April 1st marked the 50th anniversary of the successful launch of the World's first Weather Satellite, TIROS 1, built by RCA's Astro-Electronics Division, Princeton, NJ. Being at the right place at the right time at the beginning of the Space Age, I was an antenna engineer at Astro, assigned to develop the antenna system for the satellite. The manufacturing facilities had not yet been established at the new Division, so in addition to designing the antenna array consisting of four sleeve-rod monopoles that transmitted signals from four transmitters operating simultaneously with circular polarization on four different frequencies, I manufactured the monopoles in my basement machine shop.

Talk about a thrill, I saw my array of monopoles on the NBC Nightly News that night!

The coupling system that connected the four tx to the four-monopole arrray was fabricated in stripline, the circuit of which is shown in the pix below.

ANNOUNCEMENT: The 3rd edition of my book Reflections will be available at the CQ booth at the Dayton Hamvention. Along with a lot of new goodies, a detailed description of the development of the antenna system that flew on the first TIROS, including details of the operation of the stripline coupling system will appear there.

I plan to be at the CQ booth, hoping to meet you there.

Walt Maxwell, W2DU, No. 5938

April 3, 2010