Walt wrote:

If you have a copy of Reflections II you can see a picture of my lab
setup at the RCA Laboratories in Princeton, NJ, showing the ground
plane and the HP-805 slotted line.

Did that line just look like you could drive a tank across it, or did
you try?

Incidentally, in 1957 there were no hand calculators either--my
calculations from the line measurements were all made with a slide
rule. Just picture the amount of work involved using such antiquated
equipment compared with what we could do now using today's more
sophisticated instrumentation.

That's the irony of it: if they'd been able to connect modern computing
power to a simple slotted line, they might never have bothered to invent
the network analyser :-)

Actually, slotted lines and computers might just about have overlapped.
I'll bet that, somewhere on an 8-inch disk in a forgotten landfill,
there are programs that say:

Connect Short to Slotted Line and Press Enter
Enter Voltage
Connect 50 ohm Load to Slotted Line and Press Enter
Enter Voltage
Connect ...


--
73 from Ian G3SEK 'In Practice' columnist for RadCom (RSGB)
http://www.ifwtech.co.uk/g3sek