Coming out of the quietness of the holiday period, here I am, on New Year’s Day 2009, thinking about what self-perceived wisdom I could distribute to readers. I am tired of looking-back at 2008 articles; annoyed by look-ahead at 2009 articles; puzzled by peoples’ resolutions for the New Year; frustrated about thinking about the present economy; maddened by the stupid system that doesn’t allow the elected will of the people to be enacted for another nineteen days; in total wonderment at the attempts by Bush, Cheney, and even little ex-AG Gonzales to change history and wonder why people think they did bad things; and puzzled by the rudeness of the White House in not letting the Obama family use Blair House so the daughters can get to start their new school on Monday, at least within viewing distance of their new home.
No, enough of those depressing things. We can find those everywhere in extremely large dollops. How about positive things, like the truly awesome Sydney Harbour Bridge
fireworks welcoming in 2009?
We have the privilege this week at
EN-Genius to be running the first part of a TechNote on the sensor aspects of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva. It is written by a man deep in the throes of the project, Croatian Erik Margan. It was fascinating to read a Curriculum Vitae (CV) of his posted on a Croatian site (
third box down) where Erik very funnily describes his technical awakening. Learning that 3 V flash lamps don’t react really well to 220 Vac
is very educational and is a lesson that will never be forgotten.
That’s how I got the start of my engineering education. At the age of eleven I was starting to take TVs apart, building tube radios, oscillators, and power supplies: eating up practical projects from the likes of
Practical Wireless (affectionately known as Cam’s Comic, after the founder) and the more professional
Wireless World. I knew from that age that I wanted to work for the BBC and the day I started there, at eighteen, I threw in my amateur TV license, the third to be issued in the UK: G6AAC/T.
That hands-on experience was invaluable, and was built-up by the lectures at college – rather than being derived from the theoretical content and academic simplifications that were put out at us to graze upon. (Vendors know better than to try and persuade me these days that they have built the perfect op amp.)
When I was myself teaching, I was able with the aid of industry to help put together a complete, fully-equipped color broadcasting studio operation in the college. In my specialized fiefdom (in an acquired NAAFI – Navy, Army, Airforce Institution – the equivalent of a huge USO but with restaurants and lots of temporary living accommodation, like an hotel for the military) on Plymouth Hoe I had high-powered VHF and UHF transmitters plus a bunch of other hands-on RF equipment and test and measurement products, from spectrum analyzers to test loads. In that environment I found it much more useful in the teaching process to introduce the undergraduates to the real object of our scrutiny (called by some a curriculum…) like a klystron, or a TWT, or a filter section (or cavity), or duplexer, or a filament power supply, etc., before going anywhere near the theory.
I was also, God help me, able to identify undergraduates who were most likely to fail in the real world of RF. There was no point in taking a student to degree level in the fundamentals of RF in mathematics and circuit theory – if that was the field they wanted to work in – unless they would be able to use that theoretical knowledge. I remember only two undergraduates who went on to final exams in RF courses even though they would be unlikely to ever be able to tune themselves out of a cardboard box. Both wanted the RF theory as a stepping stone to other communications areas without having, ever, to be hands-on. I hope they never changed their minds.
Do we see the hands-on first approach in today’s education? Probably only in band, and you know how that first term sounds…
When it comes to consumer equipment, the majority of users go straight for operation rather than the manual. And, generally, it all works out. I would commend those who are educating our children today to consider the practical approach. I still remember my first chemistry lab session when, after all the safety stuff was pounded into our brains, we were allowed to make toffee. That was magic, and didn’t require 220 Vac sparking across a 3 V flash lamp… But I’ve done larger in later life with 30 kVdc across a leaking vapor cooling system on a 100 kW shortwave transmitter. Those sparks were almost better than the simulated lightning bolts in Sydney. How the heck do they do that?
