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I Became An Engineer: By Just Being Myself

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***Editor’s Note: The “I Became An Engineer” blog runs every Friday. To share your story email jennifer.delaosa@advantagemedia.com***

This week’s story comes to us from ECN reader Frank Karkota.

Actually, I don’t think I ever became an engineer; I was always an engineer. I am now seventy years old and I can only vaguely remember when I was maybe ten or eleven years old and built my first crystal radio with a cat whisker on a galena crystal. I remember how excited I was when I heard the BBC and Radio Moscow on a radio that I had built! Next, I started playing with old junk radios trying to make them work, often with great success.

When I was thirteen years old, I got my Novice License and was issued the call sign KN1RZK. Since I was not proficient with Morse code, I did not advance to General Class, but got a Technician Class instead. Shortly thereafter, I got a Globe Scout 680A, which included six meters. I built a super regenerative receiver using a 6C4 vacuum tube. I took a couple of curtain rods, taped them to a piece of wood, and then connected the coax at the center. I talked to people all over the area, and had so much fun!

Later, I built and connected a converter to an ARC-5 receiver. After a few years and a little more knowledge, I realized that the Globe Scout doubled in the final. (The input was 25 MHz and the output was 50 MHz.) That meant that the 6146 amplifier was not efficient and a major cause of TVI. I recall adding a doubler stage with a 5763 tube. I had so much fun!

In 1964, somebody gave me a couple of 2N2222 transistors. I made a little transmitter for six meters. By then I had a five element beam antenna. I connected the transmitter (which was on perf board) to the antenna and I talked to somebody over ten miles away. It was more fun to use a transmitter or receiver that I built than to just talk with people whom I met on the radio. Amateurs who don’t build their own equipment miss out on so much fun.

For my first summer job, I worked at a small company that made phonographs. (Yes, they once made phonographs in the USA!) My job was to repair the assembly line rejects. Some used tubes and others were transistorized. I had no test equipment, and had to use a soldering aid to determine the problem by the size of the spark when I shorted something to ground. For a seventeen-year-old boy, it was an interesting experience. Once again, I had so much fun!

A few years later, I got a job with radio station WCRB as an engineer. At that time, WCRB was an innovator. They were the first Boston station to have AM-FM stereo and then Zenith stereo. They experimented with Dolby, quadraphonic sound, and was one of the first to use SCA subcarriers for background music. They had a 5 KW AM transmitter and 10 KW FM transmitter. I learned a lot about broadcasting and radio.

My next interesting experience was in the U.S. Army. I was assigned to the elite 362d Signal Company, tactical troposcatter, in Vietnam. The Army stationed me on a mountaintop just west of Qui Nhon. Back in the late 1960s, satellite communications was in its infancy, so we only had terrestrial radio. When a man is in the jungle getting shot at, and needs to talk to his commander (who might be thirty miles away), how does he do it? Those walky-talkies or back-pack radios had a range of about a mile or line-of-sight.

So, the Army put repeaters on the mountaintops, but they could only reach to the next mountain. You cannot put a repeater on every mountaintop in a war zone. High frequency radio is unreliable and has limited range in the jungle. Our radio vans operated in the 5 GHz range with an ERP of a million watts (or so they claimed). We bounced the signals off the clouds between our site and the distant site, providing twenty-four or forty-eight channels of clean and reliable communications at distances up to sixty miles.

Of course, the Army does not like soldiers doing design engineering in a combat zone, but that did not stop me! On our mountaintop was a TV station, on channel 11, for troops within twenty miles. The transmitter antenna consisted of four corner reflectors, but because our unit was the only one to the south, they did not point anything toward us. With the television receiver’s monopole antenna, there was a ghost for every mountain within view and the picture was unusable. Only an engineer could solve that problem!

I found a roll of 8 gauge wire that was discarded, and a few small wood planks. I had brought along a copy of The Radio Amateurs Handbook to calculate antenna dimensions. The only problem in making an antenna was twin-lead. The PX did not carry any, but they did carry zip cord. It was not a good match, but there was plenty of signal. I built a yagi antenna for myself, one for the club, and a couple for my friends. We had perfect TV reception!

After my discharge from the Army, I started my own business. I did some design work, but could not sell my designs, so I got part-time work in broadcasting. Initially, I took transmitter shifts at a local AM/FM station. That led to getting a job as contract engineer for a 1 KW daytimer. I got jobs doing maintenance at other local stations, and was on call for emergencies. Eventually, I designed and built a complete automation system for one station and other small devices for other stations. It was just part-time work, and I wanted to get involved in more design work.

Since I previously worked with SCA at the transmitters of several stations, I had the unique technical knowledge to start designing and making SCA receivers. During the 1970s, SCA found other uses than just background music including narrowcasts in foreign languages to immigrants that congregated in larger cities, especially New York City. Another use was for blind people. Volunteers read the daily newspapers and have their voices narrowcast to blind people in communities all over the country. Unlike talking books (which are recorded months or even years before they are heard), newspapers must be received the day that they are printed otherwise news becomes stale. For many blind people, radios are a link to the community, and give them a degree of independence.

As I built the radios, the perfectionist within me emerged. I had the best radios on the market, but to me it was not good enough, so I kept trying to make them better and better. To me, a good design is a work of art. A good design is like a symphony that brings tears to the listener, or a painting that leaves the viewer transfixed by the image, or a well-crafted novel that is never forgotten. My designs were a work of art. Although nobody could see them, I could visualize my design whenever a radio was shipped, and listeners could tell that something was special about the radios that I built.

I can barely express the joy of taking a concept that existed only in my mind and then bringing that concept, that design, to a prototype that actually worked. I then had to lay out the printed circuit board further to bring my concept to reality. I had to design the cabinet to be functional, aesthetic, and inexpensive. Then I had to source and order the parts so that the assemblers could mass produce the radio. I also had to make sure that the manufacturing met my standards. Finally, I had to convince the reading services and others to buy my product. Blind people all over the country have access to their local newspapers because of my talents. My work, creation, and art, actually make people’s lives better and that is the greatest of all rewards.

I received many letters praising the quality of my receivers, but some really touched me. I can remember receiving a letter from the purchaser of a radio for a religious service. The letter said something like, “Your radio was by my father’s bedside when he died. It brought him so much peace and happiness during his final days. Thank you.” A letter like that is worth more than money.

I am seventy years old and looking both to the future and to the past. I have made many mistakes in my life, yet have also accomplished many things. If I had to do it again, would I become an engineer? Without question, yes! There can be no greater joy than using one’s talents to improve the lives of others.

My advice to a young man or woman who is creative, imaginative, and likes science: become an engineer. It might be in electronics, architecture, automotive, or anything else of interest; the world is not the limit, but the universe is. Your designs could make a positive difference in the lives of people whom you will never meet and even have an impact on generations to come.

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