Make great oscilloscope measurements. In oscilloscopes today, making a good signal measurement is easy. However, making a great measurement takes some expertise.
Op amp basics: Small signal bandwidth and overall performance. It is rare to find an op amp data sheet without a bandwidth number on the front page. Because small signal bandwidth is the largest number, this is usually the number featured most prominently. A good question, though, is how important is this number and how does it relate to other device performance metrics?
The quest for the ultimate vacuum tube. In July 1962, the Telstar 1 satellitetook an enormous leap toward the globally connected world we now take for granted. It relayed from space, for the first time ever, live television images and telephone calls between continents: specifically, a ground station in Andover, Maine, and other stations in England and France. It accomplished this feat thanks to a microwave repeater that had at its heart a slight but powerful vacuum device known as a traveling-wave tube. The 30-centimeter-long,glass-walled electron tube was at the time the only device capable of boosting a broadband television signal with enough power to cross an ocean. Solid-state devices just weren’t up to the task. More than a half century later, traveling-wave-tube amplifiers still dominate satellite communication. That’s right—your ultrahigh-definition satellite TV and satellite radio come to you courtesy of vacuum tubes in space.
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