Adam our Electronics Technician.

Richard our Digital Technician.

Helen our Administrative Assistant.

The Powers That Be

by Mike Carter

At some point in the dark ages (i.e., when I was just starting college) I quickly learned that while professors give grades, it is the department staff that wield the real power in the academic world. One may scrape and claw for that elusive "A" in junior electronics, or find oneself battered and broken on the rocks of Emag class, but these struggles pale in comparison to the abyss into which the unwary student is hurled if one fails to respect and appreciate the department staff members! ECE alumni will surely recall occasions on which the department secretary bailed them out of a procedural bind, or the last minute efforts of the department technician to troubleshoot a balky oscillator or an amplifier that wouldn’t stop oscillating! Those wise graduates may also remember times at which the staff went beyond the confines of their formal job descriptions to provide a friendly shoulder to lean upon in times of crisis, or simply a patient ear when no one else would listen. I suspect that I’m not alone when I can’t recall a single lecture from my sophomore circuits course, but have no trouble remembering the wisdom dispensed by Jim, the EE instrument room technician at Michigan, in 1973! If you have friendly anecdotes to share about past or current ECE staff, please send them to the Signals and Noise Editor (ece.dept@unh.edu) for possible inclusion in a future edition of the newsletter!

The three vignettes that follow are offered to alumni and current ECE students in the hope that they may better appreciate the talented, committed individuals who play a vital, often unsung, role in the education and character-building of our graduates.

The Indomitable Helen Lawson

Those who’ve graduated after 1987 will remember Helen as the mainstay of the Department office. Through three department chairmen and several office secretaries (Sandy, Ellen, Tracey, Carol, Kim), Helen has remained the senior administrative assistant and resident wizard of arcane university policies and procedures. Until the advent of the new Business Service Centers on campus, Helen kept (or was it cooked?) the books for all Department procurements including grant-funded research accounts. You may recall her laboring at the computer in the inner sanctum of the ECE office, trying to decipher Ron Clark’s latest travel expense voucher scribblings, or conferring with Frank Hludik about time and room scheduling for the next year’s classes. It is perhaps ironic that as the University has become more lean, the accompanying reductions in staff have enabled Helen to do more of what she enjoys most: interaction with ECE students. Freed from the chains that bound her to accounts payable and the inner office, she now presents her sun-bronzed visage to all who enter the Department office.

If you’ve stayed around UNH during any recent summer, you know the importance of attending to all crucial items of business before Helen departs on her annual July vacation! While I suspect that the choice of July was once linked to the close of the University’s fiscal year (and with it the temporary lull in the usual accounting frenzy), Helen has maintained her tradition even though her new duties no longer require financial legerdemain. She presides over the poolside frolic of her five grandchildren, or just enjoys some peaceful moments in her float-chair, while Kingsbury Hall wilts under the July sun and humidity. Yet she always looks forward to the return of the students in late August because it is from them that she derives her greatest satisfaction.

Although Helen has been a fixture in the ECE Department since 1987, it may come as a surprise to many readers of Signals and Noise that she spent the twelve years prior to 1987 in other departments in CEPS! After being at home for seventeen years while raising three children, she came into the University’s fold through the good offices of her (then) neighbor Carol French (who many former students will remember as the grande dame of the CEPS Dean’s Office). Helen started a temporary, though full-time, position with the Mechanical Engineering Department (Bill Mosberg was the chairman at the time) in September 1975, and then accepted an offer for a regular office staff position from Sandy Amell in the Chemistry Department beginning in January 1976. In those days, the office staff and the faculty both worked under ten month contracts! She returned to Mechanical Engineering in 1979 where she remained as a full-time, year-round staff member until commencing work in the ECE Department in June 1987.

Through 24 years of professional life at UNH, Helen has had the opportunity to witness many changes within the institution and the student body. As the University has pared back its administrative and support staff, the increased reliance on technology (e.g., voicemail, e-mail) has been something of a double-edged sword. Helen observes that these inventions have partially freed her of the need to be continuously present in the office, but at the same time have decreased the pleasurable personal contacts that once were the norm of routine daily work. Even the University has not been immune to the plague of telephone menu trees, and Helen laments the fact that one may no longer get a prompt response from a real person to an urgent question. Among the students, Helen notes, there has been a trend toward lost innocence. While she enjoys tremendously her interactions with all of them, she is amazed at the worldliness of even the newly arrived freshmen, and can’t help but feel that they’ve grappled with so many major life crises and experienced so much of the world through travel and the media that their natural sense of awe is diminished with respect to that of previous generations of students. This trend is not unique to UNH students, but reflects the changes in the broader American society.

