MATH’S NOTES

hile thinking of a suitable topic for this month, I remembered an interesting experiment we did many years ago that I might have mentioned before. At that time, we needed a microwave signal to test a surplus microwave cavity we had obtained from a source in New York’s so-called “Radio Row” down on Canal and Cortland Streets. This entire area unfortunately disappeared many, many years ago (in shows roughly what we did. The high-voltage transformer was one commonly used to step up the AC line to the high voltage required to light advertising neon signs and produced a small spark across the gap. The overall result was a weak but detectable microwave signal somewhere in the GHz range. Further details are not needed at this point but the technique did work.