Perhaps we can reassign some of the Marines who get a little too rough with our "guests" at Gitmo to duty on Phobos. Lets hope they don't find that interdimensional gateway, but make sure they are well-armed with plasma rifles and a few BFG-9000s, and plenty of ammo.
I always seem to put one strike against a merchant who is less than honest about their shipping charges, even if the total cost with shipping is competitive with other sellers who are more honest about their shipping costs. It makes me wonder what else they are being dishonest about. A couple of bucks over the cost of postage and packaging, normal USPS or UPS type stuff is not really a problem. Neither is the substantial time, effort, and expense a seller might go to using his own vehicle to deliver something like a car, boat, motorcycle, or other large piece of machinery, if I had the option to pick it up myself or arrange transportation.
It is the vendors of small objects like electronics, jewelry, etc. that ship the cheapest way possible and ship dozens of items a day, yet charge like they drove 20 miles just to FedEx your one bubblewrap envelope, marking up the actual cost by several hundred percent that get in my craw.
The whole concept of buying things online, whether on Ebay, online classified listings, or on newsgroups does have its limits. Ebay works well for specialty items that can be hard to find in local markets, or for items which the shipping cost is not a huge percentage of the value of the item.
For lightweight items (less than a pound or so), it is difficult to justify domestic shipping costs of more than 5 or 6 bucks, since a 1 pound priority mail envelope or small package will go for about $4 and change, plus the cost of the packaging itself.
For little stuff, like memory chips that get a 60 cent stamp and a 15 cent bubble wrap envelope, I see all the time shipping costs in the range of $5 to $10. This is price inflation, pure and simple, particularly if the merchant is aggregating his shipments. Of course, it is easier to charge $10 for shipping a $150 dollar memory module than it is a for a 15 dollar one, even if the postage and packing materials are the same.
For larger items that are UPS sendable (up to 70#), I can see spending up to $50 to ship a heavy item such as a desktop computer, monitor or ham radio transceiver cross country. It cost me about $30 for USPS ground postage, plus a large box and packing material to ship a Kenwood TS-520 to a buyer in Texas, about 1,200 miles away. If you have to buy the boxes and peanuts, bubble wrap, etc. it can add several more bucks to the cost of shipping. Still, I have brought items that the shipping costs had more padding than the box they came in. It does get a little tougher for the merchant to seriously overcharge for shipping for heavier items, particularly if the item has a fairly low value to weight ratio.
For the really big stuff such as cars, motorcycles, big-screen TVs, furniture, and industrial equipment, arranging for shipment can be a much larger expense, and can be a real headache to pull off for the casual seller, or for the buyer to arrange if the seller is unable or uninterested in shipping it himself. The potential market for large heavy items becomes regional or even local, rather than nationwide. Online forums start to lose their advantage over local markets, particularly for items that are somewhat commodities, like used vehicles and appliances that have a low value to weight ratio.
One good thing that Ebay has done is improve their search engine to allow the buyer to specify the maximum distance from their home city when searching for vehicles and other items. Too often, I have seen dozens of gorgeous bikes I might want to bid on, then find out they are in Provo UT or Portland Oregon. I might specify a radius of 450 miles from Baltimore, MD, and would include the east coast from Boston down to Wilmington, NC, and as far west as Cleveland. For the right bike, I might make a weekend of it to pick it up.
For a more common item, such as a '95 F-150, I might limit my search to less than 100 miles. There might be 10 similar vehicles within 10 miles of my house that I can inspect while running my Saturday shopping errands, both marketed locally and online.
Another drawback of Ebay is the ability to closely inspect something before you buy, unless you are local enough to check it out before the auction ends. All you usually have to go on are some digital photos and the word and reputation of the seller. Even a good picture won't show all of the cracks, scratches, and dings, nor will it do a great item justice. Dodgy sellers sometimes have worthwhile stuff, and sometimes even good sellers overlook flaws. For anything with a switch, motor, or engine, there is nothing like being able to start it up, boot it up, or turn it on. A seller may be honest and ethical and disclose that his truck has a coolant leak, but until I can see whether it is a leaky thermostat gasket that is easily and inexpensively repaired, or a leaking head gasket will require tearing down the engine to fix, I tend to fear the worst and will bid accordingly, if at all.
In the past, hams have had some high earth orbiting birds up as well, which have allowed worldwide QSOs. Oscar 4, AO-10, AO-13, and AO-40 were high earth orbiting satellites, capable of worldwide QSOs and extended operating windows up to 10 hours long or more. Sadly, none of these satellites is currently considered operational. Of these, AO-10 is brain dead and has no attitude control, but occasionally the solar panels and the antennas line up in a favorable orientation as it tumbles through space, and communications are occasionally possible. AO-13 and AO-4 have reentered the atmosphere, after partial failure of their secondary boosters, but provided some service. AO-40 suffered a crippling explosion onboard about a month after launch, but was partially recovered and provided an S-band downlink, along with uplinks on 70cm, 23cm, and 3cm IIRC. It suffered a catastrophic battery failure in January, 2004 and has been silent ever since.
Lots of things can screw up FM reception. Does your work building have a metal skin? Lots of computers inside, generating lots of broadband RF noise? Welding equipment, electrostatic precipitators, even some types of commercial lighting can cause local RF interference. This is also true with all sorts of other mechanical equipment can also compromise your radio reception.
Most of the frequencies used for cell phones are in the upper UHF and lower microwave bands, from 850 Mhz to 1.8Ghz around here. By themselves, they are probably not likely to cause interference with FM radio, which operates between 88 and 108 Mhz. Other services on the tower might be able to desense cheaply designed tuners on inexpensive radios, such as pagers, fire, police, and other radio services that operate in the VHF portion of the radio spectrum.
The tower itself, along with tall buildings in the area can partially block some signals, and reflect some signals back to the antenna, causing multipath interference, This is most familiar on Analog TV signals as a ghost image offset to the main image. On radio, it causes uneven reception of signals.
Finally, evaluate the lay of the land around the building. Normally high ground favors good radio reception at FM frequencies. A building located in a valley or on the back side of a hill between it and a station's transmitter will normally have poorer reception than one located on high ground.
Depending where the property is located, the complaints about aesthetics, etc. can range from none at all in some areas, particularly if there are other broadcast, cellular, and public service radio towers in the area, to dealbreaking opposition near historic districts,upscale rural and suburban neighborhoods, or near other natural or manmade attractions.
As far as health issues go, the only possible health issue I can reasonably see is that the tower crashes down on you during an extreme windstorm, and proper engineering will mitigate this risk to the point of being negligible. The amount of RF transmitted by a cell site is on a par with a police radio or other mobile radio service. The fact that the antennas are located a couple hundred feet up in the air means that in reality, that police radio in the cop car behind you is pumping more RF into you than the cell site you are directly under.