With New Hampshire summers being notoriously short (there are, after all, only a few weeks between mud season and the arrival of the leaf peepers!), Helen can’t spend all of her spare time at poolside. She and her husband of eighteen years, Jim, often take long drives on the less traveled roads of our beautiful state, or make an occasional foray to the Foxwoods casino in Connecticut. They followed the stock car racing circuit for several years while her son Jeff was a member of a racing team, but now pursue less hair-raising hobbies! Helen finds much more time now for reading, mostly novels, and she and Jim have made the game Aggravation into a regular pastime with old friends. After living in Dover for many years, Helen and Jim returned to her family homestead in Barrington after her mother passed away.

Helen is delighted to have ECE alumni drop into the office and keep her up to date on their life and career changes. For those alumni who remember the traditional Friday platter of cookies that Helen would put out for students, you’ll be pleased to know the tradition lives on. Because she enjoys the drop-in visits of current students so much, she’s been putting out "bait" more often since she became the sole office staff member! More than a few ECE students have been seen passing by the office door, only to snap back as if on a rubber band when they realize that Helen has put cookies, pretzels, or some other delectable goodies on the counter. While some just snatch a cookie and run to class, others pause to converse because they need her receptive ear and, sometimes, a shoulder to cry on. Above all, Helen wants our students to feel comfortable and relaxed in their interactions with her. She does not want a repeat of what must have been a memorable scene years ago. A student, perhaps late in submitting a crucial form or an assignment, came to Helen’s desk pleading for mercy, and went so far as to kneel in front of her, hands folded as though in prayer, clearly visible to all passers-by in the hallway!

Adam Perkins -- The "Internet Tech"

When Dick Jennings, our long time Department technician and master of unruly instrumentation, retired in1993, many of us wondered if we could find a replacement who could nurse along our inventory of venerable test gear. With much tech shop experience in small R&D firms, and a lot of ham radio projects under his belt, Adam Perkins stepped into the breach left by Dick’s departure. Adam confesses that he originally thought he would be working with equipment -- calibrating and repairing the many oscilloscopes, signal generators, and the like, scattered among the Department’s teaching and research laboratories. He rapidly found, however, that his real job was teaching students the practical side of electrical and computer engineering! Fortunately for our students, he finds this role to be the most enjoyable part of his work. Adam’s long-standing interest in computers has also been a boon to the Department and its students. Through much effort, Adam has developed an enviable command of electronics-related web sites on the Internet. Need a data sheet for an obscure surplus IC? -- Adam can find it for you almost instantaneously. Want the best price on a particular power MOSFET? -- Adam will track it down and give you the vendor’s contact information within a matter of moments. Many ECE students now rely on Adam, the "Internet Tech," for much help in completing their senior design projects, both in locating and ordering the necessary parts and constructing working breadboard circuits.

Adam is a native son of New Hampshire who grew up in Farmington and began working in the electronics field, at least formally, in 1969. He started working at Kidder Press (then located on Locust Street in Dover) on the development of high-speed web presses. He attributes most of his real electronics education to a mentor, Walter Becker, for whom he worked in the TV repair business. He also spent time at the Simplex cable plant in Newington, and was an electronics technician for several small R&D firms before coming to UNH. Adam says he was attracted to the campus because it seemed like "a nice place to work," and his wife Joyce was already a UNH employee. Loving all things electronic, Adam was particularly impressed during his job interview tour when he heard people discussing electronic circuits in the Kingsbury hallways! He observes that at his previous employers, most of the staff talked about anything but electronics, and that the UNH ECE Department was a refreshing experience for him.

When asked about hobbies, Adam replied, "Electronics, electronics, and electronics." That’s not entirely true. His daughter Katherine, born in 1992, gives Adam a chance to revisit some of the great New England fun spots: Storyland, Santa’s Village, and Fun Town (for the old wooden roller coaster in which Katherine delights!). Frequent day trips to New Hampshire’s state parks for hiking, bike rides around the neighborhood, and the other joys of parenthood would seem to leave little time for ham radio and electronic projects, but Adam manages to squeeze in those pursuits as well.

One might say that Adam started out in electronics and ham radio "on the shady side!" At the ripe age of 14, and eager to hang out with the older kids in town, he figured that he might be able to trade his services as an on-air DJ for free rides in the best "muscle cars"! He built an AM transmitter, took requests for favorite songs and played them on air at an unused (though locally publicized!) frequency in the AM broadcast band, and soon found himself in great demand by older teens. It was not until much later in life, however, that he became a legitimate ham. His employer in the TV repair business, Walter Becker, K1QPS, used to take Adam along on service calls, and while on the road Walter would send and receive Morse code using an HF ham rig in the car! Adam, naturally, was in awe of Walter’s ability to copy code in his head without aid of pencil and paper, and thought it would be a great skill to have. Walter wisely encouraged Adam to learn the code by writing down every last character as he listened. As a consequence of his code proficiency and technical training, Adam was able to jump immediately to the Advanced Class amateur license grade (call sign WA1UNU), and that is no small feat!

