hit the surplus stores, look for fusty old board with wire-and-hole components, preferably with enough component sticking out the back side to poke holes and make your hands bleed. excellent source of salvage parts. you also want a desolder bulb so you don't heat the parts up so much that they drift out of tolerance. many a project have we all built with salvage stuff.
test when you pull, so you're not keeping crap that doesn't work, and building projects with crap that cannot work.
and then, of course, there is faking it.
you can always series resistors to get odd values (120 + 120 + 100 = 320 ohms) and parallel them as well (120 || 120 = 60), although the math gets a little more than four operators with more than two parts.
capacitors in parallel provide more capacitance at the same voltage (20 || 20 || 20 = 60 uF) and capacitors in series provide less capacitance but more voltage (20 + 20 at 450 volts = 20 uF at 900 volts).
the transistor battles... basically, 2N3904 and 2N3906 will replace just about all small-signal NPN and PNP applications, except way at the edges of the bell curve when you are looking for lowest noise. MPF102 is the universal JFET.
a good DMM with a capacitor meter built in, doesn't necessarily have to be a fluke, is the most important test equipment you can start with, for it allows you to build a junkbox. we're at the point where a scope is real close to the second most important piece of test equipment, and nothing below 20 MHz is worth thinking about. I got a nice dual-trace Tek digital storage scope at 100 MHz off eBay for around $150 a year or two ago, and it works great. get some $25 dock-sweepings probes from a mail order outfit and you're set.
and at least half my stuff was working to some degree by the time I was almost 13 and killing transistors.
the demise of popular electronics and the slate of similar magazines, in which you had both semi-interesting one or two element circuits to learn off of as welll as more advanced functional items is badly missed. as is heathkit. junko heathkits like the $8 learn to solder kit are selling at a 2-1/2 times premium unopened on eBay. items like the SB-2xx ham linear amps, unopened, sell well over a thousand bucks. the "220" was a $350 kit back in the day.
there are plenty of sites with a little information, but it's not pulled together like it once was. the guru's lair site, http://www.tinaja.com/default.asp , last redoubt of the venerable don lancaster, has some interesting stuff, but mostly it's his experiments on postscript and stuff like that from almost 20 years back.
mostly what's out there new and fresh is basic stamp and PIC projects. advanced stuff at www.circuitcellar.com , which should be familiar to those old Byte-hounds in the audience.
no good parts sources in the twin cities, for instance, that you can rely on, since AEI moved out of downtown mpls. you have to use www.digikey.com and www.mouser.com for much of anything, as well as specialty places like www.rfparts.com and www.tubesandmore.com .
as I understand things, under the law of the land, which is also called "fair use" provisions of the copyright act, you can have as many copies of a licensed work as you want, as long as you always hold onto The One that the license came with, and only one is in use at any one particular time.
it is my understanding that you are also permitted to keep these copies on alternative media.
the questions:
(1) so if little boopsie decides to download an MP3 of "screaming babies," for instance, because little boopsie is unable to encode her own copy, what exactly law did she break? (2) and further, exactly what evidence did RIAA and their contractors, employees, etc. who have been cutting a flaming swath across the Internet use to determine that the downloaded MP3 would not, in fact, be the copy used under the original license.
for as we all should know, you never "own" music as a customer. (3) you buy a physical carrier and a license to use that music for personal enjoyment in line with the copyright law as it exists at the time of "purchase"/license. right?
you didn't grow up with the technology, talk to the engineers, aspire into ham radio, look over the manuals, read the technical journals including licensing discussions and issues, and in general spend the formative years of your life looking into propagation and antenna design.
to those who are judged ill-able to afford to dump the old NTSC television set and buy a digital machine. you can already buy external digital tuners in the $80-100 range. when the production is ramped up by next summer to start getting the non-technical, anti-geek, and poor onto the new signals, the cost will be down as low as $40. and there's something like a billion and a half dollars in the subsidy fund.
no, you don't HAVE to dump the big glass eye for a new plasma. you'll just be "oh, Gawd, that's too bad you can't see the whole picture" goaded into it, like the switch to color TV happened once the color CRTs went square and all four networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS) went full-color. the percentages, as I remember them, went from 2% penetration in 1960 to 5% penetration in 1963 to 10% penetration in '65 to 75% penetration in '68, and no black and white to speak of by 1975. last large-screen b/w TVs were offered around 71 or 72, and then it was just belly sets.
