Rob Frohne

email:  My first name "dot" my last name "at sign" wallawalla.edu
Office:CSP261
Phone: (509) 527-2075
Fax: (509) 527-2867

Good Stories

My favorite magazine which has a lot of good stories is Guideposts Magazine . Check it out!
If you are interested in how I became a Christian, look here .

The Land of Bearded Trees, a book by my Aunt Joan Frohne Abbott and my grandmother, Margaret Doorly Frohne, a beautiful book, with interestig stories of life on Barbados in the 19th century.

Some Papers and Pages on my Site:

• R2-DSP, add a DSP demodulator to Rick Campbell's R2 receiver!
• Using a Vector Network Analyzer to Make Time-Domain Transmission and Reflection Measurements, RF Design, December 1995, page 62.
• Voice Frequency Compandor Using DSP
• Modifying your Heathkit HD-1481 Antenna Switch For High Frequency Operation
• Add a Noise Blanker that Works to Your Drake R-4C Receiver
• Repairing an Oxyhealth Vitaeris 320 Hyperbaric Chamber With a Window Leak and a Splitting Zipper (Also some notes on how the chamber helps my glaucoma....)

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  Dynamic Carrier Control: AM Transmitters Save on the Power Bill While Sounding Louder

  Do you operate an AM transmitter, especially an AM shortwave transmitter? If you do, you should be using dynamic carrier control (DCC). Dynamic carrier control lowers the carrier power when it is unnecessary in such a way that to receivers equipped with automatic gain control (AGC) the signal sounds even louder than when more power was being transmitted. I designed a DCC circuit for the Thompson transmitters at Adventist World Radio Asia , on Guam. It saves them about 20 percent on their power bill (several thousand dollars a month savings). I also designed a similar circuit for High Adventure Ministries stations in California and Palau. If you have a need for this circuit, send me an e mail message. I believe in conserving the world's resources and so I'll probably be glad to help you. I had a little documentation on this circuit on disk that you can look at if you like. Check here for that. My handwritten notes from 1991 describing the DCC circuit I used for the Thompson transmitters at AWR is described here as a PDF. Those transmitters are now in use in Palau.

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  Some of my Favorite Classes to Teach:

  • Engineering Electronics
  • Electromagnetic Propagation & Radiation
  • Communications Systems
  • Signals & Systems
  • Analog Design

  Class Notes and Links

  Check here!

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  Frohne Family Notes of Interest

  1997 Pictorial Family Highlight

  Mission College Adventure

  Photo Review of 2003

  
  

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  My Hobbies:

   

  • Amateur Radio
    • My call is KL7NA/W7. I spend most of my hobby time playing with radio projects. See Some Recent Papers . You can see me installing my four element five band quad at 90 feet. It used to be at 120 feet, but I moved nearer to the local airport.
    • I have used Ham Series rotors for years, and learned some hard lessons with them.  Read about how to avoid them here.
      
    • I have some radio schematics available to download here. I scanned them for friends who requested it on the news groups. The ones available are:
      • Ten-Tec Argonaut 509
      • Heathkit HP-1144 power supply for the SB-104/A
      • HP-4185A Vector Impedance Meter Manual
  • Computers
    • I wrote a program for the Commodore Amiga years ago, and recently found it on the net! It is a toy for learning Morse code. It is called CWToy. You can find it at: CWToy.readme and CWToy.lha .
    • There is also some software that goes along with the DSP Demodulator for the R2 receiver mentioned in the recent papers section .
    • I have used an Apple Powerbook 520c for a few years, and in that time I've had some things to fix. If you have a 520 or 540 you might want to look at Powerbook 520 & 540 Modifications and Fixes I've come up with.
    • I acquired a Wallstreet Series I powerbook, and came up with a fix for the hard to press clicker .
    • I ended up with a 3400c powerbook, and found that it seems to be cardbus compliant even though Apple doesn't admit it.
    • I have been having a good time with REALbasic from Real Software. It is an object oriented basic for the Macintosh platform. I have a class that will do Cartesian plots. You can download it here .
    • I have been playing around with Apple's AirPort wireless networking. Here I have an article on adding an external antenna to the AirPort base station. Here I have a document on how to install Airport 1.2 on Mac OS 8.6 even though Apple says it is not possible. Apple also claims that it will not work on a powerbook 3400c and it works fine for me. I have a page on using the surplus Primestar dishes with an IEEE 802.11 wireless network connection. Here is an index of my IEEE 802.11 projects.
    • Save My Whiteboard is a program I wrote to transform photos of the whiteboard into printable notes that are also nice for posting to the web. I used this to preserve whiteboard notes for my students from my lectures.
    • SimpleRPN is an open source program I wrote to learn Cocoa for Mac OS X. It is a simple RPN calculator, and I use it as my computer calculator of preference.
    • A Wireless Flood Alarm is a project I built using MicroPython and a ESP8266 (NodeMCU) to alarm me if the sump pump failed.
    • My Github Projcets are more recent than most of the above, and include antenna rotator control software, some VNA projects, and some forks of other's work.
  • Collecting Hewlett Packard Calculators.
    • HP Calculator Reference Sheets
      • HP-41C or HP-41CV
      • HP-67 or HP-97
    • There is a lot of data on the Museum of HP Calculators.
  • Postage Stamp Collecting