Ron Roscoe has finally done it. He’s cre­ated his dream class, the most clever lab con­cept at MIT. Com­ing next Spring to an Insti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy near you (should you be near Massachusetts):

INTRODUCTORY RF DESIGN LABORATORY: Learn RF design through the study of
antique radio receiver cir­cuits; restore (and keep!) an antique radio.
 
Lec­tures, PSets, and six Labs will cover the fol­low­ing top­ics:
 
Series and par­al­lel tuned cir­cuits and asso­ci­ated band­width High Fre­quency
RF Amps; how to design around the Miller effect Regen­er­a­tive receiver and
detec­tor cir­cuits Tuned RF [TRF] receivers Neu­tral­ized [Neu­tro­dyne] RF Amps
Super­hetero­dyne receivers; oscil­la­tors, mix­ers and IF amps The "All Amer­i­can
Five" AM receiver FM receivers and detec­tors JFET sub­sti­tutes for scarce
1920's vac­uum tubes RF mea­sure­ments Com­mon vac­uum tube tri­ode and pen­tode
topolo­gies
 
5 weeks of the term will be devoted to the restora­tion and cir­cuit analy­sis
of an antique radio [sup­plied]
 
Pre­req­ui­sites: 6.002 or 6.071

In an age where young kids are no longer fas­ci­nated by build­ing oatmeal-box crys­tal radios; where the excite­ment over the lat­est achieve­ments in sil­i­con has out­paced inter­est in the clever trick­ery of design­ing with sim­ple, less-than-perfect com­po­nents; where ham radio has come to be the near-exclusive domain of fat old white men; where the heart of EE—the craft—is in dan­ger of being for­got­ten: this class is a most cru­cial step toward keep­ing the art of ana­log and wire­less alive. I am jeal­ous of the stu­dents who will get to take it.