right now is the magic time, if you're cheap... we just got an analog/digital set for my mother, CRT and 23 inch, for under $300. you're not going to see that size and price come together again for a long, long time... and it was a name brand Sharp set with two AV inputs, stereo and 4-line comb filter, etc. when the CRTs are gone in a year, and they will be, 23 inches will be $450 minimum in LCD screen for a digital-720.
radio signals from the vast majority of US broadcasters, at 5 kilowatts power, are regularly audible over 120 miles. skywave bounces off the ionosphere cause pockets of listenability for many thousands of miles. the "B" contour of most commercial TV broadcasters, running 25 KW to 100 KW of power audio and 10 to 50 Kw video, where some interference is likely but a good picture is pulled in almost all the time with an external gain antenna beam, runs 50 to 80 miles out.
every major metropolitan area is served with numerous 5KW radio stations, and those below midband are predictably audible across the SMSA boundary almost all the time, which encompasses radiuses of 20 to 40 miles.
on such technical material are the frequencies, powers, and beam patterns of radio licenses calculated. this is well-trodden ground, the number of communications lawyers in Washington, DC is second only to the K-street melange of political lobbyists, and they all use the same polar calculations to insure that radio KRAP applies for a license they can actually get authorized and sell enough ads to make money on.
amateur and shortwave radio can be expected at various bands and at various times, to be useable for two-way communications worldwide.
the 20-mile limit of Doctor Crumb needs some documentation. Soviet "chord" jamming of the 60s had to be done at the 100 to 200 KW level to drown out the state-run shortwave transmitters of Europe and the US, clearly audible any hour day or night in the US, and with the european state stations running up to 250 KW, they still got listeners.
yes, inverse-square laws apply. so do good construction principles. in the 1920s, primitive tube radios were made with great sensitivity, and if you had a good set, there was no problem listening on one coast of the US to the other coast nightly. that usually requires better than a 1 microvolt per meter sensitivity, and just about any crummy one-chip radio can do that today.
I might buy 20 miles for UHF television, merely because this follows line of sight rules with no skywave. but you can erect a tower of 1 + (4/3 (earth radius)) = h in feet and place an antenna, and get the signal of a typical TV broadcaster 35 KW or higher for over a hundred miles on any production TV set.
no, it gets back to hunger for frequencies, the desire of governments to reassign these frequencies in costly auctions for big dollars, and a serendipitous moment of technology change they can exploit for the purpose to explain why analog commercial broadcasting is going, going, gone. if they ever wanted to get the REALLY big bucks, move the technology into their military nets and sell THAT excess bandwidth. in the US, the military controls 99% of all assignable bandwidth DC to daylight, and has not given up one single 400 Hz channel since the Communications Act of 1939.
HP burns 11.5 million dollars on shredder oil per year. this settlement means nothing to HP, which remains the poster boy for no ethics in business for spying like Putin.
if he had, RCA would not have been able to maintain the pleasant but wrong story that their man vladimir zwyorkin invented scanning TV whole.
philo farnsworth did, 15 years before vlad had his iconoscope.
but philo didn't have a potfull of cash to push his invention and an existing base of customers -- radio stations and owners -- to push it to. RCA did. so RCA got all the glory.
a business case, again, is just logic. an evangelist with money and an agenda is truly business in operation.
it takes one alpha from one atom hitting the right cell in the right way to cause a cancer.
less than a picocurie but electically useful in a smoke detector probably means there are hundreds of alphas a minimum per minute coming from that source in the smoke detector.
that's plenty dangerous enough for me, might not be for you.
it is reasonable to assume, as Tom Clancy has in at least one novel, that because every reactor has differences from design-mates, and all are operated differently due to the whims of their managers, that there are differences in the "impurity" mix of any particular element retrieved from the witches' brew of used fuel rods.
so there is a "fingerprint" that overall says this Po210 came from a Crudhole type reactor, and this Po210 came from a Stinker type reactor, and it is quite possible that due to defects in shielding or a plugged cooling tube, the presence of element such-and-so means this particular sample came from Gornischt City's Crudhole reactor, possibly between 2001 and 2003.
it is also quite reasonable to assume that due to weapons inspections requirements in disarmament in the past, the atomic powers have ledgers of this information from folks who normally they don't meet in scientific conferences.