The fact is, a properly located cell site will improve coverage for its customers, and can actually reduce exposure to RF. How can that be? Most modern cell phones adjust the power level of their transmitters based on the quality of the link they have to the best receive site in the area. I actually notice that my cell phone's battery needs recharging more if you are using it in an area of poor coverage, even if just in standby mode. A good cell site nearby reduces the power that the handset needs to maintain the link, reducing RF exposure to the user.
As far as interference to services you may be using inside your facility, you might want to find out from the cell site operator what frequencies, power levels, and duty cycles they will be transmitting at. This applies not only for cell phones, but for other services that may piggyback onto the tower as well, a tower in a good location will often have antennas strung up the side of it as well. These other radio services might include paging, public safety radio services, amateur radio repeaters and digipeaters, FM broadcast radio transmitters, etc. If you do sensitive testing of radars or something of that ilk, it would pay you to know what is up there.
In conclusion, I wouldn't be afraid to do it, as long as there is nothing up on the tower that would directly interfere with what you are doing now. Leasing space for cell sites is a profitable business around here, the local Volunteer Fire Dept receives about $12,000 a year to lease a 30 by 30 foot space to Verizon, and this is a very common arrangement. Besides the money, you might be able to write the lease to get services of your own on the tower, such as dispatch radios if you are in a service business, set up data links to remote offices, etc. Finally, another benefit might be the ability to use the services directly. Reliable 2 way radio services and WiFi internet access provided on that tower could actually enhance your operation. You may be able to make an arrangement for discounts on these services they may provide.
Driving in the 1920's was about as dangerous on a per mile basis as riding a motorcycle is today, which is about 10-15 times the risk of driving in modern day America. A little quick research came up with some historical data for traffic death rates for Washington State shows that in 1925 there were about 20 deaths per 100,000,000 passenger miles, about the same risk that riding a motorcycle is today. In the good old days, driver training was nonexistent, brakes were nonredundant and often only on the rear axle, making them relatively ineffective and unreliable. Such basic safety features as windshield wipers, defrosters, proper tailights and turn signals were nonexistent on lower cost cars.
Tire blowouts were common on the fragile tires of the day. Catastrophic mechanical failures on early cars were not uncommon either, such as broken axles and suspension pieces. I remember in a 1927 reproduction of the Sears Catalog that Sears bragged that their tires were guaranteed for 4,000 miles, provided they were not abused.
The Local Hamfest
on
Homeless Wires?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Check the ARRL for listings of Hamfests in your region. Offer the whole box or two up for a few bucks, or sell the stuff piecemeal for 25 or 50 cents a pop. Even if there isn't a hamfest in the area for a month or two, say you will sell your stuff there. You might be able to buy some time that way. The hamfest will also give you the opportunity to acquire new junk as well, so be prepared to defend any items that follow you home, or keep them in the trunk of your car until the coast is clear.
Judging by the numbers of octagenerian hams, it seems most make it well into their dotage years, though it does not stop them from complaining about their health. Seriously, the only health problem that I have ever heard of being possibly related to RF exposure is a ham friend of mine who developed cataracts in his late 40s. He admitted that it was probably from working on live unshielded PA decks on old Motorola UHF commercial gear (Motracs, etc), without proper precautions. 100 watts of RF at a couple of feet on an occupational basis might be enough.
One thing that non-technically oriented fail to realize is that the size of the tower bears little direct relationship to the amount of ERP it radiates. The typical police radio, marine radio, or 2 meter ham rig puts out about the same ERP as a cell phone tower transponder. My 2 meter mobile transmits about 100 watts ERP at eye level, while a cell tower's antennas are about 200 feet up. If there is an RF boogeyman at all, it would be the UHF analog and HDTV transmitters. Channel 22 in Crownsville, MD transmits with an ERP of about 5 Megawatts, or more than all the cell towers in the state.
Our family has owned since the 1920s, and I am currently living on a piece of land that is one of the highest points in Baltimore County. As a ham radio operator, this situation has obvious advantages, as undoubtedly it would if I would put up a communications tower. About 10 years ago, Verizon selected a tower site about 1/4 mile away at the local Volunteer Fire Department, which sits at least 60 feet lower than where my house now stands. For the privlege of having to erect 60 foot more tower than they needed to get the same coverage, they pay the local VFD about $15,000 a year. Good for the fire dept and community relations, but from an engineering perspective it is not the best location.
Though my neighbors might think otherwise, I wouldn't mind having a 150 foot tall steel lightning rod nearby on a couple of acres that are just hayfield right now (I have had 3 damaging strikes in the last 2 years). I also wouldn't mind getting a piece of the cell company's largess that they seem to be handing out so freely to site owners.
Putting transponders on hilltops, high-tension towers, water tanks and so on makes practical sense, but I see many cell sites around here chosen for political reasons rather than engineering ones.
About a year ago, I was moving into a new house, and had lots of stuff to throw away, since I lived in a farmhouse that my Grandmother lived in. She was one of these people who raised a family during the great depression, and refused to throw anything away. After the relatives went through all the stuff and took what they wanted, and I combed through what was left to keep what I wanted, I was still left with a huge amount of unwanted, and pretty much unmarketable stuff, not only in the house, but also in the barn, tractor shed, chicken house, and dairy shed. We are talking entire closets stuffed with broken venetian blinds and window shades, spoiled canned goods from the 1970's, you name it! Of course, being a packrat is hereditary, and I had my share of crap to part with as well.
I had already filled a 20 yard dumpster's worth of stuff the year before from the outbuildings, and ran 7 additional truckloads to the dump, but there was still a huge amount to get rid of. Luckily my builder rented a 30 yard dumpster, which was twice as big as he needed, the new house was nearby, and he agreed to let me use it. In goes another 5 loads of stuff, but the dumpster was full but my basement wasn't. Already exhausted from packing up and schlepping all that stuff already, I didn't look forward to hauling stuff one truckload at a time over to the landfill, a 2 hour round trip by the time you wait in line and unload.
I explained the dillema to my new neighbor, who was also my temporary landlord, and he volunteered a very effective solution. He is a used heavy equipment dealer, and on the neighboring farm he has a number of old tractors, backhoes, and bulldozers which he buys, fixes up, and sells. A few minutes after he goes home, a huge Caterpillar front end loader, the type that can fill a tandem-axle dump truck in 2 scoops rumbles up the drive. He maneuvered the giant machine into position, and with the pull of a couple of levers, he increased the dumpster's capacity by at least a third.
BTW, he also uses it to set wooden fence posts. He just smooshes them into place.
