Radio and Electronics (Part 7 of 12)

In ninth grade I didn’t have science in school and so I wasn’t required to do a science fair project. But I wanted to do one any way. The science fair was in the spring so I had all year to plan. I originally wanted to do a demonstration of amateur radio's slow scan television. This process took eight seconds for an image to form on a very tiny television screen. My Dad tried to discourage me from this since the equipment was very expensive, hard to assemble, and neither I, nor he, had ever seen a demonstration of SSTV. Dad tried to get me to do my project on satellite communication. He suggested I talk to people at Brigham Young University and barrow equipment from them. I was going to an engineering conference at BYU on a Saturday in the fall of 1976 and one of my mini classes was on Microwave Communication. Of course I was too shy to even ask them anything so that never materialized. Three years later though Dad had me assemble a satellite dish which was used as a test for what came to be the LDS Church’s satellite network. On a side note, I went to the BYU conference and also attended a mini class in the Harvey Fletcher Building, which is named in honor of the inventor of FM radio. That class showed us an actual computer that was being built from a kit. There was another mini class on computer aided design and manufacturing which was barely in its infancy. They bosted that the computer they had for that was very small. It was contained in two huge electronics racks. And though it wasn’t the room sized computers of an earlier age, it was still much bigger than the computer Dad had programmed in our basement in the1960s. We then had to walk a block away to the shop to see that same computer control a jig saw to cut out a block letter “Y” from Styrofoam. On another side note, although I was in ninth grade at the time, my future wife Rhonda had just moved from Indiana to the BYU campus as a college freshman. Who knows but that I might have walked by her, oblivious to the fact that we would get married someday.