WB6JNN:  The Middle Years

SBE,  KLM,  IDX,

ACSB, Project OSCAR, SYNCART,
Phase IV Study Team,
Two Meter and 23cm Linear Translators


(continued from Who is WB6JNN/9? updated 11/16/02)

Well, as might be apparent by now, I did not end up in Missionary Broadcasting.  The 60's and 70's were a time of radical changes in just about everything including the nature of mission work throughout the world.  Many countries were falling to communist regimes (Ethiopia, for example) or were so unstable due to internal strife and turmoil that mission groups were placing more and more emphasis on training national workers to do many of the technical jobs at their broadcast facilities "just in case".

   When I finished up at San Jose Bible College, I was still working for Weaver's Pony Express but noticed an opportunity to return to the Monterey Bay Area to work at SBE in Watsonville.  SBE, at that time, was mainly an importer of CB radios but they also had a line of Amateur Radio HF, VHF, and UHF radios, as well as Commercial Two Way Radios, and VHF/UHF Scanners.

SBE, Inc.

   I started in the service department repairing CB radios but also worked on the Amateur Radio and commercial VHF and UHF transceivers and Scanners. Ultimately I became the first of several Engineering Technicians under Steve Snell, our Chief Engineer.

   Steve, by the way, consistently seemed to pull in some interesting consulting work such as what must have been one of the earliest message pager receivers and an early, LF RFID transponder designed to read tire pressure in truck tires. This all took place in the 1975-77 time frame. Steve was also a licensed ham though I don't think he was very active and I can't remember his callsign. He had a Technician Class license, as I recall.

  As time went on, SBE pushed the state of the art in the CB area consistently. We had several engineers from Japan working with us to ensure that we could meet or exceed the expectations of our customers yet communicate our requirements properly to our Japanese sources.

  I worked closely with them on designs of CB mobile and base stations including some of the first PLL based units and one of the first microprocessor controlled units using keypad entry of functions and channels.  I worked on the Sidebander IV & V and the Optiscan VHF/UHF scanning receiver as well as the VHF & UHF business band mobile radio transceivers.  

  One of the Japanese engineers, Takuo Hodama, still lives in the Monterey Bay Area (Aptos, I think) and has an RF  consulting business in Watsonville.  Strangely, his business is called RF Technology, very similar in name to my recent employer RF Technologies, Inc. Takuo spends about half of his time in Tokyo where he has a second office and lab.

   During the change over to 40 channels from the original 23 channel CB allocation, SBE designed and introduced ten different models including the Sidebander IV & V, the keypad controlled unit mentioned above, and various AM models.  I performed the FCC testing and preparation for Type Acceptance on most of these in addition to aiding the Japanese engineers with design and prototype development.

   SBE also had introduced a unique, sideband only CB transceiver called the Sidebander III just before I got there.  It offered an optional Noise Blanker tuned just below the CB band to avoid the usual strong signal splatter common to IF based blankers.  SBE's Sideband IV and V also used the same noise blanker design.

  I still use a modified Sidebander III on the Ten Meter Amateur band and many people have used converted Sidebander IV's and V's for this purpose.

   SBE also designed one of the first PLL based Scanner receivers during this period using a custom PLL chip designed by Nitron.  Non-volatile memory was not readily available then so the unit used a specially designed plastic card which required the user to look up the desired frequency then lift off squares to allow light to pass through to sensors which converted the mechanical binary pattern to an electronic signal useable by the PLL.

   The OptiScan, as this receiver was called, was soon eclipsed by other units which could be programmed from a keypad, yet it was an interesting design for its time.

   During the 40 channel changeover, all manufacturers were sending their units in at the same time making the whole situation difficult, at best. We, for example, sent one of our engineers, Wayne Woolard, to Washington D.C. to sit in a motel room with a spectrum analyzer so that each time a unit got bounced by the FCC for whatever reason, he would fix the problem and take it back down the next morning to resubmit it until it met their tests.

  Unfortunately the 40 channel situation was so poorly handled by the FCC.. they actually were going to announce it one year before allowing sales of the new units(!), that prices for 23 channel radios went through the basement during the six months they finally chose as the transistion period.  None of the U.S. based designers and manufacturers of CB radios survived this debaucle and SBE finally was sold to a maker of single board computers who got out of the radio business completely.