Making perfect oil popped popcorn is an exact science, optimizing the ratio of oil, popcorn, and timing. While it is true that leaky hulls are the culprit in most old maids, a lot can be done to compensate by popping well. Here we go:
The process: Oil is added to the pan, and heated over an electric element or open flame until the oil is hot enough to pop a few kernels added when the oil was cool. The rest of the load of popcorn, typically 1/3 cup, or about 80 grams of popcorn are added to a roughly equal amount of oil. Too much oil makes the popcorn greasy, too little inhibits rapid and even heat transfer from the oil and the pan.
The pan itself is a freqently overlooked, but very important element in the mix. A flimsy thin pan tends to develop hot and cold spots, but just as important, it is an inadequate heat reservior. Once the load of popcorn is added to the oil, the temperature of the oil itself will drop, as heat is taken up in the kernels from the oil and the pan. Oil at 350 degrees will drop to about 200 when a roughly equal amount of popcorn is added. As a result, the heat necessary to heat the kernels sufficiently to rapidly develop steam inside must come from the fire itself. A heavy aluminum or cast iron pan will prevent such a sharp temperature drop, and all that heat in the skillet will find its way into the kernels quickly.
Why is this important? Think of a car tire with a slow leak. If you try to pump it up with a hand pump or one of those battery operated compressors, you may never get the tire up to pressure. If you fill it from a large tank of high pressure air with a large bore hose, you can probably blow it out. The same thing happens with popcorn. A skillet with a large thermal mass will rapidly transfer the heat needed to rapidly develop steam in the leaky kernels before it can leak out. This is why the old Jiffy Pop popcorn usually had lots of old maids.
The same thing will happen when you add popcorn to cold oil, and then heat it on the stove. As the oil heats, the precious steam inside many of the kernels will start to escape before it the oil gets hot enough to heat the kernels rapidly. Once the steam escapes, you will have charred old maids, no matter how high you turn the flame. You have much better results if you heat the oil in a heavy skillet to the brink of the oil smoking, then add the payload of kernels.
For a frame of reference, I Gigaton of TNT explosive yield is about the size of 20 Tsar Bomba class nuclear explosions . If the asteroid was kind enough to hit us somewhere on land and thinly populated, such as the Sahara Desert or Siberia, the main effect would be a volcanic winter, such as what happened after the explosion of Santorini, in about 1650 BC or Mount Tambora in 1815 . Not a lot of fun, but civilization would probably go on as usual for most places.
If it hit in the middle of the ocean, a Tsunami could conceivably wipe out many of the major cities on the Pacific Rim or Atlantic and European seacoasts. Tens of millions could die, and many of the developed world's major cities would be laid waste. Whole countries would be crippled, and the ensuing chaos would disrupt world trade, and potentially destabilize entire regions.
A direct hit on a major population center, such as Southern California, the area around Bejing, China, or Bombay, India would cause millions of casualties and huge suffering, but the effects would be local enough that the rest of civilization would find a way to get by, even if important industries were wiped out. Such a hit would be a relative longshot, but could happen.
In most temperate climates, the waste heat from computers pretty much has a neutral effect on your heating bill.
In the wintertime, running a server farm in your office 24/7 might generate enough excess heat to make a noticeable dent in your heating needs, but even so, unless you use resistance heating or burn a very expensive fuel to heat your office, it is probably cheaper to use a heat pump or other device for building heat.
In the summer however, you get hit with a double whammy. First, you are paying for the electricity to generate all that excess heat in the first place, secondly, you are paying to remove that excess heat by running the air conditioning harder.
In my old (non-airconditioned) house, my ham shack saw a lot of action in the winter, but sat idle on hot days in the summer. It just got too hot to work in there.
Being able to conduct heat internally is a major asset. Conductivity of heat is based on the difference in temperature between the heated end and the unheated end of a material of a given shape and surface area. Think about this junior high school level experiment with a cigarette:
A 1 gram mass of loosely packed tobacco is wrapped into a paper sleeve.5 cm in diameter and 10 cm long and is a very poor conductor of heat. A match is applied to one end for a few seconds, causing the tobacco to smoulder red-hot, while the other end is cool enough to touch. The small area of combustion is kept warm enough to sustain combustion by the insulating properties of the tobacco and ash surrounding it.
If you repeat this experiment with an aluminum rod of the same size, such as an aluminum nail, the heat from the match would quickly conduct the entire length of the rod, making it hot to touch within a couple of seconds. While the rod would get hot enough to be uncomfortable to hold, the end which was heated by the match would definitely not be hot enough to light a cigarette, unless the whole rod was heated red-hot.
This simple experiment demonstrates the limits of heat sinks. While aluminum is a good conductor, it isn't perfect. The area closest to the heat source will always be hotter than the areas near the ends of the fins. The quicker heat can be conducted away from the area next to the heat source, the cooler that area stays. A heat sink made from a material that is a perfect heat conductor will have a uniform temperature throughout, and keep the temperature next to the heat source the same as the tips of the cooling fins.
Junction temperature of electrical components is the critical parameter in heat sink design. A heat sink today may have a temperature of say 50C at the ends of the cooling fins, but be 200 degrees at the chip/heatsink interface, which is a guesstimate of the maximum safe temperature of a junction. A perfect heatsink material might only need to be half the size or less to keep temperatures at safe levels. Heatsinks to dissapate larger amounts of heat could be scaled more easily than is currently possible.
I stand corrected on the exact gauge, but nonetheless, standards can persist because of the huge cost of migrating the installed base to a new standard.
To paraphrase the old joke, the Solid Rocket Boosters on the Space Shuttle are limited to the diameter they are because of the finite diameter of the rail tunnels between the Morton-Thiokol plant in Nevada and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The railcars which carry the SRB segments are all on carriages which have trucks with the wheels exactly 55 inches apart, which is known as Standard Gauge in railroad lingo.
Why was this figure chosen?
Early railcars derived their design from mining cars which rode on rails inside mines before the locomotive was invented. For convenience, the railroads adopted their standard gauge very close to this common pre-railroad standard.
Why were the carts made with this width between the wheels?
The early mining carts were adapted from cargo wagons which travelled on the old Roman roads in Europe, which had developed deep ruts over the centuries. The distance between the wheels was selected so the wheels rode in the center of these ruts to avoid breaking an axle frequently?
Why did the Roman roads have their ruts at this distance from each other?
The distance between the center of the ruts on the old Roman roads was a function of the distance between the wheels of the old Roman Charriots.
Why did the Romans select the wheel spacing they did?
The old Roman charriots were designed so that a pair of horses could pull them. The track had to be wide enough to accomodate the hind quarters of two horses.
So there you have it, the design of the Space Shuttle is constrained by a couple of horses' asses!
If I hadn't already posted on this thread, I would have moderated you up. Then again, perhaps they can set up a mesh network of some type at the fest to handle the 30,000 geeks in attendance. Hope the weather is better than it was for Timmonium.