As all good hams do, Adam spent much of his early time in the hobby "just reading the mail," or listening in on the conversations of other hams. Listening, in Adam’s case, meant copying radio teletype (RTTY) conversations using a surplus autostart teletype machine! He spent a good deal of time listening in the ham voice subbands hoping to hear interesting discussions of electronics, and only listened in the Morse code (CW) subbands for code practice (incidentally, Adam is proud of his 20 word per minute certificate from W1AW, the station of the national amateur radio association, the ARRL). When he first began listening to voice conversations rather than Morse, he found himself still writing down every word, and wondering why he was having such a hard time keeping up! Over the years, RTTY has been his favorite mode of operation. In fact, his very first ham contact after he was licensed was on RTTY with a Spanish ham on the twenty-meter band.

Adam claims it was his RTTY experience that presaged his interest in the Internet. He used to retrieve partial rolls of printer paper (free of charge, naturally) from the local radio station for use with his teletype machine, and when his supply eventually ran out, he decided to buy a computer and dispense with the old clunky teletypes once and for all. He now spends his time exploring more modern digital communication modes, and dabbles in two-meter single-sideboard and CW for fun. He’s built many radio-related projects since that first illicit AM transmitter, and his accomplishments include a "home-brewed" VHF AM transceiver for the RTTY work, a Heathkit SB-303 receiver and SB-401transmitter constructed as kits, and a slow-scan television receiver that used an old P7 long persistence phosphor oscilloscope tube as the image display! He continues to tinker with small projects and threatens to venture into the newest HF digital mode for hams (PSK31) and perhaps some fast-scan television as well.

Adam likens his job to that of a farmer: every year a new crop of freshmen enters the Department and, after much careful tending, are harvested as real engineers four years later. The students, Adam asserts, "are the best part of my job!" He’s really motivated to help them learn the practical side of circuit design, construction, and debugging. He fears, though, that they face an increasingly rapid pace of learning needed to become, and remain, successful engineers.

In a theme common to the other staff members interviewed for this article, Adam cited "paperwork" as the least favorite aspect of his job. Strangely enough, as the University has decreased the size of its staff, Adam has found that the amount of paperwork has increased. There must be some kind of universal law regarding people and paperwork in institutions that maintains a constant product of the two factors.

Richard Dewolf -- Jack of All Trades

The newest member of the ECE Department staff, Rich Dewolf, has been here just short of two years. While his principal responsibility is the maintenance of the Department’s computers and local area network, he has often been sighted doing miscellaneous odd jobs quite removed from the digital realm, hence the title "jack of all trades." Rich brings an impressive array of engineering experience to the Department, including many years in the U.S. Air Force while working on heavy ground radar systems (the old DEW line) and flight simulators (no, not Microsoft Flight Simulator! - the real thing for the FB-111 and KC-135 aircraft with full cockpit mockups and hydraulic actuators). After retiring from the Air Force in 1984, he worked for several commercial engineering firms including Boeing Aerospace, Data General, and Vitronics.

Rich’s favorite pursuits outside the walls of Kingsbury Hall include fishing (primarily lake trout and salmon), woodworking (especially scrollwork), and spending time with his wife Joanne and their grandchildren (now three in number with another on the way) at their summer home on Ossipee Lake. He and Joanne recently built a home in Greenland, NH, and Rich did more than 50%of the work himself. He claims to be adventurous and is willing to try any new hobby with the exception of parachuting! Incidentally, many ECE alumni know Joanne Dewolf as the longtime librarian in the Kingsbury branch library. As a special "once in a millennium" vacation, the Dewolfs will travel to Acapulco this December to ring in Y2K (and hopefully avoid any Y2K-induced problems back on the home front!).

Rich enjoys the fact that he can work in support of our students, and finds them eager recipients of his advice based on many years of "real-world" engineering practice. He wryly observes that he wished his own kids had paid as much attention to his recommendations as do current ECE students. Rich also notes that many students approach him with questions they feel too embarrassed to bring to the faculty, and he is happy to serve as a general sounding board in such instances. Like a true ex-military man, Rich says "The students today have it too easy." One need only look at his broad grin to know that he’s pulling one’s leg, and that his respect for the current generation of ECE students is genuine. Come to think of it, that seems to be a common theme among our Department staff, and that’s probably why visiting ECE alumni first look up the staff, and only then try to find the faculty!