On Thu, 06 Oct 2016 08:14:34 -0600, Dan Marotta wrote:

Megacycles - what a blast from the past! It was '68 or '69 and I was a
ground radio repair tech in the USAF when they switched from cycles to
Hertz. How traumatic...

On 10/5/2016 7:05 PM, Vaughn Simon wrote:
On 10/5/2016 6:26 PM, Martin Gregorie wrote:
IIRC they were AM back in the mid 60s

Yes, but they weren't VHF then. They were in the 2 megacycle band and
required huge antennas for best range. Straight out of high school, my
first full-time job was working on those monsters.

It was a hugely wide-ranging renaming blitz, as it replaced many of the
old descriptive unit names by the name of a relevant, famous and deceased
scientist, e.g. the MKS unit of work, formerly the watt.second
(electrical) or newton.metre (mechanical) became the Joule and the unit
of frequency (the cycle per second became the Hertz.

I suppose it rationalised things by naming virtually *all* units of
measurement apart from distance, mass and time after people, but against
that it meant that it was now necessary to remember the dimensions of a
unit, i.e. that a Joule is a watt.second and that watts are amps times
volts in order to make calculations involving power, time and energy.


--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
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