Nah, what you really want is a dish. At 2.4 Ghz, a surplus Directv or similar dish with a patch antenna at the feed would be the real deal. Check out the K5OE Website for some ideas.
As someone who has worn glasses since my earliest memories, I treat them as an extension of my body. Being farsighted, I have always seemed to be playing catch up between lenses strong enough to read comfortably, but not too strong to interfere with driving. From the time I was a small child, my precscription gradually increased from +3.75/+4 to +5.75/+6.25 by the time I hit the big four oh.
Just as you seem to be doing, I resisted my optometrist/opthamologist's early hints and suggestions to consider bifocals, as just his way of improving the bottom line of the overpriced optician that was colocated in his office. I figured he got a piece of the action for every customer he personally escorted to their counter. I also couldn't stomach paying the $500 I would certainly be pressured into paying for their top of the line featherweight no-line bifocals by the time I got them into a good set of spring-templed stainless steel frames.
I held out for another year or so, but got tired of trying having to focus on my monitor from 3 feet away, and having to put the newspaper on the floor to read it. Next eye appointment I knew what was coming, but I was ready with several hundred bucks in my FSA. I fell for the opthamologist's FUD about any other optician than their's and expected the worst.
450 bucks and a week later I had my new top of the line no-line bifocals. The new lenses took about a week to get adjusted to, but overall I have been pleased with the results. My line of sight for driving is perfectly natural, and I don't even have to move my head to read the instruments. Using a computer at a desk is also in a natural position, but the eye level monitors on the System 150 and similar equipment I work on force me to crane my neck a bit to see well. Fortunately, I only have to interact with those monitors for a few minutes at a time.
A year later, I brought a pair of similar prescription polarized sunglasses for driving and motorcycling at an optician inside a Wal-Mart and paid about 100 bucks less, but they still set me back about 3 bills. They are okay, but are made to a slightly stronger prescription than my regular glasses, and cause a bit of eyestrain to switch back and forth between my regular glasses. I wish I had demanded an identical prescription, but it is too late to do anything about it now.
I wish I had done it 5 years sooner. If you have to wear glasses anyway, it is more convenient and easier on your eyes to deal with one pair of glasses rather than 2. A decent optometrist/opthamologist can specify a base curve suitable for optimal computer use, without compromising your vision during other activities.
As someone who has worn glasses since my earliest memories, I treat them as an extension of my body. Being farsighted, I have always seemed to be playing catch up between lenses strong enough to read comfortably, but not too strong to interfere with driving. From the time I was a small child, my precscription gradually increased from +3.75/+4 to +5.75/+6.25 by the time I hit the big four oh.
Just as you seem to be doing, I resisted my optometrist/opthamologist's early hints and suggestions to consider bifocals, as just his way of improving the bottom line of the overpriced optician that was colocated in his office. I figured he got a piece of the action for every customer he personally escorted to their counter. I also couldn't stomach paying the $500 I would certainly be pressured into paying for their top of the line featherweight no-line bifocals by the time I got them into a good set of spring-templed stainless steel frames.
I held out for another year or so, but got tired of trying having to focus on my monitor from 3 feet away, and having to put the newspaper on the floor to read it. Next eye appointment I knew what was coming, but I was ready with several hundred bucks in my FSA. I fell for the opthamologist's FUD about any other optician than their's and expected the worst.
450 bucks and a week later I had my new top of the line no-line bifocals. The new lenses took about a week to get adjusted to, but overall I have been pleased with the results. My line of sight for driving is perfectly natural, and I don't even have to move my head to read the instruments. Using a computer at a desk is also in a natural position, but the eye level monitors on the System 150 and similar equipment I work on force me to crane my neck a bit to see well. Fortunately, I only have to interact with those monitors for a few minutes at a time.
A year later, I brought a pair of similar prescription polarized sunglasses for driving and motorcycling at an optician inside a Wal-Mart and paid about 100 bucks less, but they still set me back about 3 bills. They are okay, but are made to a slightly stronger prescription than my regular glasses, and cause a bit of eyestrain to switch back and forth between my regular glasses. I wish I had demanded an identical prescription, but it is too late to do anything about it now.
I wish I had done it 5 years sooner. If you have to wear glasses anyway, it is more convenient and easier on your eyes to deal with one pair of glasses rather than 2.
The beauty of solar powered aircraft such as Helios isn't that they can carry large payloads long distances very quickly, but their potential to loiter for long periods of time without the downtime and expense of refueling. Military surveillance of an area is one major potential for an aircraft such as this. A lightweight solar powered aircraft would be free of many of the constraints of satellites used for tactical surveillance and communications, such as limited periods of availability, cost, and flexibility.
They could have civilian applications as well, such as providing wireless communications to remote and mountainous areas that are difficult and expensive to serve with either satellites or land based repeater systems. As a ham, a solar powered bird loitering at say 60,000 feet over the middle of West Virginia could provide reliable communications from Boston to Atlanta, and as far west as Chicago at a fraction of the cost of putting a satellite in orbit. This is based on data derived from plugging keplerian elements into Nova for Windows with a satellite orbiting at a height of 20 km.
It could be an ideal test bed for experimenting with new wireless communication concepts, without having to make an expensive committment to putting something into orbit.
I just got a response to the first of 3 rebates I had to file for Tax Cut. No Rebate: Invalid Declaration Control Number, which was copied directly from the program. 1 down, 2 to go. This means that it cost at least 40.00 to do taxes my way, instead of 25. It took as long to do all their BS paperwork as it did to do my taxes.
Next year I will have to do taxes the old fashioned way.
Don't get me wrong, I like my job. The nature of the work does not lend itself to remote administration to fix most tasks, since the majority of problems with the equipment tend to be mechanical or electrical in nature. Some of these mechanical problems could be diagnosed, and in some cases compensated for by having remote access to the onboard system maintenance and diagnostics, but even so, the majority of problems require an onsite visit and wrenching to resolve.
I admit I am a bit of a workaholic at times, and tend to open myself up to being taken advantage of. It is genetic, my dad used to call into work every day when he did bother to take vacation. Nonetheless, I have made it clear that I prefer to work in the field. Although I could do the management thing if I had to, I feel I am more valuable as an excellent tech than as a mediocre manager.
My boss started as a tech, but moved into management on the basis of his people skills rather than his tech skills. He was a competent tech working on our lower end equipment, and tries to keep up with our latest and greatest, but he refers the tough tech cases to me and the other top techs in the area. He respects me for my skills, and I respect him for his position and for the crap he has to put up with from upper management, technicians and customers. I have done field service management in the past, understand what he has to put up with, and have little desire to do it again.
