>I currently wait two days for my Netflix movies instead of going to the Blockbuster around the corner (1 day to ship to Netflix, 1 day for the movie to come back), so I don't see why waiting a couple of hours would be a big deal. There's a technology called "pipelining" that you can use to get your throughput up to 1 movie per day while still keeping the two-day latency...
>don't know the right answer, but when you show me an actual lawsuit that >demonstrates such interference is harming HAM radio operators, I'll believe you. >Incidentally, from what I read, in Manassas they use a technology called = >"notching" that removes the frequencies used by short-wave radios. I'm no expert > on the technology, but given the lack of actual cases (or apparent lack I should >say), it seems like notching must be working.
Another AC writes (why won't any of these people say who they are?) >Manassas, VA adopted BPL last year and has shown demonstrations of folks >using HAM all throughout the city. No interference whatsoever. >AFAIK, of all of the commercial deployments, none have been shown to >negatively interfere with amateur radio. The claims of interference >seem like little more than FUD to me. Everybody wants something >to complain about.
Well, you're quite documentedly wrong. I did Google manassas, va bpl and got a top hit that led me to a MS Word document of FCC complaint filings, together with links to the complaints filed on the official FCC web site. See Google's cache for a HTML version of the word document.
>I didn't say the evidence was false. I merely pointed out that the ARRL is not an objective source of information in this issue.
I'm sorry, your argument just doesn't hold water. Could you please, AC, tell us why the ARRL would be biased against BPL? Why aren't they coming out against the Concorde SST replacement, PodCasting, Firefox, or the AMD 64 bit Opteron?
The ARRL is opposed to BPL because it has a strong potential to intefere with world-wide radio communications that propagate via ionospheric reflection, because the tests that were done by the NTIA (US Government) showed the problems but were withdrawn by political pressure, and because of real-world tests and actual interference complaints in multiple cities where the trials were ongoing in the US.
> I would say that the Danger Hiptop, otherwise known in the US as the T-Mobile Sidekick, is an excellent cell phone for the deaf. And lookie here: Morse code on the hiptop.
>>If you don't like RSS 1.0 or 2.0, just declare an RSS 3.0 (or RSS 3.14159) and publish your own spec. >Aren't many spec names trademarked, in order to prevent somebody from thinking that your "RSS 3.0" is the official update to the standard from the entity widely recognized as the maintainer of the standard?
It's too late to close the barn door on the name "RSS" as the problem with RSS is that there is no "entity widely recognized as the maintainer of the standard." (Even Dave Winer's hagiography of RSS shows the froth.) Some people like the lack of any central body or process for changes, and some don't. If you don't like that, then you might like Atom, provided you like the IETF (the IETF works by "rough consensus and working code").
> The RSS standard itself allows for extensions. >The extensions themselves can be standardized. There is no RSS standard. There is no standards oragnization, or even industry consortium like the W3C, that defines it. If you don't like RSS 1.0 or 2.0, just declare an RSS 3.0 (or RSS 3.14159) and publish your own spec.
Check out Atom, though; it is being hammered out in the IETF, so at least there is some process for defining it, and a single point of coordination makes it possible to believe you know what someone means when they say it.
Bug 238159 attempted to address just one aspect of the problem, double-clicking submit forms (which causes tons of race conditions). But again, nobody seems to care. Bug 97806 fixes this, in accordance with this W3C Recommendation and the errata, in which I wrote:
Under no circumstances may more than a single concurrent submit process be under way for a particular XForms submission.
In my opinion, Opera doesn't like these more recent W3C recommendations because of the degree of precision in them; if new browser vendors implement what's written in them, then there won't be any value in Opera's huge intellectual property investment in reverse-engineering Internet Explorer and implementing Microsoft bug-compatibility.
Opera ought to implement the W3C recommendations, instead of starting its own competing organization to preserve their Bambi-like spot in the hegemony.
< Cool! So instead of pounding out morse code, you can instead send pictures of dots and dashes!
The original post has some questionable legality issues; I'm showing you a way to do it legally, and get peer support. It's still bog-standard TV modulation, not morse code. And you don't need to learn morse code to get a license to do ATV.
Probably the biggest problem is the use of harmonics -- the proposed system uses the 5th harmonic of a VGA output, which happens to fall in the VHF TV band. What about the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th, (and higher?) Doing this with the support of other people who know what they're doing will help you avoid these problems:
Let's see:
Fundamental: 25.71Mhz
25.550-25.670Mhz is assigned for radio astronomy. So you'd be interfering with SETI research (slightly away from the band but close enough to interfere if the signal isn't clean, which it won't be).
