Alan Martin on his award

Here is a nice email Alan Martin sent out the day after he received the EDN Engineer Extraordinaire Award.

I was totally blown away by this. I'm pretty sure this is the first trophy I've ever won in my life. The only other thing I have like this is a belt buckle from a bowling league for "Most Improved Average"-Whoop de doo.

Martin, I wish you and Bill Gross could have been there. Sounds like it's been on the agenda for a while. Martin, you can bring over the Tek 7403N scope frame now, I'm certain it's just a capacitor.

It was a tremendous surprise to have Jim Williams show up, too. Great to spend time chatting with him. We are both too distracted at swap meets to spend much time talking… looking for that current probe that might be for sale down the next aisle.

I'm not the originator of the capacitor phrase, by the way. This started with a senior engineer at Ohmeda in Madison, Wisconsin that I visited once. He had his own trophy of sorts that his co-workers had made up for him to poke fun at him saying "The problem would probably be solved with a capacitor" On his office wall was a large poster board with sections that had various types of capacitors grouped on it. It said. "Big capacitors for big problems" "Medium capacitors for medium sized problems" and" Little capacitors for little problems" Across the bottom in big letters - "If a problem can't be fixed with a capacitor, the problem can't be fixed" I think they had given him this at a company dinner. It would take some real digging to uncover his name, but I should do so, just so he receives credit. His theory revolved around product design, though.

My capacitor theory pertains to repair of defunct electronics. I put myself through college fixing stereo gear and test equipment. Bang and Olufsen of Denmark used small tantalums as timing capacitors in their turntables; notorious trouble makers. Harman Kardon used crappy electrolytics for inter-stage coupling. Cassette tape deck auto-shut-off circuits always had a poor tolerance electrolytic in the circuit that would time out prematurely and halt the transport; a major pisser if it happened during 'record'. Debugging these things the first time was always a time consuming headache. After you've seen the same thing three or four times the patterns emerge, and the number of subtle clues you can pick up visually are invaluable. I used to have great fun at LTC walking up behind Jim Williams, Fran Hoffart or Steve Hobrecht and reaching over their shoulder and saying, "look at that; that part is bad!" after they had been painstakingly debugging for an hour or two. I could spot certain things with only a quick visual scan of the board. Williams starting getting back at me though. I'd start helping someone fix something and we'd be nearly stumped and Williams would say; "Martin, you're a 'man' if you can fix that thing." Then he'd walk out the lab door and leave for the weekend. What's a guy to do? There were several Fridays we worked extra late after he'd thrown down the gauntlet. We usually succeeded in the repair, though. His challenge made us more determined to prove our muster.

As Jim Williams points out, be grateful that Tektronix used so many of the dipped tantalums, because it means we can now buy broken test gear for cheap and just go looking for the bad caps.

I read schematics differently these days. I always pay very close attention to polarized caps in the signal path. Be very suspicious of polarized caps of 1 ufd or less; destined to be a problem.

Following the Tek 7904 repair for Martin DeLateur I got jazzed up that I might be able to fix a Tek 7854 scope frame - early digital with a bunch of math functions. (It's been in the repair queue for 6 or 7 years.) After at least 5 hours of bench work on the power supply it finally has a dot on the screen but the logic section is stalled. The scope is now pushed off to the side for a more determined effort at some future date. If I can fix that scope, I may decide to make a trophy for myself.

Again, thanks a bunch, and thanks to Martin and Paul Rako for taking the first step and making me clean up my log-jammed bench.

Alan Martin