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Perhaps we can reassign some of the Marines who get a little too rough with our "guests" at Gitmo to duty on Phobos. Lets hope they don't find that interdimensional gateway, but make sure they are well-armed with plasma rifles and a few BFG-9000s, and plenty of ammo.
I always seem to put one strike against a merchant who is less than honest about their shipping charges, even if the total cost with shipping is competitive with other sellers who are more honest about their shipping costs. It makes me wonder what else they are being dishonest about. A couple of bucks over the cost of postage and packaging, normal USPS or UPS type stuff is not really a problem. Neither is the substantial time, effort, and expense a seller might go to using his own vehicle to deliver something like a car, boat, motorcycle, or other large piece of machinery, if I had the option to pick it up myself or arrange transportation.
It is the vendors of small objects like electronics, jewelry, etc. that ship the cheapest way possible and ship dozens of items a day, yet charge like they drove 20 miles just to FedEx your one bubblewrap envelope, marking up the actual cost by several hundred percent that get in my craw.
The whole concept of buying things online, whether on Ebay, online classified listings, or on newsgroups does have its limits. Ebay works well for specialty items that can be hard to find in local markets, or for items which the shipping cost is not a huge percentage of the value of the item.
For lightweight items (less than a pound or so), it is difficult to justify domestic shipping costs of more than 5 or 6 bucks, since a 1 pound priority mail envelope or small package will go for about $4 and change, plus the cost of the packaging itself.
For little stuff, like memory chips that get a 60 cent stamp and a 15 cent bubble wrap envelope, I see all the time shipping costs in the range of $5 to $10. This is price inflation, pure and simple, particularly if the merchant is aggregating his shipments. Of course, it is easier to charge $10 for shipping a $150 dollar memory module than it is a for a 15 dollar one, even if the postage and packing materials are the same.
For larger items that are UPS sendable (up to 70#), I can see spending up to $50 to ship a heavy item such as a desktop computer, monitor or ham radio transceiver cross country. It cost me about $30 for USPS ground postage, plus a large box and packing material to ship a Kenwood TS-520 to a buyer in Texas, about 1,200 miles away. If you have to buy the boxes and peanuts, bubble wrap, etc. it can add several more bucks to the cost of shipping. Still, I have brought items that the shipping costs had more padding than the box they came in. It does get a little tougher for the merchant to seriously overcharge for shipping for heavier items, particularly if the item has a fairly low value to weight ratio.
For the really big stuff such as cars, motorcycles, big-screen TVs, furniture, and industrial equipment, arranging for shipment can be a much larger expense, and can be a real headache to pull off for the casual seller, or for the buyer to arrange if the seller is unable or uninterested in shipping it himself. The potential market for large heavy items becomes regional or even local, rather than nationwide. Online forums start to lose their advantage over local markets, particularly for items that are somewhat commodities, like used vehicles and appliances that have a low value to weight ratio.
One good thing that Ebay has done is improve their search engine to allow the buyer to specify the maximum distance from their home city when searching for vehicles and other items. Too often, I have seen dozens of gorgeous bikes I might want to bid on, then find out they are in Provo UT or Portland Oregon. I might specify a radius of 450 miles from Baltimore, MD, and would include the east coast from Boston down to Wilmington, NC, and as far west as Cleveland. For the right bike, I might make a weekend of it to pick it up.
For a more common item, such as a '95 F-150, I might limit my search to less than 100 miles. There might be 10 similar vehicles within 10 miles of my house that I can inspect while running my Saturday shopping errands, both marketed locally and online.
Another drawback of Ebay is the ability to closely inspect something before you buy, unless you are local enough to check it out before the auction ends. All you usually have to go on are some digital photos and the word and reputation of the seller. Even a good picture won't show all of the cracks, scratches, and dings, nor will it do a great item justice. Dodgy sellers sometimes have worthwhile stuff, and sometimes even good sellers overlook flaws. For anything with a switch, motor, or engine, there is nothing like being able to start it up, boot it up, or turn it on. A seller may be honest and ethical and disclose that his truck has a coolant leak, but until I can see whether it is a leaky thermostat gasket that is easily and inexpensively repaired, or a leaking head gasket will require tearing down the engine to fix, I tend to fear the worst and will bid accordingly, if at all.
Sorry about the blown link in the last paragraph, the link is for AMSAT-DL.
In the past, hams have had some high earth orbiting birds up as well, which have allowed worldwide QSOs. Oscar 4, AO-10, AO-13, and AO-40 were high earth orbiting satellites, capable of worldwide QSOs and extended operating windows up to 10 hours long or more. Sadly, none of these satellites is currently considered operational. Of these, AO-10 is brain dead and has no attitude control, but occasionally the solar panels and the antennas line up in a favorable orientation as it tumbles through space, and communications are occasionally possible. AO-13 and AO-4 have reentered the atmosphere, after partial failure of their secondary boosters, but provided some service. AO-40 suffered a crippling explosion onboard about a month after launch, but was partially recovered and provided an S-band downlink, along with uplinks on 70cm, 23cm, and 3cm IIRC. It suffered a catastrophic battery failure in January, 2004 and has been silent ever since.
Not to be discouraged, a new satellite, currently designated as Phase 3E is being prepared for launch by and will hopefully reach orbit later in 2005 or early 2006.
Lots of things can screw up FM reception. Does your work building have a metal skin? Lots of computers inside, generating lots of broadband RF noise? Welding equipment, electrostatic precipitators, even some types of commercial lighting can cause local RF interference. This is also true with all sorts of other mechanical equipment can also compromise your radio reception.
Most of the frequencies used for cell phones are in the upper UHF and lower microwave bands, from 850 Mhz to 1.8Ghz around here. By themselves, they are probably not likely to cause interference with FM radio, which operates between 88 and 108 Mhz. Other services on the tower might be able to desense cheaply designed tuners on inexpensive radios, such as pagers, fire, police, and other radio services that operate in the VHF portion of the radio spectrum.
The tower itself, along with tall buildings in the area can partially block some signals, and reflect some signals back to the antenna, causing multipath interference, This is most familiar on Analog TV signals as a ghost image offset to the main image. On radio, it causes uneven reception of signals.
Finally, evaluate the lay of the land around the building. Normally high ground favors good radio reception at FM frequencies. A building located in a valley or on the back side of a hill between it and a station's transmitter will normally have poorer reception than one located on high ground.
Depending where the property is located, the complaints about aesthetics, etc. can range from none at all in some areas, particularly if there are other broadcast, cellular, and public service radio towers in the area, to dealbreaking opposition near historic districts,upscale rural and suburban neighborhoods, or near other natural or manmade attractions.
As far as health issues go, the only possible health issue I can reasonably see is that the tower crashes down on you during an extreme windstorm, and proper engineering will mitigate this risk to the point of being negligible. The amount of RF transmitted by a cell site is on a par with a police radio or other mobile radio service. The fact that the antennas are located a couple hundred feet up in the air means that in reality, that police radio in the cop car behind you is pumping more RF into you than the cell site you are directly under.
