[Radio Wrangler]

Back in the day, I wasn't aware of D&W and I thought that all those British tuner makers were making their own front ends, so they must have their own RF designers. Engineers are dangerous beasties to keep in captivity, particularly design engineers, at the best of times. They'll laugh at management decisions, see straight through personnel department shenanigans, and generally cause disruption. RF design engineers are by far the most dangerous. They know that no-one else understands what they do, thinking it's some form of black art. They do practical jokes. They design what they want to do, not what they were told to do. Disruption is elevated to mayhem. The electronics industry never saw more beards and VWs until Unix hit town. I can now understand the attraction of bought-in front-ends.

What I did wonder about was where all the innovation came from. The answer I saw was the semiconductor firms. What became the norms in FM tuners came from the applications notes of RCA for dual-gate MOSFETs, CA3089 and CA3090. Motorola for varactor tuning and MC1310. Philips ar the time were producing reference designs around bipolars saying that they represented the best performance on low DC bias currents - clearly thinking of portable. radios, not hifi. Ceramic filters came along and became standard features. Did this come from Murata/Kyocera? or were Brush-Clevite the initiators? Murata were certainly the winners.

D&W were but a step in this food-chain... the trickle down from apps notes.

David