TelecomClick
Our Web site, www.mrtmag.com, has been upgraded and included in www.TelecomClick.com, a vertical on-line community.
You can use the site to access current issues in a format that is as easy to use as a printed publication. It allows you to quickly scan issues and read articles, while offering additional online content, features and searching capabilities. You’ll find a table of contents for going to a given issue’s articles and a way to go to all articles on-line.
It’s not only easy to browse, but also to search the content, which includes all MRT back issues and other content available in TelecomClick. You’ll be linked quickly to related articles from newswires and the general business press along with MRT and other communications publications from Intertec. The site gives you access to 250 publications.
Watch the site for on-line exclusives that never appear in print and that are updated between printed issues.
The site already had been expanded into the world of sound with the addition of wave (.wav) files. Our first application allowed you to hear recordings that demonstrated the use of ordinary and noise-canceling microphones.
In joining TelecomClick, MRT becomes part of a one-stop shop for telecom information. Not only will you be able to access magazines and other publications, but you can also search and link to related Web sites and training classes for the entire telecom industry.
You can search an on-line buyers’ guide or directory of suppliers that includes radio-related vendors, browse the listings or look up specific categories.
Before long, you will be able to personalize your access to pick your favorite topics and create a start page. You’ll be able to put a link to MRT and two other magazines on your home page, and news about your favorite topics will appear when you log in. These features are coming soon and might be available by the time you read this.
The increasing use of electronic delivery will continue with our live coverage of the International Wireless Communications Expo in March 2001. Whether you attend or not, you’ll be able to access news from government representatives, exhibitors and session participants to help you know what’s going on in all parts of the trade show.
Anything else? Well, video is part of our future plans. Our sister company, Primedia Workplace Learning, may make it possible to offer you selected video coverage.
Also, our parent company, Primedia, has announced its intention to merge with About.com, a company with 700 Web sites. Before long, our organization will include nearly 1,000 Web sites. Naturally, just as you choose the trade magazines that help you to do your job better or make more money (or both), you’ll choose the Web sites that do the same.
Going it alone Mathematics had no place in the embryo days of radio. It was to be many years before anyone learned how to measure wavelengths, and they knew nothing about measuring capacity. Either an experiment worked, or it didn’t. There were no textbooks nor editors to ask for advice. You had to be an eccentric with a dream. – Lee DeForest, Ph.D.
Those were the days, eh?
Today’s radio work involves, at the least, mathematics (supported by software and computers) and highly accurate tests and measurements.
Lee DeForest invented the three-element electron tube. His work amplified (sorry) that of English scientist John Ambrose Fleming, who had used a two-element tube to detect electromagnetic waves. In 1906, DeForest placed a metal grid between the cathode and anode, connected it with an independent source of current, and found that his rudimentary device could multiply a signal three times.
It was the first electronic amplifier.
I was about to say that electronics, the science of the control of electron flow, would have little to show if all it could do were to turn current flow on and off. But that would ignore digital techniques, wouldn’t it? Even so, without amplification, radio communications would amount to little.
My friend Maurice H. Zouary gives us a look into radio development in the early years with his new book, DeForest: Father of the Electronic Revolution. (www.1stbooks.com; ISBN 1-58721-449-0)
Have you ever heard of inventors or engineers who have ideas and prototypes, yet little money to develop them? Have you ever heard of initial public stock offerings in start-up companies and of promoters who run up the price of shares, only to have the company fail? That’s part of DeForest’s story, too. Maybe radio development in the first decade of the 20th century wasn’t so different from some of the wireless development in the first decade of the 21st!
After radio, DeForest turned his interest to adding synchronized sound to the movies by placing the soundtrack onto the film. Previous efforts involved playing the soundtrack from a phonograph record, and synchronization was virtually impossible. By 1922, DeForest conducted public demonstrations.
Zouary documents DeForest’s achievement with reproductions of 1922 film strips with soundtracks and newspaper coverage of the demonstrations.
Imagine – DeForest did it all without advice from editors.