The fact is, a properly located cell site will improve coverage for its customers, and can actually reduce exposure to RF. How can that be? Most modern cell phones adjust the power level of their transmitters based on the quality of the link they have to the best receive site in the area. I actually notice that my cell phone's battery needs recharging more if you are using it in an area of poor coverage, even if just in standby mode. A good cell site nearby reduces the power that the handset needs to maintain the link, reducing RF exposure to the user.
As far as interference to services you may be using inside your facility, you might want to find out from the cell site operator what frequencies, power levels, and duty cycles they will be transmitting at. This applies not only for cell phones, but for other services that may piggyback onto the tower as well, a tower in a good location will often have antennas strung up the side of it as well. These other radio services might include paging, public safety radio services, amateur radio repeaters and digipeaters, FM broadcast radio transmitters, etc. If you do sensitive testing of radars or something of that ilk, it would pay you to know what is up there.
In conclusion, I wouldn't be afraid to do it, as long as there is nothing up on the tower that would directly interfere with what you are doing now. Leasing space for cell sites is a profitable business around here, the local Volunteer Fire Dept receives about $12,000 a year to lease a 30 by 30 foot space to Verizon, and this is a very common arrangement. Besides the money, you might be able to write the lease to get services of your own on the tower, such as dispatch radios if you are in a service business, set up data links to remote offices, etc. Finally, another benefit might be the ability to use the services directly. Reliable 2 way radio services and WiFi internet access provided on that tower could actually enhance your operation. You may be able to make an arrangement for discounts on these services they may provide.
Driving in the 1920's was about as dangerous on a per mile basis as riding a motorcycle is today, which is about 10-15 times the risk of driving in modern day America. A little quick research came up with some historical data for traffic death rates for Washington State shows that in 1925 there were about 20 deaths per 100,000,000 passenger miles, about the same risk that riding a motorcycle is today. In the good old days, driver training was nonexistent, brakes were nonredundant and often only on the rear axle, making them relatively ineffective and unreliable. Such basic safety features as windshield wipers, defrosters, proper tailights and turn signals were nonexistent on lower cost cars.
Tire blowouts were common on the fragile tires of the day. Catastrophic mechanical failures on early cars were not uncommon either, such as broken axles and suspension pieces. I remember in a 1927 reproduction of the Sears Catalog that Sears bragged that their tires were guaranteed for 4,000 miles, provided they were not abused.
Check the ARRL for listings of Hamfests in your region. Offer the whole box or two up for a few bucks, or sell the stuff piecemeal for 25 or 50 cents a pop. Even if there isn't a hamfest in the area for a month or two, say you will sell your stuff there. You might be able to buy some time that way. The hamfest will also give you the opportunity to acquire new junk as well, so be prepared to defend any items that follow you home, or keep them in the trunk of your car until the coast is clear.
Judging by the numbers of octagenerian hams, it seems most make it well into their dotage years, though it does not stop them from complaining about their health. Seriously, the only health problem that I have ever heard of being possibly related to RF exposure is a ham friend of mine who developed cataracts in his late 40s. He admitted that it was probably from working on live unshielded PA decks on old Motorola UHF commercial gear (Motracs, etc), without proper precautions. 100 watts of RF at a couple of feet on an occupational basis might be enough.
One thing that non-technically oriented fail to realize is that the size of the tower bears little direct relationship to the amount of ERP it radiates. The typical police radio, marine radio, or 2 meter ham rig puts out about the same ERP as a cell phone tower transponder. My 2 meter mobile transmits about 100 watts ERP at eye level, while a cell tower's antennas are about 200 feet up. If there is an RF boogeyman at all, it would be the UHF analog and HDTV transmitters. Channel 22 in Crownsville, MD transmits with an ERP of about 5 Megawatts, or more than all the cell towers in the state.
Our family has owned since the 1920s, and I am currently living on a piece of land that is one of the highest points in Baltimore County. As a ham radio operator, this situation has obvious advantages, as undoubtedly it would if I would put up a communications tower. About 10 years ago, Verizon selected a tower site about 1/4 mile away at the local Volunteer Fire Department, which sits at least 60 feet lower than where my house now stands. For the privlege of having to erect 60 foot more tower than they needed to get the same coverage, they pay the local VFD about $15,000 a year. Good for the fire dept and community relations, but from an engineering perspective it is not the best location.
Though my neighbors might think otherwise, I wouldn't mind having a 150 foot tall steel lightning rod nearby on a couple of acres that are just hayfield right now (I have had 3 damaging strikes in the last 2 years). I also wouldn't mind getting a piece of the cell company's largess that they seem to be handing out so freely to site owners.
Putting transponders on hilltops, high-tension towers, water tanks and so on makes practical sense, but I see many cell sites around here chosen for political reasons rather than engineering ones.
About a year ago, I was moving into a new house, and had lots of stuff to throw away, since I lived in a farmhouse that my Grandmother lived in. She was one of these people who raised a family during the great depression, and refused to throw anything away. After the relatives went through all the stuff and took what they wanted, and I combed through what was left to keep what I wanted, I was still left with a huge amount of unwanted, and pretty much unmarketable stuff, not only in the house, but also in the barn, tractor shed, chicken house, and dairy shed. We are talking entire closets stuffed with broken venetian blinds and window shades, spoiled canned goods from the 1970's, you name it! Of course, being a packrat is hereditary, and I had my share of crap to part with as well.
I had already filled a 20 yard dumpster's worth of stuff the year before from the outbuildings, and ran 7 additional truckloads to the dump, but there was still a huge amount to get rid of. Luckily my builder rented a 30 yard dumpster, which was twice as big as he needed, the new house was nearby, and he agreed to let me use it. In goes another 5 loads of stuff, but the dumpster was full but my basement wasn't. Already exhausted from packing up and schlepping all that stuff already, I didn't look forward to hauling stuff one truckload at a time over to the landfill, a 2 hour round trip by the time you wait in line and unload.
I explained the dillema to my new neighbor, who was also my temporary landlord, and he volunteered a very effective solution. He is a used heavy equipment dealer, and on the neighboring farm he has a number of old tractors, backhoes, and bulldozers which he buys, fixes up, and sells. A few minutes after he goes home, a huge Caterpillar front end loader, the type that can fill a tandem-axle dump truck in 2 scoops rumbles up the drive. He maneuvered the giant machine into position, and with the pull of a couple of levers, he increased the dumpster's capacity by at least a third.
BTW, he also uses it to set wooden fence posts. He just smooshes them into place.
Trashdot: News for Redneck Nerds.
