swanson

Ron Swanson

Ron grew up in Oregon. He mentioned past work with a sawmill. The sawmill fire-supression-system was a persistent nussance, according to Ron. He said the pipes were full of compressed air to protect them from frost damage. In the event of a fire, an open sprinkler begins venting air. Water pressure enters the system through a check-valve when supression-system manifold-pressure drops below the regulated water supply pressure.
Each time the system activates, all legs of it require draining and dryout. Ron lamented that water somehow got in there with no fire. Pipes froze. Breakage, flooding, and false alarms resulted. I wonder if a refrigerated air-dryer would help?

ETM attempted to do a solid-state pulser for a klystron at Walter Reed Hospital. Gunnar Wik copied a schematic for an FET driver from a motor-control industry trade journal article. He designed an opto-isolated switch-card around that and the then-new 1N95 VMOS FET, rated 950 V. He hoped for a push-pull output of 2KV swing. Four seriesed devices comprised each switch. Alas, the circuit oscillated. Gunnar boldly thrust it into use anyway. Perhaps it appeared to work.
    "Success" of the maiden voyage prompted Gunnar to start a new ETM solid-state-modulator line. Richard Ziskowski got stuck holding the bag when the first one materialized. A thousand blown FETs later, he was exasperated. Then we heard the Walter Reed job flopped. We had 40 units in production. And they were duplicates of a failed attempt. ETM founder Chuck Hayse decided to scuttle the program.
    Ron came to the rescue. He pulled out an HP application note with the answer: HP touted a clock-driver chip intended to drive the capacitance of computer memory. The app. note used an hp 2601 opto-isolator to drive a National Semiconductor DS0056 clock driver, which in turn drove the output device, in this case a FET.
    Ron gave Richard samples and the rest is history. That archetecture now provides 100KHZ, 3KV swing squarewave, into 150pf, with a rise-time of 150ns, and no perceptible overshoot, routinely withstanding 85KV arcs into the output terminal. Wade Goins recently extended the philosophy to achieve 50KV swing, for cathode pulsing and Crowbar switching applications.
    One would think that after saving, a run of 40 modulators, Ron would be celebrated through company lore--a hero of sorts. Ironically, he got demoted from engineer to technician. Then ETM laid him off. The unit that dogged Ron in test was the one he had to operate when Litton hired him. He got Carl Everling's old-old line. It ran 3.5 KV, the lowest I'd seen. High-fashion equipment design wasn't Ron's station in life. So Litton, in a diabolical plot, used Ron to end a 15 year seige; one of cut-throat competition with a true nemesis: Carl Everling himself. Charlie Litton had no idea Carl would spring back up, resuming production with his own firm, MLI, after selling that group to Litton. When Charlie died, scale economies and low cost leadership lay fallow, for lack of one person who cared. Now the official rumor blames MLI's demise on venture capatalists, not Ron, the archetypal unsung hero.

Ron was pretty involved in the local square-dance scene. But sometimes the younger set wanted to sneak out and really go nuts. I guess it must be taboo, cutting off the older folks like that. And then there was a scandal. And Ron got caught up in it. It was like he was being challenged to a duel. Some firey old geezer was taking him to task, for what he'd done. Ron stood accused of duplicity and chicanery. Ron it seems, tried to get the caller to sneak out with the youngsters. Somehow the plot came unraveled . . . . It was a crackup. The look on his face was priceless, as he read it all aloud from a square-dance magazine. Duplicity! That face! I still laugh.

Both a little excentric, the whole gang decided to give the bride and groom a toaster collection, for a wedding present. A bunch of the guys came over asking for junkers. I kept the cords. I was holding mine like an accordian when I demo'd the features. . . . A toaster-oven by day, toast also pops out . . . this while I'm flipping the hatch open. He just about died laughing when he saw the stub where I'd cut the cord.

Ron ran a Cober test set at Ford Aerospace before he came to ETM. He understood it well. Not even thinking about possible rivalry, he made his first unit the same way. Possibility that our modules wouldn't apply hadn't crossed his mind either. Our chief engineer, Gunnar Wik, was also from Cober. He'd hired Al Johnson, another former associate from Cober. It's like the fabric of space-time warped, surrounding Ron with Cober, amid ETM. Nobody from ETM-proper noticed Ron was making a Cober. It was coming together in cabinet assembly. Then bigwigs from Litton were in for contract negotiation. Ron's unit was spotted. These guys probably all worked with Chuck at Litton 20 years earlier. They found it amusing he started our company to be the antithesis of Cober. And here a few short years later, he's, perhaps unwittingly, building them one.
Poor Chuck had the panels scrapped. And Ron's pennance would be paid personally in test, he wasn't getting a teck. Sadly, changing panels couldn't make it "ETM blue." There were these little details, they kept coming out of the woodwork. That little 4KV collector supply produced the most amazing eight-foot arcs I've ever seen. You'd start small, draw 'em out. The rivulets moved like a sidewinder rattlesnake. I was worried for my eyes.
I said jokingly, ETM collector panels don't do that. But we'd been duped, both sides of that supply were floating. Collector protection was at ground potential. That had us stumped. Ron bought two AAC brand hall-effect current sensors, for sensing cathode and collector currents at ground level. Arcing through one blew it out. A pi filter of 1 ohm resistors and electrolytic caps was constructed to save the other. It was like pulling teeth. Simple current metering and overcurrent protection fought us tooth and nail every step of the way. And everything was like that. We learned it all from scratch: we had to. Richard Ziskowski shipped sn.333 after Ron's dismissal.

There is nobody as kind, gentle, giving, technically competent to boot, as our man Ron. This guy hasn't a mean bone in him. After witnessing his treatment, I feel I've failed personally. It brightened me up immensely when I saw his baby, a 31KV switcher, crowbar, and grid deck; to complement Hal's tube, a beefy coupled-cavity TWT out of Group 14. Just a breadboard in FC-77, it would have fit in a shoe-box. Ron's happy there and I see why. That thing kicked out 3KW continuous.

Ron thought of me while he was out. So he picked me up a dot/bar generator, IF alignment marker generator, and CRT anode voltage probe--with one-gig resistor. Gee-wizz, what a guy!