On Sat, 15 Apr 2006 08:31:28 -0700, "RST Engineering"
wrote:


That wasn't by some wild chance the HP-35, was it? I can kick myself six
ways from Sunday for tossing mine when the batteries went dead after fifteen
years.

It was some follow-on, circa 1981. HP-Corvallis was still called the
Watch and Calculator Division, and they had calculator variations for
every conceivable job. While the 35 was a K&E log-log duplex
deci-trig that took care of the mantissa for you, the later
calculators were a bundle of RPN keys in search of a function. A
manual comprised endless pages of button sequences. Aaarrrgh!

No, when the 35 came out, I was still in aerospace in LA, writing qual
test reports, and in one amusing moment, explaining the probable
reason the MB antenna for the F-something-or-other failed VSWR testing
in the temperature chamber, even though the company had never had
problems with prior versions of that antenna. After going back
through all the bluelines, I said it was probably because every
generation since the B-58 had been "qualified by similarity" to the
antenna in the Hustler, and that at some point in that evolution, the
cavity and radiator had been shortened to meet some earlier fighter's
form-factor requirement, and a slug-tuned capacitor had been added at
the top of the element to make it tune. The cap, of course, had a
substantial temperature coefficient, so it was no surprise that
resonance varied with temperature. I also asked why a MB antenna
needed a flat 1.1:1 VSWR across any temp range. I don't know how that
came out. I took off for Oregon before it got resolved.

Um ... you come up with a fresh idea, a novel approach, design it, prototype
it, debug it, write it up rough, polish it, take magazine quality photos
and/or engineering drawings, do this every month for twelve years, and then
do it again in 30 days. Don't get me wrong, I love writing for KP, but
every so often I get into a tight little box that doesn't want to let me out
and it is frustrating as hell.

Yes, your situation is different. Coming up with new stuff (and
sometimes making it work before one could write about it) was a trap I
got into when I was writing TAB books under contract. That problem was
complicated by TAB's policy at the time of not sending galley or page
proofs to authors for review. I hate it when the "j"s disappear from
my equations.

I finally fell into the trick of picking the brains of engineers who
are smarter than I am (they're easy to find) and writing about what
they had done better than they could. The engineers got the glory and
the magazines' small honoraria; I got anonymity and substantial checks
from the engineers' employers.

(To the ones who can also write and like to write and have the time, I
say, "Keep this. It's good." I hate it when somebody comes along and
screws up perfectly reasonable copy for no good reason.)

If anyone wants to know whether I ever wrote about aviation -- I once
got a check from Flying because I wrecked a Luscombe. The I Learned
About Flying From That piece was called, "The Judge Was a Pilot." It
does appear in one of the ILAFFT compilations that are now available
from TAB. (Royalties? I don't know. Maybe TAB made an effort to
contact me, but I had too many forwarding addresses. The amount
involved would be too piddly to worry about.)

I'm going on at this length because the subject line is "Writing
Professionally." I see from occasional postings that some people want
to know about that from a career standpoint.

Don