Making perfect oil popped popcorn is an exact science, optimizing the ratio of oil, popcorn, and timing. While it is true that leaky hulls are the culprit in most old maids, a lot can be done to compensate by popping well. Here we go:
The process: Oil is added to the pan, and heated over an electric element or open flame until the oil is hot enough to pop a few kernels added when the oil was cool. The rest of the load of popcorn, typically 1/3 cup, or about 80 grams of popcorn are added to a roughly equal amount of oil. Too much oil makes the popcorn greasy, too little inhibits rapid and even heat transfer from the oil and the pan.
The pan itself is a freqently overlooked, but very important element in the mix. A flimsy thin pan tends to develop hot and cold spots, but just as important, it is an inadequate heat reservior. Once the load of popcorn is added to the oil, the temperature of the oil itself will drop, as heat is taken up in the kernels from the oil and the pan. Oil at 350 degrees will drop to about 200 when a roughly equal amount of popcorn is added. As a result, the heat necessary to heat the kernels sufficiently to rapidly develop steam inside must come from the fire itself. A heavy aluminum or cast iron pan will prevent such a sharp temperature drop, and all that heat in the skillet will find its way into the kernels quickly.
Why is this important? Think of a car tire with a slow leak. If you try to pump it up with a hand pump or one of those battery operated compressors, you may never get the tire up to pressure. If you fill it from a large tank of high pressure air with a large bore hose, you can probably blow it out. The same thing happens with popcorn. A skillet with a large thermal mass will rapidly transfer the heat needed to rapidly develop steam in the leaky kernels before it can leak out. This is why the old Jiffy Pop popcorn usually had lots of old maids.
The same thing will happen when you add popcorn to cold oil, and then heat it on the stove. As the oil heats, the precious steam inside many of the kernels will start to escape before it the oil gets hot enough to heat the kernels rapidly. Once the steam escapes, you will have charred old maids, no matter how high you turn the flame. You have much better results if you heat the oil in a heavy skillet to the brink of the oil smoking, then add the payload of kernels.
For a frame of reference, I Gigaton of TNT explosive yield is about the size of 20 Tsar Bomba class nuclear explosions . If the asteroid was kind enough to hit us somewhere on land and thinly populated, such as the Sahara Desert or Siberia, the main effect would be a volcanic winter, such as what happened after the explosion of Santorini, in about 1650 BC or Mount Tambora in 1815 . Not a lot of fun, but civilization would probably go on as usual for most places.
If it hit in the middle of the ocean, a Tsunami could conceivably wipe out many of the major cities on the Pacific Rim or Atlantic and European seacoasts. Tens of millions could die, and many of the developed world's major cities would be laid waste. Whole countries would be crippled, and the ensuing chaos would disrupt world trade, and potentially destabilize entire regions.
A direct hit on a major population center, such as Southern California, the area around Bejing, China, or Bombay, India would cause millions of casualties and huge suffering, but the effects would be local enough that the rest of civilization would find a way to get by, even if important industries were wiped out. Such a hit would be a relative longshot, but could happen.
In most temperate climates, the waste heat from computers pretty much has a neutral effect on your heating bill.
In the wintertime, running a server farm in your office 24/7 might generate enough excess heat to make a noticeable dent in your heating needs, but even so, unless you use resistance heating or burn a very expensive fuel to heat your office, it is probably cheaper to use a heat pump or other device for building heat.
In the summer however, you get hit with a double whammy. First, you are paying for the electricity to generate all that excess heat in the first place, secondly, you are paying to remove that excess heat by running the air conditioning harder.
In my old (non-airconditioned) house, my ham shack saw a lot of action in the winter, but sat idle on hot days in the summer. It just got too hot to work in there.
Being able to conduct heat internally is a major asset. Conductivity of heat is based on the difference in temperature between the heated end and the unheated end of a material of a given shape and surface area. Think about this junior high school level experiment with a cigarette:
.5 cm in diameter and 10 cm long and is a very poor conductor of heat. A match is applied to one end for a few seconds, causing the tobacco to smoulder red-hot, while the other end is cool enough to touch. The small area of combustion is kept warm enough to sustain combustion by the insulating properties of the tobacco and ash surrounding it.
A 1 gram mass of loosely packed tobacco is wrapped into a paper sleeve
If you repeat this experiment with an aluminum rod of the same size, such as an aluminum nail, the heat from the match would quickly conduct the entire length of the rod, making it hot to touch within a couple of seconds. While the rod would get hot enough to be uncomfortable to hold, the end which was heated by the match would definitely not be hot enough to light a cigarette, unless the whole rod was heated red-hot.
This simple experiment demonstrates the limits of heat sinks. While aluminum is a good conductor, it isn't perfect. The area closest to the heat source will always be hotter than the areas near the ends of the fins. The quicker heat can be conducted away from the area next to the heat source, the cooler that area stays. A heat sink made from a material that is a perfect heat conductor will have a uniform temperature throughout, and keep the temperature next to the heat source the same as the tips of the cooling fins.
Junction temperature of electrical components is the critical parameter in heat sink design. A heat sink today may have a temperature of say 50C at the ends of the cooling fins, but be 200 degrees at the chip/heatsink interface, which is a guesstimate of the maximum safe temperature of a junction. A perfect heatsink material might only need to be half the size or less to keep temperatures at safe levels. Heatsinks to dissapate larger amounts of heat could be scaled more easily than is currently possible.
I stand corrected on the exact gauge, but nonetheless, standards can persist because of the huge cost of migrating the installed base to a new standard.
To paraphrase the old joke, the Solid Rocket Boosters on the Space Shuttle are limited to the diameter they are because of the finite diameter of the rail tunnels between the Morton-Thiokol plant in Nevada and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The railcars which carry the SRB segments are all on carriages which have trucks with the wheels exactly 55 inches apart, which is known as Standard Gauge in railroad lingo.
Why was this figure chosen?
Early railcars derived their design from mining cars which rode on rails inside mines before the locomotive was invented. For convenience, the railroads adopted their standard gauge very close to this common pre-railroad standard.
Why were the carts made with this width between the wheels?
The early mining carts were adapted from cargo wagons which travelled on the old Roman roads in Europe, which had developed deep ruts over the centuries. The distance between the wheels was selected so the wheels rode in the center of these ruts to avoid breaking an axle frequently?
Why did the Roman roads have their ruts at this distance from each other?
The distance between the center of the ruts on the old Roman roads was a function of the distance between the wheels of the old Roman Charriots.
Why did the Romans select the wheel spacing they did?
The old Roman charriots were designed so that a pair of horses could pull them. The track had to be wide enough to accomodate the hind quarters of two horses.
So there you have it, the design of the Space Shuttle is constrained by a couple of horses' asses!
