KB6NU's Ham Radio Blog

KB6NU's Ham Radio Blog

Allied

A thrift shop find

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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.

Cover of the book Allied's Radio-Formula and Data Book.
My latest Kiwanis Thrift Sale find cost me only 50 cents.

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:

Page showing equations for calculating the characteristic impedance, inductance, capacitance, 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.

 

Catalogs are about possibilities

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When I was a kid, I used to regularly get catalogs, such as the Allied Radio and Lafayette Radio catalogs and pore over them for hours. Even if I couldn’t afford to buy the latest Knight-Kit or Lafayette shortwave radio, I could imagine what it would be like. These catalogs were chock full of possibilities.


I spent many hours poring over the  Allied and Lafayette catalogs as a kid. These two are from 1968, when I was 13 years old.

So, you can imagine how I felt when, last Thursday, I found both the Autumn/Winter 2017 DX Engineering catalog and the 2018-2019 Newark Electronics/element14 catalog in my mailbox.

DX Engineering has really taken the amateur radio world by storm over the last ten years or so. I probably don’t have to tell you about that. If you’re an active amateur radio operator, I’m sure that you have heard about—and probably ordered from—DX Engineering.

I think that they did a very smart thing by investing the money in a print catalog. There’s something about browsing a print catalog that is just more satisfying than browsing online.

DX Engineering has just about everything you need to have fun with amateur radio. The one glaring omission? They still don’t carry my study guides!

The Newark/element14 2018-2019 catalog is a completely different beast. Amateur radio operators are only a small part of Newark/element14’s market, but one nonetheless. They have, for example, attended the Dayton Hamvention for many years.

As such, the catalog is not a “ham radio” catalog, but if you build stuff at all you’ll find something of interest in its 1,799 pages. It includes nearly any kind of electronic part that you might need.

The section that might you might want to start with is the “makerspace” section. In this section, you’ll find Raspberry Pis, BeagleBones, and even micro:bits.

Like I say, these catalogs are all about possibilities. Get your own copies—they’re free—and page through them. I’d be surprised if you didn’t run across something that you didn’t know about before, and it gave you some ideas about your next amateur radio project.