it is not required that you are "in the loop" that nobody will confirm exists that if Reuters and AP quote senior British government officials to the effect that the Po210 comes from Russia, there is a good chance they could make their case in the UN or world court.
assuming they decided it was worth releasing the background information that proves the case, which is almost certainly NOT going to happen.
what good is protecting this information? the first time some wacko bin looney decides to tape a bottlecap of Po210 to a stick of dynamite and flip it off an observation deck someplace, it will go a long way towards pinning down WHICH wacko bin looney is probably was.
alphas will kick neutrons out of the aluminum foil, and some occasional betas and gammas should come out due to interference which are detectable. alphas are much more destructive to biological tissue due to the mass they have, but the glass wall of a geiger tube will block them from carrying a charge across the gas and causing a click.
RCA pushed it because they could. that's what RCA did in those days, late 30s and post-war and the early 50s.
HDTV is the same thing. the manufacturers have an interest. it's a paradigm shift for broadcasters, and it will cannabilize their existing businesses, just like TV did, and color TV was just a gawd-awful money eater for stations in the 1960s.
but the FCC wants to sell those juicy frequencies near the cell phone bands, and congress spent the money a thousand times over, so your present TV system (NTSC, PAL, SECAM, doesn't matter) is headed down the dumper for HDTV versions.
that's how the future works. you can go into your back room and play your edison cylinders now... at least, the ones that aren't all fuzzy black mold by now. most folks eventually fall for pretty pictures and better sounds.
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hit the surplus stores, look for fusty old board with wire-and-hole components, preferably with enough component sticking out the back side to poke holes and make your hands bleed. excellent source of salvage parts. you also want a desolder bulb so you don't heat the parts up so much that they drift out of tolerance. many a project have we all built with salvage stuff.
test when you pull, so you're not keeping crap that doesn't work, and building projects with crap that cannot work.
and then, of course, there is faking it.
you can always series resistors to get odd values (120 + 120 + 100 = 320 ohms) and parallel them as well (120 || 120 = 60), although the math gets a little more than four operators with more than two parts.
capacitors in parallel provide more capacitance at the same voltage (20 || 20 || 20 = 60 uF) and capacitors in series provide less capacitance but more voltage (20 + 20 at 450 volts = 20 uF at 900 volts).
the transistor battles... basically, 2N3904 and 2N3906 will replace just about all small-signal NPN and PNP applications, except way at the edges of the bell curve when you are looking for lowest noise. MPF102 is the universal JFET.
a good DMM with a capacitor meter built in, doesn't necessarily have to be a fluke, is the most important test equipment you can start with, for it allows you to build a junkbox. we're at the point where a scope is real close to the second most important piece of test equipment, and nothing below 20 MHz is worth thinking about. I got a nice dual-trace Tek digital storage scope at 100 MHz off eBay for around $150 a year or two ago, and it works great. get some $25 dock-sweepings probes from a mail order outfit and you're set.
and at least half my stuff was working to some degree by the time I was almost 13 and killing transistors.
the demise of popular electronics and the slate of similar magazines, in which you had both semi-interesting one or two element circuits to learn off of as welll as more advanced functional items is badly missed. as is heathkit. junko heathkits like the $8 learn to solder kit are selling at a 2-1/2 times premium unopened on eBay. items like the SB-2xx ham linear amps, unopened, sell well over a thousand bucks. the "220" was a $350 kit back in the day.
there are plenty of sites with a little information, but it's not pulled together like it once was. the guru's lair site, http://www.tinaja.com/default.asp , last redoubt of the venerable don lancaster, has some interesting stuff, but mostly it's his experiments on postscript and stuff like that from almost 20 years back.
mostly what's out there new and fresh is basic stamp and PIC projects. advanced stuff at www.circuitcellar.com , which should be familiar to those old Byte-hounds in the audience.
no good parts sources in the twin cities, for instance, that you can rely on, since AEI moved out of downtown mpls. you have to use www.digikey.com and www.mouser.com for much of anything, as well as specialty places like www.rfparts.com and www.tubesandmore.com .
do please find sanity elsewhere as well, industry.
all drains will back up, it's just a question of when.
it is perfectly acceptable to put the chillers outside the server room on a lowered floor, folks. hire an architect.
just depends on where and when.
as I understand things, under the law of the land, which is also called "fair use" provisions of the copyright act, you can have as many copies of a licensed work as you want, as long as you always hold onto The One that the license came with, and only one is in use at any one particular time.
it is my understanding that you are also permitted to keep these copies on alternative media.
the questions:
(1) so if little boopsie decides to download an MP3 of "screaming babies," for instance, because little boopsie is unable to encode her own copy, what exactly law did she break? (2) and further, exactly what evidence did RIAA and their contractors, employees, etc. who have been cutting a flaming swath across the Internet use to determine that the downloaded MP3 would not, in fact, be the copy used under the original license.
for as we all should know, you never "own" music as a customer. (3) you buy a physical carrier and a license to use that music for personal enjoyment in line with the copyright law as it exists at the time of "purchase"/license. right?