If I hadn't already posted on this thread, I would have moderated you up. Then again, perhaps they can set up a mesh network of some type at the fest to handle the 30,000 geeks in attendance. Hope the weather is better than it was for Timmonium.
Nah, what you really want is a dish. At 2.4 Ghz, a surplus Directv or similar dish with a patch antenna at the feed would be the real deal. Check out the K5OE Website for some ideas.
As someone who has worn glasses since my earliest memories, I treat them as an extension of my body. Being farsighted, I have always seemed to be playing catch up between lenses strong enough to read comfortably, but not too strong to interfere with driving. From the time I was a small child, my precscription gradually increased from +3.75/+4 to +5.75/+6.25 by the time I hit the big four oh.
Just as you seem to be doing, I resisted my optometrist/opthamologist's early hints and suggestions to consider bifocals, as just his way of improving the bottom line of the overpriced optician that was colocated in his office. I figured he got a piece of the action for every customer he personally escorted to their counter.
I also couldn't stomach paying the $500 I would certainly be pressured into paying for their top of the line featherweight no-line bifocals by the time I got them into a good set of spring-templed stainless steel frames.
I held out for another year or so, but got tired of trying having to focus on my monitor from 3 feet away, and having to put the newspaper on the floor to read it. Next eye appointment I knew what was coming, but I was ready with several hundred bucks in my FSA. I fell for the opthamologist's FUD about any other optician than their's and expected the worst.
450 bucks and a week later I had my new top of the line no-line bifocals. The new lenses took about a week to get adjusted to, but overall I have been pleased with the results. My line of sight for driving is perfectly natural, and I don't even have to move my head to read the instruments. Using a computer at a desk is also in a natural position, but the eye level monitors on the System 150 and similar equipment I work on force me to crane my neck a bit to see well. Fortunately, I only have to interact with those monitors for a few minutes at a time.
A year later, I brought a pair of similar prescription polarized sunglasses for driving and motorcycling at an optician inside a Wal-Mart and paid about 100 bucks less, but they still set me back about 3 bills. They are okay, but are made to a slightly stronger prescription than my regular glasses, and cause a bit of eyestrain to switch back and forth between my regular glasses. I wish I had demanded an identical prescription, but it is too late to do anything about it now.
I wish I had done it 5 years sooner. If you have to wear glasses anyway, it is more convenient and easier on your eyes to deal with one pair of glasses rather than 2. A decent optometrist/opthamologist can specify a base curve
suitable for optimal computer use, without compromising your vision during other activities.
As someone who has worn glasses since my earliest memories, I treat them as an extension of my body. Being farsighted, I have always seemed to be playing catch up between lenses strong enough to read comfortably, but not too strong to interfere with driving. From the time I was a small child, my precscription gradually increased from +3.75/+4 to +5.75/+6.25 by the time I hit the big four oh.
Just as you seem to be doing, I resisted my optometrist/opthamologist's early hints and suggestions to consider bifocals, as just his way of improving the bottom line of the overpriced optician that was colocated in his office. I figured he got a piece of the action for every customer he personally escorted to their counter.
I also couldn't stomach paying the $500 I would certainly be pressured into paying for their top of the line featherweight no-line bifocals by the time I got them into a good set of spring-templed stainless steel frames.
I held out for another year or so, but got tired of trying having to focus on my monitor from 3 feet away, and having to put the newspaper on the floor to read it. Next eye appointment I knew what was coming, but I was ready with several hundred bucks in my FSA. I fell for the opthamologist's FUD about any other optician than their's and expected the worst.
450 bucks and a week later I had my new top of the line no-line bifocals. The new lenses took about a week to get adjusted to, but overall I have been pleased with the results. My line of sight for driving is perfectly natural, and I don't even have to move my head to read the instruments. Using a computer at a desk is also in a natural position, but the eye level monitors on the System 150 and similar equipment I work on force me to crane my neck a bit to see well. Fortunately, I only have to interact with those monitors for a few minutes at a time.
A year later, I brought a pair of similar prescription polarized sunglasses for driving and motorcycling at an optician inside a Wal-Mart and paid about 100 bucks less, but they still set me back about 3 bills. They are okay, but are made to a slightly stronger prescription than my regular glasses, and cause a bit of eyestrain to switch back and forth between my regular glasses. I wish I had demanded an identical prescription, but it is too late to do anything about it now.
I wish I had done it 5 years sooner. If you have to wear glasses anyway, it is more convenient and easier on your eyes to deal with one pair of glasses rather than 2.
The beauty of solar powered aircraft such as Helios isn't that they can carry large payloads long distances very quickly, but their potential to loiter for long periods of time without the downtime and expense of refueling. Military surveillance of an area is one major potential for an aircraft such as this. A lightweight solar powered aircraft would be free of many of the constraints of satellites used for tactical surveillance and communications, such as limited periods of availability, cost, and flexibility.
They could have civilian applications as well, such as providing wireless communications to remote and mountainous areas that are difficult and expensive to serve with either satellites or land based repeater systems. As a ham, a solar powered bird loitering at say 60,000 feet over the middle of West Virginia could provide reliable communications from Boston to Atlanta, and as far west as Chicago at a fraction of the cost of putting a satellite in orbit. This is based on data derived from plugging keplerian elements into Nova for Windows with a satellite orbiting at a height of 20 km.
It could be an ideal test bed for experimenting with new wireless communication concepts, without having to make an expensive committment to putting something into orbit.
I just got a response to the first of 3 rebates I had to file for Tax Cut. No Rebate: Invalid Declaration Control Number, which was copied directly from the program. 1 down, 2 to go. This means that it cost at least 40.00 to do taxes my way, instead of 25. It took as long to do all their BS paperwork as it did to do my taxes.
Next year I will have to do taxes the old fashioned way.
Don't get me wrong, I like my job. The nature of the work does not lend itself to remote administration to fix most tasks, since the majority of problems with the equipment tend to be mechanical or electrical in nature. Some of these mechanical problems could be diagnosed, and in some cases compensated for by having remote access to the onboard system maintenance and diagnostics, but even so, the majority of problems require an onsite visit and wrenching to resolve.
I admit I am a bit of a workaholic at times, and tend to open myself up to being taken advantage of. It is genetic, my dad used to call into work every day when he did bother to take vacation. Nonetheless, I have made it clear that I prefer to work in the field. Although I could do the management thing if I had to, I feel I am more valuable as an excellent tech than as a mediocre manager.
My boss started as a tech, but moved into management on the basis of his people skills rather than his tech skills. He was a competent tech working on our lower end equipment, and tries to keep up with our latest and greatest, but he refers the tough tech cases to me and the other top techs in the area. He respects me for my skills, and I respect him for his position and for the crap he has to put up with from upper management, technicians and customers. I have done field service management in the past, understand what he has to put up with, and have little desire to do it again.