It all began with a cheap Chinese rotary vane vacuum pump and a desire to learn the witchcraft of DIY vacuum tubes. It ended with a string of successes – a working vacuum chamber, light bulbs, glow ...

Noise is an annoying but unavoidable part of any engineering project. Fixing noise issues is hard enough, but even just measuring how much noise an amplifier adds to your signal is tricky without ...

We might tend to take the word “diode” for granted if we’re thinking of a “diode” as just a two-lead or two-terminal device that gets used in this or that place for this or that purpose. It can become ...

A diode is an electrical device that allows current to move through it in one direction with far greater ease than in the other. The first diodes were crystals used as rectifiers in home radio kits. A ...