Winter 2004 Issue

Radio-control pioneer Walter Good, W3NPS, stabilizes the wing of his “Guff” model at the RC event of the AMA National Model Airplane Championships in Minneapolis in 1947. His twin brother Bill, W81FD, was the pilot, hidden behind Walt aside of the 6-meter Yagi antenna.

At age seven, after several failures I built my first model airplane that actually flew. That rubber-band-powered creation of balsa and tissue paper smartly climbed to altitudes near 30 feet and sometimes stayed up for as long as 30 seconds! This joyous achievement was the start of a 70-year addiction to a balsa-and-glue habit. I confess that I simply must have the stuff! I built models during high school, during 21/2 years in the Navy in WW II, during college, and during 52 years of marriage and family life that occasionally got a little rocky because of my obsession.

After two years of struggles that could rightly be called failures, in 1949 I successfully flew a radio-controlled model airplane. Success was a vague sort of thing in those days. What actually happened is a friend towed my 10-foot-span glider to about a 250-foot altitude. It made several figure-8s as it descended, and was steered to a landing about 200 feet from where it was anchored to the ground by a cable attached to a 20-pound black box that was almost as big as a bread box. This achievement led to a permanent addiction to the fascinating joys of radio-controlled flight.

The radio equipment I used in 1949 was a commercial version of a system that had been developed by the Good brothers. Walt, W3NPS, and Bill, W81FD (later W2CVI), were identical twins with an identical zeal for radio-control. Their first RC flights had been made in 1936, and historians credit them with being the first hobbyists and radio amateurs to fly RC in the United States, and perhaps in the whole world.

The Good brothers’ post-war RC equipment was made and marketed by Harry Geyer under the logo of Beacon Electronics. The airborne stuff, with its batteries, weighed about 2 lbs. with a 1/2-hour battery supply—gross by today’s standards, but remarkably light and small for 1949 vintage radios. The receiver was a super-regenerative type operated on the 6-meter ham band. The heart of the unit was a 3A5 vacuum tube whose plate current flowed through a magnetically polarized super-sensitive relay. The filament of the 3A5 needed 100 ma @ 1.5 volts. The plate current was 6.0 ma @ 45 volts. These two rivers of electrons add up to about 0.42 watts, a Niagara compared to modern PCM (pulse code modulation) receivers.

 

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