Engineering at Dordt College

In my Electronics II Lab (EGR 323) we are building an AM/FM radio. Not only are we building the radios, the students are also doing all the alignments and any necessary troubleshooting (to correct mistakes which are infrequent but inevitable) . I took this picture on Tuesday, February 20, just as Roy (pictured) was finishing testing the audio amplifier portion of his radio. This week he finished the AM intermediate amplifier, AM oscillator and mixer, and the AM antenna and tuner circuits and finished aligning them all. The AM part of his radio is now fully working. For one thing, it sure is fun for me to watch the smiles on my student’s faces when they hear, for the first time, a radio station coming through on a radio they built! But more importantly, since they have built it piece-by-piece, tested and analyzed the bias of every transistor as they build, and done all the alignments themselves, they see how the theory taught in class gets applied in real-life electronics, and they find that very satisfying.

In the photo: Roy is adjusting the volume control on his radio project. The computer (the larger monitor) is used to display various documents relating to testing and aligning the radio. The item on the top shelf that has a small computer screen is a digital storage oscilloscope. Roy is using that to check the audio signal for distortion and for adequate power at the loudspeaker. Roy is a senior student in Dordt’s Engineering Major. Upon his graduation this May, he plans to work for Fagen Engineering, a company that does consulting engineering work on ethanol plants.