2nd harmonic mixed with 76.5: 178.71MHz
The article said TV channel 5, but it's not so in the US.
See this chart.
3rd harmonic mixed with 76.5: 153.64MHz
Police and fire VHF radio frequencies, in the US.
The list goes on, since mixing both adds and subtracts the frequencies and their harmonics.
I forgot to mention that the NASA Ames folks plan to re-transmit live space shuttle video from STS-114 over the K6BEN repeater, so you can pick it up on cable channel 57.
You can do ATV legally in the US with NTSC, with a ham license.
You can see this the video for yourself, with stuff you have at home right now. There are cable channels that are on ham bands, but it's OK because their signals stay on the cable.
If you live in the SF ba area, hook a UHF antenna (vertically polarized) to your cable-ready TV or VCR with TV out, and tune to cable channel 57 (421.25 MHz), and aim it at Mt. Hamilton (east of San Jose).
Here are some tests on 1.2GHz, which is also a ham band.
>You only get a few minutes before the satellite disappears below the horizon again, but it's still cool. You can also use a store-and-forward system (like SMTP) to send messages to a Digipeater on the ISS or a ham satellite and have them picked up later by someone halfway around the world, without worrying about the view horizon. A friend of mine did this with a two-meter handitalkie and an antenna stuck on an ironing board.
To cut down on the number of uC pins you can use a diode matrix connected to a smaller number of pins than switches; then you scan the keys by raising, lowering, and tristating (input) reading the various pin combinations. A side effect is that pressing two keys at once will generate a phantom key. Probably in this case the phantom key activates the rational arithmetic function, which was removed from the keyboard but not the microcontroller (i.e., I think they removed the UI but left the backend code in place).
There's a couple of ham radio text messaging type things.
One, called PSK31, uses less bandwidth than a morse code signal (31Hz), and uses a computer soundcard to audio encoding and decoding. You can read more about it here. You can talk around the world with 5 Watts on HF (high frequency, 14.070 MHz, in this case). There are other, similar, digital modes available for keyboard-to-keyboard communications (synchronous, non face-to-face) that have different radio propagation and bandwidth characteristics, as well as image transmissions modes that work on HF, which propagates world-wide, and you can read about those in the PDF presentation above as well.
The other, APRS, uses VHF and UFH (usually 144.39 MHz in the US), and because of the shorter range, uses a store-and-forward packet technology. This mechanism is more like SMS in that it is asynchronous, non-face-to-face, and in that it uses a network of repeaters and packet forwarding systems, and message lengths are limited.
There used to be a wider ham packet network, back before the ARPANet became the Internet; this piggybacks on the technology and uses it for short message, position reporting, and weather reporting. Check out APRSWorld.net for open-source software for the network side of this. (The radio side is already taken care of in the Linux kernel, and in various Windows packages. There is also a client program called XASTIR.
I'm looking for a low-cost DAC/ADC chip for SP/DIF, something that takes audio and produces SP/DIF, and vice versa. If it can use fixed modes and doesn't require a uC that would be great.
The Phillips UDA1355H looks like what I want, but Phillips doesn't even list availability information, and DigiKey and Mouser say either nothing or non-stock, which leads me to think that the chip doesn't exist.
Does anybody have anything like this?
I already know about PCM2902 USB DAC project, and while that's useful (similar to the Griffin iMic) it's the opposite of what I want.
Here are reports on BPL from OfCom, which is the British government's equivalent of the FCC in the US: OfCom reports on BPL. The first report (on Amperion) is cited in the ARRL article but was not written by the ARRL, but rather by the British government.
It's a bad idea and has been dropped left and right. Here's a paper from Canada on BPL. And here's a counter proposal for those who feel that energy companies need to be in the network business: Broadband Over gas (apparently not a joke).
>It might be worth it to develop a website for setting up your ham radio set and encouraging school students to explore this new hobby option.
Yes, good plan. There are quite a few sites already.
The local Jr High School (appropriately named after Fred Terman, a pioneer in radio research at Stanford) has a ham club with quite a few members, and I've been giving talks at elementary schools (tying in to geography units, for example).
I personally don't have satellite equipment to bring to schools, but every few weeks another school somewhere on the planet gets to talk live with ISS astronauts and cosmonauts (list).
The same rocket launch also put into place ham satellite for use in South Asia. There are other satellites available for personal use (AMSAT has several, including (Echo 51) but VUSat is focused on use from India and South Asia.