  SBE actually had been one of the best situated of the U.S. companies, financially, thanks to the conservative fiscal approach taken by CEO Dave Thompson. Unfortunately, many of the other CB companies were way over extended on their commitments when the 40 channel change was proposed by the FCC and this, along with the stupidity of the government delaying sales for half a year, was the undoing of the industry in the United States.

   Just before the end came, I was working on the commercial side of the business helping design a VHF and a UHF Business Band radio. These were 25W units which, unfortunately, never really had much chance to make it to the market due to the failure of the CB side of the business.

KLM Electronics

   Fortunately, about the time of the downward spiral at SBE, I had contact with KLM Electronics through my VHF activities on Ham Radio. I had discovered a prototype, Two Meter Single Sideband radio in the back stockroom at SBE which they had considered as a potential product but had rejected as having insufficient market interest for their Amateur Radio line.

   SBE had always been ambivalent about their ham line during the period I worked for them. Clearly the numbers weren't anything like the numbers in the CB market and the profit margin was far inferior to the Commercial Two Way business, as well.

   I asked SBE if I could show the unit off at the W6GD VHF/UHF Society meeting at the SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator) facility near Stanford University and it generated quite a bit of enthusiasm. In fact, Mike Staal, W6MYC and Mel Farrer, K6KBE and a couple of other Bay Area hams worked me mobile from Palo Alto all the way back to my home in Watsonville.. some 45 miles through the Santa Cruz Mountains across the winding pass of Highway 17.

   Since SBE wasn't interested in marketing this transceiver, KLM approached its maker, Belcom, and changed the name from Liner 2 to the ECHO II. This, and the ECHO 70, became KLM's entry point into the VHF/UHF transceiver marketplace.

   "ECHO", of course, referred to moonbounce echoes, since both Mike and Mel originally got into the ham antenna business primarily due to their moonbounce activities. These relatively compact, solid state mobile units seemed to offer them a natural extension of their product line.  The only near competition was the Gonset Sidewinder but it was inferior in many ways and was no longer available, anyway.

   As KLM's business was expanding into transceivers with the introduction of both the ECHO series and their recently acquired Multi-2000 and Multi-2700 multimode, 2 meter transceivers, it turned out that there was an opening in the service department about the time SBE was slowly fading into the sunset due to the CB disaster.

   I made the move.

   At KLM we had a variety of products mostly related to Amateur Radio. The initial product was a line of antennas which integrated a log periodic set of driven elements with long yagi directors and a reflector to provide the highest possible gain and bandwidth over any given Amateur Band.

   "KLM", as a historical footnote, stood for Ken, Leeland, and Mike, the original group  of Ken Holladay, Leeland "Mel" Farrer, and Mike Staal who together started KLM.

   My main task was to tune up and prepare incoming VHF/UHF multimode transceivers for shipment, work with the Japanese suppliers to improve the products, and repair units returned for service. I was Service Manager and provided Customer Support as well as helping prepare user's manuals and application notes.

   During this period a number of SF Bay Area hams began experimenting with TVRO reception in their own back yards. My friend and mentor Paul Shuch, N6TX, was one of the first to actually develop a commercially viable TVRO (Satellite TV) receiver which was sold by International Crystal (ICM), if I remember correctly. Later, KLM also got into the TVRO business with both dish antennas (naturally) and an LNA / image reject mixer combination. I became the foreman overseeing production of these units as well as performing purchasing functions for the product.

   I also inherited the daytime oversight of the Power Amplifier line, developed methods to tune them up with better linearity, and also performed purchasing functions. Additionally, we had commercial versions of the 80W VHF and 70W UHF amplifiers for which I developed appropriate Low Pass Filters (designed by Mel) then did the required testing and submissions to obtain FCC Type Acceptance approvals.

   These were good times, overall. Unfortunately, the Ham Radio business isn't as lucrative as most hams think it is, especially for a U.S. based manufacturer. While Japanese companies have all of their million plus ham market plus Europe plus the U.S., we had only the domestic market which at that time was not in a growth mode. KLM was sold to a new owner in 1979. It later sold again and ultimately adopted the Mirage label for its amplifier line (based on Ken Holladay's designs, originally) and has since then split up to seperate owners for the antenna and amplifier businesses.  The KLM antenna line, in fact, disappeared abruptly late in 1999.

   Due partly to the change of ownership in 1979 along with a timely but unsolicited job offer providing a significant wage increase and a reduction in commute time from 45 minutes to about 20 minutes, I took a position with Identronix, Incorporated in Santa Cruz, California.

