Going to the Air & Space Museum is a somewhat different experience for me than most folks, I am thrilled to look at the wiring and connectors on the planes and spacecraft! The height of my last visit was noticing the first Vanguard 1 right there on display under glass. It is shown bent up and (possibly artificially) broken open. You can look right inside, where there are apparent some kind of metal cylinder with relatively standard-looking mini-rf connectors from which little coax cables lead (presumably to the antennas). The cylinder was a bit of a mystery, but I wondered if it would be possible to find the schematics for the satellite somewhere online, they couldn't be very large.
Of course such a thing was easily found. This article:
http://aa1tj.blogspot.com/2012/06/vanguard-1-satellite-transmitter.html)
is by a guy who built a copy of the Vanguard 1 transmitter, apparently called a "minitrack" transmitter, and then used it to get the attention of his radio friends. There's complete contemporary schematics, a description of how he used antique transistors and why, and pictures of his build. Then it wanders off into rf jokes between him and his friends. So nerdy, and yet he reconstructed technology history in the most genius way; this is really living and thinking!
This article has a mechanical schematic that shows the cylinder:
http://weebau.com/satellite/V/vanguard%201.htm
This article has a post-recovery photo of TV-3 which does not show its body to have been split, which makes me suspicious of the display at the Smithsonian:
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=1958-002B