They're gonna push Flash as the lingua franca of the interactive web (while we wait on things like XForms, XAML, XUL and Web Forms 2.0) Actually, Macromedia ColdFusion 7 uses XForms as its forms language.
Slashdot Mirror
>I currently wait two days for my Netflix movies instead of going to the Blockbuster around the corner (1 day to ship to Netflix, 1 day for the movie to come back), so I don't see why waiting a couple of hours would be a big deal.
There's a technology called "pipelining" that you can use to get your throughput up to 1 movie per day while still keeping the two-day latency...
>demonstrates such interference is harming HAM radio operators, I'll believe you.
>Incidentally, from what I read, in Manassas they use a technology called =
>"notching" that removes the frequencies used by short-wave radios. I'm no expert
> on the technology, but given the lack of actual cases (or apparent lack I should
>say), it seems like notching must be working.
Here you go.
Another AC writes (why won't any of these people say who they are?)
>Manassas, VA adopted BPL last year and has shown demonstrations of folks
>using HAM all throughout the city. No interference whatsoever.
>AFAIK, of all of the commercial deployments, none have been shown to
>negatively interfere with amateur radio. The claims of interference
>seem like little more than FUD to me. Everybody wants something
>to complain about.
Well, you're quite documentedly wrong. I did Google manassas, va bpl and got a top hit that led me to a MS Word document of FCC complaint filings, together with links to the complaints filed on the official FCC web site. See Google's cache for a HTML version of the word document.
Another contains WMV video of a radio experiencing interference in Manassas, VA. and watch "706 listening to BPL on 40 meters, while another transmits".
>I didn't say the evidence was false. I merely pointed out that the ARRL is not an objective source of information in this issue.
I'm sorry, your argument just doesn't hold water. Could you please, AC, tell us why the ARRL would be biased against BPL? Why aren't they coming out against the Concorde SST replacement, PodCasting, Firefox, or the AMD 64 bit Opteron?
The ARRL is opposed to BPL because it has a strong potential to intefere with world-wide radio communications that propagate via ionospheric reflection, because the tests that were done by the NTIA (US Government) showed the problems but were withdrawn by political pressure, and because of real-world tests and actual interference complaints in multiple cities where the trials were ongoing in the US.
> I would say that the Danger Hiptop, otherwise known in the US as the T-Mobile Sidekick, is an excellent cell phone for the deaf.
And lookie here: Morse code on the hiptop.
>>If you don't like RSS 1.0 or 2.0, just declare an RSS 3.0 (or RSS 3.14159) and publish your own spec.
>Aren't many spec names trademarked, in order to prevent somebody from thinking that your "RSS 3.0" is the official update to the standard from the entity widely recognized as the maintainer of the standard?
It's too late to close the barn door on the name "RSS" as the problem with RSS is that there is no "entity widely recognized as the maintainer of the standard." (Even Dave Winer's hagiography of RSS shows the froth.) Some people like the lack of any central body or process for changes, and some don't. If you don't like that, then you might like Atom, provided you like the IETF (the IETF works by "rough consensus and working code").
> The RSS standard itself allows for extensions.
>The extensions themselves can be standardized.
There is no RSS standard. There is no standards oragnization, or even industry consortium like the W3C, that defines it. If you don't like RSS 1.0 or 2.0, just declare an RSS 3.0 (or RSS 3.14159) and publish your own spec.
Check out Atom, though; it is being hammered out in the IETF, so at least there is some process for defining it, and a single point of coordination makes it possible to believe you know what someone means when they say it.
Bug 97806 fixes this, in accordance with this W3C Recommendation and the errata, in which I wrote:
In my opinion, Opera doesn't like these more recent W3C recommendations because of the degree of precision in them; if new browser vendors implement what's written in them, then there won't be any value in Opera's huge intellectual property investment in reverse-engineering Internet Explorer and implementing Microsoft bug-compatibility.
Opera ought to implement the W3C recommendations, instead of starting its own competing organization to preserve their Bambi-like spot in the hegemony.
Originally it was case-insensitive but Sun made Netscape change it to match Java.
>Californians raise our power rates by buying ours, we don't mind.
Nah, it was Texans
< Cool! So instead of pounding out morse code, you can instead send pictures of dots and dashes!
The original post has some questionable legality issues; I'm showing you a way to do it legally, and get peer support. It's still bog-standard TV modulation, not morse code. And you don't need to learn morse code to get a license to do ATV.