Identronix Research (IDX, Inc.)

   Identronix had been in existence for about 5 years when I joined them. The president, Vic Grinich, was one of the so called "traitorous eight" which broke off from Shockley Labs (yes, the Shockley) to form Fairchild. He had also taught at Stanford University and, as I recall, had published a book on Integrated Circuits in Spanish which was a standard text on the subject in that language.  Those interested in learning more about Vic can read the article "Leaving the Master" in the EE Times 25th Anniversary special edition which has a very nice photo of Dr. Grinich (he's the fourth from the right) on page 59 and a more recent photo and resume on page 62.

   I started as a technician at Identronix (later shortened to IDX, Inc. ), but soon took on most of the RF design functions and was promoted to "engineer" in keeping with the type of work I was really doing. A good synopsis of what we did at IDX can be found at The Eagle's Nest site under RFID History. I won't go into detail here since most of what we did at IDX is outlined pretty well on the RFID History page.

  In 1985, Allen Bradley bought an interest in IDX and finally bought the company in 1986. In late 1987 they decided to move "Santa Cruz Operations" to Milwaukee. Those who remember what else happened in October of 1987 (think "stock market") probably will not be surprized to find that when they offered to transfer me to Milwaukee, I made the move.  (The Rest of the Story...)

ACSB

   While I was at KLM, probably because research was being done at Stanford and several of the developers were ham radio operators acquainted with KLM's leadership in supply of VHF SSB equipment, the research team studying Amplitude Compandored Sideband (ACSB) and Narrow Band Voice Modulation (NBVM) for the Office of Telecommunication Policy (OTP) came us to develop a test transceiver and power amplifier. While KLM, as a company, did not participate, I did some contract engineering with Dr. Lusignan modifying the Sidebander V Citizen's Band radios I had worked on at SBE to have better linearity and to operate at Low Band (30-50 MHz).

   The field tests of these radios when compared with standard FM radios (Motorola) performed quite well. From the Stanford test site which was above the campus at the Radio Astronomy dish site, the FM radios worked well to about the edge of the Santa Clara Valley near Coyote (north of IBM's main plant). The ACSB radios, on the other hand, though using less than 3.5 KHz bandwidth, were usable as far south as Morgan Hill, another 15-20 miles.

   Another ham involved in this development was Fred Cleveland, WA6CZX, who was part of the NBVM/ACSB company which was developing the technology (VBC, Inc.).

   I explored Amplitude Compandoring further in the following years relative to Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) improvement on the OSCAR 10 and OSCAR 13 amateur satellites. Unfortunately, even though I published a couple of articles and through Project OSCAR we made printed circuit boards available, few people apparently built them and since ACSB, to be effective, definitely "takes two to tango", this enhanced technique has never caught on in the general Ham Radio population. These experiments, however, did bring me the AMSAT Technical Achievement Award for 1985 and 1986. (I guess there must not have been much else going on in those years, eh?)

   Now generally referred to as "Linear Modulation",  ACSSB is still in use in the 220 MHz region. One company offering such equipment is SEA in Mount Terrace, Washington. Various digital modes have overshadowed this technology even though at 5 KHz spacings, ACSSB is more spectrally efficient than most of the spread spectrum techniques or other competing digital techniques. CDMA, under lab conditions (but not under normal, urban conditions) has been demonstrated to give more stations per Hz. ACSSB, on the other hand, can provide spectrally efficient performance at lower VHF and UHF frequencies where wide spectrum spreading cannot be used and where multipath fading isn't too rapid to be effectively controlled when using ACSSB..  its major drawback.

Project OSCAR

   During this same period, there were changes going on in Project OSCAR, the original Amateur Satellite group which launched the first non-government satellite of any kind, OSCAR I, and all of the first five satellites in the OSCAR series. Many of the "old guard" were desirous of giving way to some "new blood" and, back then, I guess I was considered to be in that category.

   I started out as Technical Director but became President of the organization and served in that position until 1987 when I moved out of the Bay Area to Wisconsin. Project OSCAR was primarily focused as an Amateur Satellite user's organization (AMSAT had taken over the political and satellite construction activities in the mid to late '60's), but we did work on several technical projects.

(to be continued...some day)

SYNCART
Phase IV Study Team
Satellite Development Linear Translator
Community Access Station (CAS)
Two Meter Linear Translator (Narrow Band Communicators)

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