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New SponsorWelcome Ken Rockwell and Tektronix(June 6, 2000) We welcome Tektronix and their regional representative Ken Rockwell to our line-up of sponsors. He's been a busy Tektronix rep for the Test and Measurement division for sometime now. I'll let him take the floor and explain.--GS TV has excited me since I was a little kid in New York. My dad and uncle were also engineers. I got CATV engineering books as birthday gifts. For my 9th birthday I got what I wanted most in the whole wide world: a tour of NBC's Rockefeller Center studios. I got my 1st 'phone in high school and became Chief Engineer of a class-D FM station. I designed and installed several studios, and that included building a multi-band audio processor with NE571 chips from scratch. I had an article published in Radio World (remember I'm still in high school) about an LED meter I had designed. Boy, was Telex surprised when they called to ask questions and got my mom on the phone!
Dad insisted I get a "real" job, so I got my BSEE and a boring office job. In 1988 TRW LSI Products, the inventors of the video A/D converter chip, as well as the digital video multiplier and other digital image processing chips, moved me to La Jolla to be an applications engineer. I got paid to help other engineers (including Tek and GVG) design high-end broadcast equipment. HA! An office job in TV engineering! In 1995 I started with Tektronix' Television Division as their District Manager in Hollywood. Fun! They actually PAID me to tour all the biggest Hollywood studios! They liked what I did, so I gradually got put in charge of everything from San Luis Obispo to Las Vegas to San Diego. I'm also active in SMPTE and am the former VP of the AES' Hollywood section. I still live in La Jolla. The address on my card is Tek's biggest local office. I'm responsible here for everything Tek does from oscilloscopes to RF and audio and video. Feel free to call (858) 457-8400, my direct number, any time day or night. Oh Yeah, Tektronix...Nothing has changed with GVG becoming their own company. GVG and the Tektronix Video Business Unit, of which I am part, were always separate. Tek VBU has been pushing the edge in video and audio for 50 years. Today Tek offers the RFA300A, the largest selling 8VSB transmitter test set, and several MPEG testers, generators and analyzers. The most unusual instruments we make are the PQA and PQM instruments. They look directly at picture quality, just as our eyes do. The waveform and vectorscopes have been in continuous production for five decades. Tek is an amazing place: I'm just a guy in the field, and even I have a patent pending on oscilloscope triggers. For the first time in 20 years we've introduced a new oscilloscope that works great for TV: the TDS3000 series. Believe it; even the cheapest $2,995 TDS3012 can run circles around a $20,000 2467BHD for aligning tape machines. We just introduced a 601SDI module that lets you monitor serial digital video with the TDS3000 oscilloscope, including vector and picture functions, and it can run on BATTERIES. When I'm not working I'll be off photographing, surfing, running, cycling, SCUBA diving or traveling in some crazy remote location like Russia, France or Guatemala. My latest project is learning how to take www.kenrockwell.com from one page to a full site. |
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