Electronics Now articles from October 1994

Electronics Now archives from October 1994

Widescreen TV. (Video News)
October 1, 1994... Widescreen TV sets with 16:9 aspect ratios (more like movie screens than the conventional 4:3 sets) are available in the United States under a variety of brand names in several direct-view and projection sets, But they haven't been selling too...

Tektronix Tekmeter portable oscilloscope. (Tektronix Inc.) (Evaluation)
October 1, 1994... When a DMM isn't enough, and a full-size oscilloscope is too much, you need a combination of both. The general-purpose digital multimeter is the tool of choice for technicians on the go. It comes in handy for performing almost any...

The Picture Stick. (creating images with a light-emitting wand) (Cover Story)
October 1, 1994... Build the Picture Stick and light up the night with computer-generated graphics. ON A MILD SUMMER EVENING, YOU walk to the top of a small rise overlooking the park. In your left hand you carry a small circuit board and a battery pack and in...

Fun with function generators.
October 1, 1994... Couple a function generator to an oscilloscope to form a versatile instrumentation set for testing systems and components. THE FUNCTION GENERATOR IS A versatile test instrument that usually functions as a signal substitution source. This...

Build this telephone call restrictor. (restricting telephone access)
October 1, 1994... Restrict access to those expensive "900" and "976" numbers with this inexpensive call restrictor. OVER THE PAST FEW YEARS, THE "900," "976," and "540" telephone exchanges have become an easy way for people to spend a lot of money--too easy,...

Night-vision scopes. (includes related article)
October 1, 1994... View a scene in near total darkness with a passive night-vision scope, or illuminate it with infrared for an active scope NIGHT-VISION SCOPES WERE DEveloped as military surveillance devices to permit viewing enemy activities and aiming weapons...

Automatic rechargeable flashlight.
October 1, 1994... Build this combination rechargeable emergency light/flashlight with a bright, high-efficiency LED lamp. A BRIGHT LIGHT-EMITTING DIODE (LED) with a rechargeable battery and recharging circuitry in one module and a step-down transformer for...

Phase-locked loops.
October 1, 1994... Experiment with these phase-locked loop circuits, and put them to work in your designs. THIS ARTICLE PICKS UP WHERE LAST month's article on phase-locked loops left off. Last month the basic principles of the phase-locked-loop were explained...

More thoughts on SETI. (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) (Hardware Hacker)
October 1, 1994... Some very interesting events have occurred lately in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. After a number of false starts, convincing evidence exists that several planets orbit a remote pulsar. They were discovered by...

Our alternate tachometer design takes shape. (Drawing Board)
October 1, 1994... Figure 1 is the block diagram I came up with last month for the counter-based tachometer. The circuit requires 2-hertz pulses so that the tachometer updates its display twice a second. The simplest way to get accurate timing pulses is to use the...

Why Microsoft will win and IBM will lose the OS war. (operating system) (Computer Connections)
October 1, 1994... I started this story by describing important new features of Chicago, Microsoft's follow-on to Windows 3.x. As my writing progressed, it became more clear that the real story is why Microsoft will succeed, and why IBM, Novell, and Apple will fail...