The "Condom" Waveform

Some of Ted’s humor became common terminology around the Numar shop. When I started with Numar in late 1994, it wasn’t long that I was sent up to Malvern, PA to absorb some knowledge on how to maintain the then new “C” tool.

I returned to Brenham several weeks later with a notebook full of waveforms I had measured and printed from an oscilloscope. One of the most important ways to determine the health of the C tool transmitter was to measure the output to the antenna. The waveform had a distinctive shape and while demonstrating this to the other techs, Ted happened to walk in the shop, look at the o-scope, and said,” That looks like a condom!” – And he was right, it did.

So was born the term “condom waveform”. Some times this was just abbreviated to condom, so it became common practice to ask a field tech calling in for support “if he had a condom” or “what does your condom look like?” I could just imagine what someone eavesdropping on Jimbo’s technical telephone conversations may have thought.

A year or so later, it was determined that the “condom waveforms” were not exactly the best type of waveforms for NMR and were technically called “hard pulses”...

On a different note, the attached picture is of Ted checking out the wolf pelts in a market place in Bergen, Norway - August or September 1995.

Neal Naumann