(4) so who died and made you dictator?
what a fool. just another family-friendly republican with all the answers on how to make your life better, I'm sure.
you didn't grow up with the technology, talk to the engineers, aspire into ham radio, look over the manuals, read the technical journals including licensing discussions and issues, and in general spend the formative years of your life looking into propagation and antenna design.
or you would not have made your post.
one points over there. one points up. both mean something else when viewed by others.
(points)
(nfm)
to those who are judged ill-able to afford to dump the old NTSC television set and buy a digital machine. you can already buy external digital tuners in the $80-100 range. when the production is ramped up by next summer to start getting the non-technical, anti-geek, and poor onto the new signals, the cost will be down as low as $40. and there's something like a billion and a half dollars in the subsidy fund.
no, you don't HAVE to dump the big glass eye for a new plasma. you'll just be "oh, Gawd, that's too bad you can't see the whole picture" goaded into it, like the switch to color TV happened once the color CRTs went square and all four networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS) went full-color. the percentages, as I remember them, went from 2% penetration in 1960 to 5% penetration in 1963 to 10% penetration in '65 to 75% penetration in '68, and no black and white to speak of by 1975. last large-screen b/w TVs were offered around 71 or 72, and then it was just belly sets.
right now is the magic time, if you're cheap... we just got an analog/digital set for my mother, CRT and 23 inch, for under $300. you're not going to see that size and price come together again for a long, long time... and it was a name brand Sharp set with two AV inputs, stereo and 4-line comb filter, etc. when the CRTs are gone in a year, and they will be, 23 inches will be $450 minimum in LCD screen for a digital-720.
radio signals from the vast majority of US broadcasters, at 5 kilowatts power, are regularly audible over 120 miles. skywave bounces off the ionosphere cause pockets of listenability for many thousands of miles. the "B" contour of most commercial TV broadcasters, running 25 KW to 100 KW of power audio and 10 to 50 Kw video, where some interference is likely but a good picture is pulled in almost all the time with an external gain antenna beam, runs 50 to 80 miles out.
every major metropolitan area is served with numerous 5KW radio stations, and those below midband are predictably audible across the SMSA boundary almost all the time, which encompasses radiuses of 20 to 40 miles.
on such technical material are the frequencies, powers, and beam patterns of radio licenses calculated. this is well-trodden ground, the number of communications lawyers in Washington, DC is second only to the K-street melange of political lobbyists, and they all use the same polar calculations to insure that radio KRAP applies for a license they can actually get authorized and sell enough ads to make money on.
amateur and shortwave radio can be expected at various bands and at various times, to be useable for two-way communications worldwide.
the 20-mile limit of Doctor Crumb needs some documentation. Soviet "chord" jamming of the 60s had to be done at the 100 to 200 KW level to drown out the state-run shortwave transmitters of Europe and the US, clearly audible any hour day or night in the US, and with the european state stations running up to 250 KW, they still got listeners.
yes, inverse-square laws apply. so do good construction principles. in the 1920s, primitive tube radios were made with great sensitivity, and if you had a good set, there was no problem listening on one coast of the US to the other coast nightly. that usually requires better than a 1 microvolt per meter sensitivity, and just about any crummy one-chip radio can do that today.
I might buy 20 miles for UHF television, merely because this follows line of sight rules with no skywave. but you can erect a tower of 1 + (4/3 (earth radius)) = h in feet and place an antenna, and get the signal of a typical TV broadcaster 35 KW or higher for over a hundred miles on any production TV set.
no, it gets back to hunger for frequencies, the desire of governments to reassign these frequencies in costly auctions for big dollars, and a serendipitous moment of technology change they can exploit for the purpose to explain why analog commercial broadcasting is going, going, gone. if they ever wanted to get the REALLY big bucks, move the technology into their military nets and sell THAT excess bandwidth. in the US, the military controls 99% of all assignable bandwidth DC to daylight, and has not given up one single 400 Hz channel since the Communications Act of 1939.
if anybody ever wanted to know what was at the basis of the RIAA, this shows it all.
beat up the customers, try to roadblock technology, and now stiff the artists.
it's obvious who RIAA's clientele and controllers are... makers of 78 RPM records.
