capacitance, inductance, and attenuation of two-wire, open-air transmission lines:
Click here to download a scanned version of the book. It’s 35 Mbytes, so be warned that it could take some time to download.
I was reading through this blog post thinking “Oooh, I wish I could get a copy of that book,” and when I got to the end and there was the link to the pdf! Thank you so much for scanning and posting this.