Probably the biggest problem is the use of harmonics -- the proposed system uses the 5th harmonic of a VGA output, which happens to fall in the VHF TV band. What about the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th, (and higher?) Doing this with the support of other people who know what they're doing will help you avoid these problems:
Let's see:
25.550-25.670Mhz is assigned for radio astronomy. So you'd be interfering with SETI research (slightly away from the band but close enough to interfere if the signal isn't clean, which it won't be).
The article said TV channel 5, but it's not so in the US. See this chart.
Police and fire VHF radio frequencies, in the US.
The list goes on, since mixing both adds and subtracts the frequencies and their harmonics.
And who can forget the plasma TV transmitting the 121.5 MHz international distress signal?
Bottom line: don't hook this thing to an antenna.
I forgot to mention that the NASA Ames folks plan to re-transmit live space shuttle video from STS-114 over the K6BEN repeater, so you can pick it up on cable channel 57.
You can do ATV legally in the US with NTSC, with a ham license.
You can see this the video for yourself, with stuff you have at home right now. There are cable channels that are on ham bands, but it's OK because their signals stay on the cable.
If you live in the SF ba area, hook a UHF antenna (vertically polarized) to your cable-ready TV or VCR with TV out, and tune to cable channel 57 (421.25 MHz), and aim it at Mt. Hamilton (east of San Jose).
Here are some tests on 1.2GHz, which is also a ham band.
>You only get a few minutes before the satellite disappears below the horizon again, but it's still cool.
You can also use a store-and-forward system (like SMTP) to send messages to a Digipeater on the ISS or a ham satellite and have them picked up later by someone halfway around the world, without worrying about the view horizon. A friend of mine did this with a two-meter handitalkie and an antenna stuck on an ironing board.
Pre-dating PHP is MetaHTML, developed by Brian Fox (original author of BASH) and Henry Minsky. See the examples.
It lets you define your own macro tags, and it can access MySQL and other databases.
Try it if you prefer a cleaner syntax.
To cut down on the number of uC pins you can use a diode matrix connected to a smaller number of pins than switches; then you scan the keys by raising, lowering, and tristating (input) reading the various pin combinations. A side effect is that pressing two keys at once will generate a phantom key. Probably in this case the phantom key activates the rational arithmetic function, which was removed from the keyboard but not the microcontroller (i.e., I think they removed the UI but left the backend code in place).
There used to be a wider ham packet network, back before the ARPANet became the Internet; this piggybacks on the technology and uses it for short message, position reporting, and weather reporting. Check out APRSWorld.net for open-source software for the network side of this. (The radio side is already taken care of in the Linux kernel, and in various Windows packages. There is also a client program called XASTIR.
I'm looking for a low-cost DAC/ADC chip for SP/DIF, something that takes audio and produces SP/DIF, and vice versa. If it can use fixed modes and doesn't require a uC that would be great.
The Phillips UDA1355H looks like what I want, but Phillips doesn't even list availability information, and DigiKey and Mouser say either nothing or non-stock, which leads me to think that the chip doesn't exist.
Does anybody have anything like this?
I already know about PCM2902 USB DAC project, and while that's useful (similar to the Griffin iMic) it's the opposite of what I want.
I am licensed to talk to Cubans legally, from right here in th
Here are reports on BPL from OfCom, which is the British government's equivalent of the FCC in the US: OfCom reports on BPL. The first report (on Amperion) is cited in the ARRL article but was not written by the ARRL, but rather by the British government.
It's a bad idea and has been dropped left and right. Here's a paper from Canada on BPL. And here's a counter proposal for those who feel that energy companies need to be in the network business: Broadband Over gas (apparently not a joke).
More links from today's news: 2005-ARLS004, pictures.
>It might be worth it to develop a website for setting up your ham radio set and encouraging school students to explore this new hobby option.
Yes, good plan. There are quite a few sites already.
The local Jr High School (appropriately named after Fred Terman, a pioneer in radio research at Stanford) has a ham club with quite a few members, and I've been giving talks at elementary schools (tying in to geography units, for example).
I personally don't have satellite equipment to bring to schools, but every few weeks another school somewhere on the planet gets to talk live with ISS astronauts and cosmonauts (list).
The same rocket launch also put into place ham satellite for use in South Asia. There are other satellites available for personal use (AMSAT has several, including (Echo 51) but VUSat is focused on use from India and South Asia.
They're gonna push Flash as the lingua franca of the interactive web (while we wait on things like XForms, XAML, XUL and Web Forms 2.0)
Actually, Macromedia ColdFusion 7 uses XForms as its forms language.