Ron Olson: Difference between revisions

[[File:Ron Olson.jpg|thumb|200px|right|Ron Olson]]

}} designed the [[1A1]] and the [[316]].

He was project leader on the [[556]] and the [[Z|Type Z plug-in]], which was primarily [[Charlie Rhodes]]’ idea and project.

Later, Ron Olson worked on the [[1480]] series of television waveform monitors.

The [[L|Type L plug-in]] was Ron's first project.

Ron had been in the Navy during WW2, worked as a telephone line installer in central Oregon and had gone on to get a physics degree at Reed College.

Ron had done the [[L]] unit, a [[K]] unit with a 10× AC coupled preamp.

Well, he taught me enough about tee coils that I could design with them, but the dual-trace 515 still couldn't make the required 15 MHz bandwidth,  

mostly because the tubes ([[6BQ7]]s) couldn't have enough Gm at the voltage we had to operate that at (we didn't want to have a +500 V supply).  

 

 

I became a project manager after doing the [[529]], and Ron ended up reporting to me, which bothered me.  

I thought, "this guy's been working on vertical amplifiers all the time, so why don't I have him do something else?".  

In the late 70s, Ron worked for me designing the large PCB that took the serial data from the TI9900 CRU (Communications Register Unit) and controlled the operation of the analog/digital front end of the [[1980]] Video Waveform Analyzer. That was kinda tricky in that operations had to occur timed to the video sampling clock at 4*f_sc, the color subcarrier frequency (PAL or NTSC).  

For example, if we wanted to examine a staircase signal with subcarrier on it, we would program the gain and offset to change so the ADC window would be optimally utilized.  

 

Ron had joined Tek in the early 50s and I left the TV group in 1983 to join Tek Labs. I believe that Ron retired around the same time. I heard that he had died 8 or 9 years ago. Hell of a guy!