KB6NU's Ham Radio Blog

KB6NU's Ham Radio Blog

Handbook

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.

 

You never know what you’re going to find….

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I was puttering around the shack yesterday, putting some stuff away and throwing out stuff that I’ve either finished with or will probably never get back to. In doing so, I ran across this:

It’s hard to read, but the date of the 15 wpm endorsement is “JUN 28, 1972, almost 50 years ago! I think that, just for fun, I’ll try to qualify for the 30 wpm endorsement.

The certificate itself is really brittle, but I don’t want one of the new ones. I don’t like the way they look with the Vibroplex key on them. Maybe I can have this one laminated.

While I was at it, I decided to re-organize my small collection of ARRL Handbooks.

As you can see, I have the 1949, 1958, 1963, 1965, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1979, 1981, 1985, 1986, and 2000 Handbooks. Not shown is the six-volume 2022 Handbook that I purchased a couple of months ago.

Paging through these Handbooks really gives one a sense for the history of the  hobby. For example, the 1948 Handbook has a chapter on broadcast interference (BCI). Now, we’d call that radiofrequency interference (RFI) or electromagnetic interference (EMI). Also, I didn’t find any information on RF exposure in the 1948 Handbook.