Wade G Holcomb’s diy NMR system. W1GHU became a Silent Key in 2015. Click on the picture for a full-resolution image
Many years ago I corresponded with Wade G Holcomb (W1GHU, SK 2009) about his home-brew NMR spectrometer and MRI experiments. Going through my files I found the documents that he had sent me back then (1996), including a picture of his diy NMR setup with a big surplus magnet and a copy of the article “Try NMR with your old CW rig” which he had published in the Winter 1996 edition of Communications Quarterly.
I looked Wade up today, and found that he became a silent key in 2009. His article is nowhere to be found on the internet, so I decided to scan it and make it available so this part of his legacy doesn’t get lost.
Click here for a scanned version of the paper (this is the best I got. It’s a photocopy of the original that Wade sent to me).
Click here for an OCR version of the paper.
UPDATE 16 Oct 2020:
Peter Brown sent me an e-mail telling me:
“Thank you for scanning and placing on the web Wade’s article from Communications Quarterly on turning your HF rig into a spectrometer.
I was fortunate to have had Wade’s mentoring over the years for making RF tuned circuits for NMR systems.
I have attached a jpg of Wade’s obituary on the off chance you may want it.
He was very proud of that article. He first tried submission for it in “73”, and “CQ”, and I believe in “QST”. He said they sent him rejection letters because they felt it was beyond the scope of their readership, and then tried Communications Quarterly, in which it was accepted.
I joked with him that his next publication should be “Try ham radio with your NMR spectrometer”, to entice the NMR scientists world wide to be interested in ham radio. He didn’t think my joke was as amusing as I thought it was.”
