You’re going all old school on me, huh?
I love how old school RF/microwave engineering can be. Doug, my advisor at Draper, gave me a slide rule a few days ago as a gift. I initially dismissed the thing as an antique, and pushed it off into a corner of my desk. To my surprise, I’ve suddenly found the thing indispensable for performing quick and dirty transmission line calculations with the trombone lines that I’ve been messing around with. Since the alternative to using a slide rule is to plug away at some fairly annoying equations with a calculator (which isn’t terribly convenient when all you want is a rough estimate in lab), using a slide rule really is the most convenient way to do a lot of transmission line equations quickly (like figuring out the magnitude of reflection coefficient you need to get a VSWR of 10 while accounting for a line return loss of 0.5 dB).
The MegaRule!
On the front, the “MegaRule”, as it’s called, features ten correlated scales for various transmission line functions. The back has nifty formulas for each of these functions in terms of the value of the standing-wave ratio (SWR). The slide rule was apparently manufactured back in the day by the Analog Instruments Company, which was founded by none other than Phillip Smith himself. According to the manual, you can mail in to the company and order them for $3.75 a piece, but the manual was published in 1964, and somehow I don’t think the company’s in business any more.
And a million points to whoever can figure out the source for the title. I can’t seem to remember myself, although the quote keeps going through my head for some reason…
July 5th, 2006 at 12:38 am
Dude, your title is totally from Samurai Jack. It’s from the episode where Jack encounters some villain with blue skin (his name escapes me right now). “Ah, you goin’ all old school on me huh?”.
July 11th, 2006 at 10:26 am
Hells yeah, good call Ariel. They also used it in one of the Samurai Jack commercials on Cartoon Network, which is probably where most of the exposure came from.
The dude who says it has a great voice, too.
-rsw