HP burns 11.5 million dollars on shredder oil per year. this settlement means nothing to HP, which remains the poster boy for no ethics in business for spying like Putin.
with availiability through the resellers, because I will grab one the second it's availiable if it is.
obviously, prior art exists, no patent forrrr you. the spammers have been using this engine for years.
if he had, RCA would not have been able to maintain the pleasant but wrong story that their man vladimir zwyorkin invented scanning TV whole.
philo farnsworth did, 15 years before vlad had his iconoscope.
but philo didn't have a potfull of cash to push his invention and an existing base of customers -- radio stations and owners -- to push it to. RCA did. so RCA got all the glory.
a business case, again, is just logic. an evangelist with money and an agenda is truly business in operation.
it takes one alpha from one atom hitting the right cell in the right way to cause a cancer.
less than a picocurie but electically useful in a smoke detector probably means there are hundreds of alphas a minimum per minute coming from that source in the smoke detector.
that's plenty dangerous enough for me, might not be for you.
...in such a blatant way."
so was the USSR. the "wet work" was usually done by bulgaria or rumanian secret services. that's not blatant, it's the other guy.
meet the new boss, same as the old boss...... prove me wrong.
it is reasonable to assume, as Tom Clancy has in at least one novel, that because every reactor has differences from design-mates, and all are operated differently due to the whims of their managers, that there are differences in the "impurity" mix of any particular element retrieved from the witches' brew of used fuel rods.
so there is a "fingerprint" that overall says this Po210 came from a Crudhole type reactor, and this Po210 came from a Stinker type reactor, and it is quite possible that due to defects in shielding or a plugged cooling tube, the presence of element such-and-so means this particular sample came from Gornischt City's Crudhole reactor, possibly between 2001 and 2003.
it is also quite reasonable to assume that due to weapons inspections requirements in disarmament in the past, the atomic powers have ledgers of this information from folks who normally they don't meet in scientific conferences.
it is not required that you are "in the loop" that nobody will confirm exists that if Reuters and AP quote senior British government officials to the effect that the Po210 comes from Russia, there is a good chance they could make their case in the UN or world court.
assuming they decided it was worth releasing the background information that proves the case, which is almost certainly NOT going to happen.
what good is protecting this information? the first time some wacko bin looney decides to tape a bottlecap of Po210 to a stick of dynamite and flip it off an observation deck someplace, it will go a long way towards pinning down WHICH wacko bin looney is probably was.
and if they resist arrest, there is no trial.
I suspect that most every CEO and board member in a large public corporation is liable for insider trading charges.
and the rest of use don't stand a chance until every single one of these cases is rooted out.
site now says they're adding a more powerful server.
;)
how about ballmer for pres and gollum for VP instead? we'll have two graceful dancers on the grave of our country
alphas will kick neutrons out of the aluminum foil, and some occasional betas and gammas should come out due to interference which are detectable. alphas are much more destructive to biological tissue due to the mass they have, but the glass wall of a geiger tube will block them from carrying a charge across the gas and causing a click.
clips that went onto the headshell of a tonearm.
now you have to take smoke detectors apart to get it.
surprised nobody posted a statement about a nice book, The Radioactive Boy Scout, which will give the !! OMG !! crowd heart attacks by the pound.
RCA pushed it because they could. that's what RCA did in those days, late 30s and post-war and the early 50s.
HDTV is the same thing. the manufacturers have an interest. it's a paradigm shift for broadcasters, and it will cannabilize their existing businesses, just like TV did, and color TV was just a gawd-awful money eater for stations in the 1960s.
but the FCC wants to sell those juicy frequencies near the cell phone bands, and congress spent the money a thousand times over, so your present TV system (NTSC, PAL, SECAM, doesn't matter) is headed down the dumper for HDTV versions.
that's how the future works. you can go into your back room and play your edison cylinders now... at least, the ones that aren't all fuzzy black mold by now. most folks eventually fall for pretty pictures and better sounds.