Foundations Of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I started doing some research on Baluns. It was prompted by a message from a fellow amateur who asked about how they work and what they do and what the difference was between a 1:1, a 1:4 and a 1:9 balun. While doing that, I thought I'd look up what the definition was of a balun. It says right here on Google - so it must be true - that it's a type of electrical transformer used to connect an unbalanced circuit to a balanced one. I clicked on the link that said "Translations, word origin and more definitions", which showed me a history of the use of the word balun and I was hooked. The explanation of a balun will have to wait for another day. I started looking at the use of the word going back to the 1800's, based on Google's Ngram Viewer. Looks like it was used a bit between 1800 and 1910, but steadily declining in use, until it started picking up in popularity around 1930. Today the word balun is more popular than the phrase "radio amateur", but less popular than either