High Voltage Circuit

[Dean Huster]

OK. All of the 1970's and 1980's have been indexed, at least until the (first) death of Popular Electronics. Man, that was depressing, for as I got into the 1980s, there was such a heavy emphasis on computers that finally they changed the name of the mag to Computers and Electronics, finally making it such that there were absolutely NO electronics projects involved at all. And even the computer stuff involved no building -- it was just nothing but articles on software and hardware. Even Forrest Mims III columns ("Solid-State Developments", "The Electronics Experimenter" and "Project of the Month") were combined into one ("The Electronics Scientist") and finally that changed to "The Computer Scientist" where all electronics as we knew it ceased to be published by that magazine. It dissolved about that time. Had they kept the magazine intact with electronics and produced another NEW magazine called "Computers", I think that Popular Electronics would have survived just find. But it ended up being ruined by computers that were nothing more than appliances. And during that time, with all the hoopala with microprocessors and computers, there was only ONE project pubished (other than the original Altair and ELF projects) that used a microprocessor. You'd have thought that they'd have come up with all sorts of processor-based projects, but all they did was articles on this computer system or that software package. Everything was turnkey. And yes, I'm pretty-well disgusted with Ziff-Davis over all that. It'd be interesting to see what Forrest Mims thought about all that. Didn't he post on this forum about a year ago?

No HV shocker projects at all, by the way.

Now I'm working on the 1960's, beginning with 1967, since that's the oldest I've found, which I find disconcerting. I KNOW I have from 1964 through 1969 because that's when I started subscribing. I've a few in 1963.

[Rodney]

The July 1962 issue of Popular Electronics had a circuit to convert battery power to a higher voltage;
2.4Vin=70Vout, 4.8Vi=120Vout,6Vin=150Vout and 8Vin=200Vout; max output current 40 milliamperes. I still have it and it still works, uses two 2N392 power transistors in what I think was a multivibrator circuit. I do not have the schematic handy nor have I looked at the circuit for the last 30 years.