"Return of the Slide Rule Dial"
by Brian Wood, W0DZ, is an article
in the 2002 Feb issue of QST,
the amateur radio magazine by
the American Radio Relay League.
http://www.arrl.org

He first explains what a slide rule is.
This is probably necessary these days.
A K&E 4081 is pictured.

In the old days, radio receivers, transmitters
and transceivers had frequency tuning dials
that were called "slide rule" dials
because of their resemblance with the
numbers and tuning indicator/cursor.
These dials also had lots of useful information
like ham band and subband limit markings,
prominent shortwave bands and stations, etc.
When fully digital synthesized equipment
came in, the dial was replaced by
just the frequency in decimal digits.
This is much more accurate in frequency
than the old style dials,
but the ancillary information was gone.

Brian missed this and decided to get it back.
He's programmed a "slide rule" type dial PC display
for his fancy new digital Yeasu FT-1000MP ham transceiver.
He wanted to "restore some of the 'humanity'
to our technological marvels."
Neat.

Not all change is necessarily progress. :)
Occcasionally, it is a good idea to look
back and see what might have been lost.

Cheers,

Ron McConnell
w2iol