[RFI] New ARRL Mission statement > Was solar fix

[Jim Brown]

I attended one of his three-day workshops, in Palo Alto, in 2004 or '05. 
I found his many insights to be brilliant. I also was part of arranging 
for him to present invited lectures at two national conventions of the 
Audio Engineering Society. Henry was a (silent) member of the EMC WG of 
the AES Standards Committee.

We had several dinners together over the years. One of the things he 
talked about was breaking fundamental concepts in the simplest terms 
possible to make them more understandable to those with less technical 
education. He had always been very good at that -- I was very impressed 
with how he did that in his workshop and talks.

I had already known that he had done consulting work for virtually every 
major corporation on a wide range of issues. During that workshop, 
things he said made it very clear to me that he had thought extensively 
and had major insights into just about any problem faced by contemporary 
designers in a very wide range of fields and applications, and had 
thought through 6-8 different implications to every problem/mechanism.

As an example, thinking about traces above a "ground" layer or 
sandwiched between two such layers as a transmission line, and that 
transit time along those traces had become a fundamental limit on 
processing speeds. Another important insight was that any break on one 
of the "ground" layers acts as a break in the line, causing return to be 
purely random based on physical construction, creating crosstalk and 
causing emissions from the resulting radiation.

That one workshop was one of the most valuable education I received over 
the years. I say one of the most, because I also had the opportunity to 
study extensively under Richard Heyser, a scientist at JPL who worked in 
space communications there. But I was studying in what was his "hobby" 
-- pro audio, which he revolutionized in the '70s with his invention of 
Time Delay Spectrometry, and with his many lectures and workshops. TDS 
brought complex analysis to audio and acoustic systems with practical 
instrumentation, a decade before anything comparable with dual channel 
FFT. I bought one of the earliest production units in 1982, and it made 
my career in pro audio. It cost me the $12,000 I had saved for a down 
payment on my first house.

Dick was President-elect of the AES when he died in 1986 of cancer.

73, Jim K9YC

> Jim, I took several of his courses.