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Tim Koeth and the Classic Tektronix Oscilloscope Tim Koeth’s interest in vintage oscilloscopes began remarkably early. He got his first oscilloscope at just eight years old, during a trip to Packard’s Flea Market in New Jersey with his mother and his Aunt Lil. Among the tables of old electronics, Tim spotted an RCA WO-91A oscilloscope….

Emittance Exchange – The 2nd Ph.D. Project. Tim Koeth’s Ph.D. at Fermilab was not built around a single narrowly defined experiment. It unfolded over roughly seven years of intensive, hands-on accelerator work, during which he was entrusted with two unusually large experimental projects. The first was Capture Cavity II, where he led and participated deeply…

Capture Cavity II — Superconducting RF at Fermilab One of Tim Koeth’s formative experiences as a young accelerator physicist was his work on Capture Cavity II (CCII) at Fermilab under the mentorship of legendary accelerator physicist Helen Edwards. Begun in the early 2000s, CCII was Tim’s first intended Ph.D. research project and immersed him in…

CKM and the Beginning of a Partnership with Helen Edwards — 1998 Tim Koeth’s first experience at Fermilab came in 1998, when, as a young aspiring physicist, he headed west to work on Gordon Thomson’s proposed CKM (Charged Kaons at the Main Injector) experiment. The project required a specialized radio-frequency device—a TM110 transverse deflecting cavity—and…

Director, UMD Nuclear Reactor & Radiation Facilities From 2013 to 2019, Tim Koeth served as Director of the University of Maryland Nuclear Reactor and Radiation Facilities, overseeing the 250-kW Maryland University Training Reactor (MUTR), Cobalt-60 gamma irradiation facilities, and electron linear accelerators. Tim did not merely administer an existing reactor facility; he helped preserve it…

Amateur radio has been a part of Tim Koeth’s life since his early teens, helping turn an early fascination with electronics into a lifelong habit of experimentation, building, and learning by doing. Tim earned his first amateur radio license, KB2IXD, at age 13 alongside his father, Bill Koeth (W2WK, Silent Key). The two attended evening…

Part of Tim’s professional activities includes collaboartions that have brought him to CERN a handful of times over the past two decades. This page is to capture the adventure more than the technical aspects, so this is only a brief technical summary of his most recent activity (2018) taking him to CERN. Tim stands beside…

Tim Koeth’s three-decade cyclotron project Tim Koeth’s cyclotron project began in 1995, when he was a sophomore physics student at Rutgers University. During a modern physics lecture by Professor Tom Devlin, Tim learned how a cyclotron uses a magnetic field and radio-frequency electric fields to repeatedly accelerate charged particles. The combination immediately appealed to interests…

Tim Koeth’s cryptologic hobby sits at the intersection of historical cryptography, electromechanical engineering, restoration, radio, and hands-on experimental history. It is less about modern computer cryptography than about preserving and actually operating the physical machines that implemented secure communications during the 20th century. His interest goes back to childhood, when formerly secret cipher technology was…

The story begins in 2013, when Tim unexpectedly received a roughly two-inch, five-pound cube of natural uranium metal. It came with the tantalizing handwritten note: “Taken from the reactor that Hitler tried to build. Gift of Ninninger.” Tim immediately recognized what it appeared to be: one of the uranium fuel cubes manufactured for Nazi Germany’s…

Tim’s Account of the Piscataway Radium Incident Background My fascination with radioactivity started very early. By the age of 10, I knew I needed a Geiger counter. I searched high and low for one, calling my science teachers and their friends, but to no avail. I did already have an insensitive, high-range CDV-715 ionization chamber,…