Category: Tech

Sputtering After Sputnik

Sputnik - 1957

Science News is a consistently excellent weekly magazine for keeping up with what’s really happening in the various scientific disciplines. I enjoyed reading an article about the launching of Sputnik 50 years ago. Something I didn’t know is that the launch was no surprise to American scientists, who were looking forward to it. America’s first attempt at a satellite launch was spectacular, but not successful:

On Dec. 6, the press was invited to Cape Canaveral, Fla., to witness the U.S. response to Sputnik. Newsreel cameras rolled as a modified Navy Vanguard rocket carrying a small satellite lifted off the launch pad. It rose just 4 feet before erupting in a fireball, sending the grapefruit-size satellite in its nose cone hurtling across the sands. The next day’s headlines provided the postmortem: “Flopnik,” “Dudnik,” “Kaputnik.”

You can read the article by clicking here.

New Tube Radio

A recording of the song ‘Layla’ is on the audio player. It was taken from an FM tube radio.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/NOV07/nanoradio-layla.mp3]
Courtesy Zettl Research Group,
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California at Berkeley

Bad reception? An old LP played with a broken needle? No! Quite the opposite. It’s from the most advanced, state-of-the-art FM radio ever devised. It’s not a tube radio, but a nano-tube radio! Edwin Armstrong would be pleased.

Numerical Perspective

I’m just some guy who’s blogging as a hobby, so it’s interesting to check the month-end numbers. Excluding all traffic from home, and rounding down to be conservative, in October there were 92,000 hits on DogRat.com from 4900 unique addresses.

Plastic Soul Lives

On October 17, Amazon.com created a section devoted to vinyl records.

One of D.F. Rogers’ possessions that I envy him having is the complete British catalog (or, should I say, “catalogue”) of Beatles albums put out by Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs in the early 1980’s. The box set now goes for big bucks on eBay. I have a couple of the individual discs. The general consensus is the records sound better than the CDs; which is understandable, considering the digital mastering was done with first-generation equipment over 20 years ago.

GE RCA Superadio III

When I was a boy I loved my Aiwa TP-32A reel tape recorder, but the single most satisfying piece of electronic equipment I’ve ever owned is a GE Superadio III. I bought it for $40 in November, 1994, and today it gets regular use sitting in the window next to my computer.

HD Radio and Wi-Fi Radio are coming along, and there’s satellite radio of course, but plain, old AM/FM radio remains convenient and reliable. And the Superadio III, having analog tuning, is about as plain as it gets. What sets it apart is its exceptionally good, albeit mono, sound quality.

Recently, the company that makes the Superadio III, Thomson of France, changed the brand name from GE to RCA. Or maybe it’s being made by another outfit. Whatever. The product seems to be pretty much the same as it’s been for nearly 15 years. It remains the absolute cheapest self-contained hi-fi audio system that I know of.