Curtiss-Wright makes a circuit board that would be perfect for this work. This board is an FPGA next to a DAC that can spit out an RF signal whose modulation is about 6 GHz wide, calculated by the FPGA. Using this technology, ANY type of waveform or modulation can be sent to the radar transmitter.
I just ordered (for my radio astronomy job) its cousin, which is all A/D converter, as our radio telescope doesn't have a transmitter, just a receiver.
This reminds me of when Caldera systems sued IBM, thinking that it could get an easy win. Ha! Guess who had $50 million to waste on lawyers. Not Caldera.
I have a 2" diameter jar with half a megabit of core memory, but it's not strung yet. They are extra-tiny cores. My coworker saved the core from a PDP-11 computer, I think it's 16k bytes. One board for the cores, one for the driver circuits.
The USB charging port is only 5V, and the resistance of water, even salt water, is high enough that it shouldn't disturb the charging process. I can see why you wouldn't want to submerge your 120V hair dryer in the bathtub with you, but this is a completely different scenario. Am I missing something?
There are two logos one uses for UL stuff: The backwards UR which means a recognized component, and the UL which means a listed complete product. A claim that the battery being UL listed (if such a thing is even possible) constitutes the necessary safety testing is a bad move, as the entire hoverboard assembly needs to be tested and UL listed for it to have some hope of being safe enough for your insurance adjuster to buy you a new house when your hoverboard burns it down.
I recently got a tour of the 200 inch Hale telescope, which is outfitted with an optical eyepiece, although it was daytime so I didn't get to peek through it. My have to stop by at night some time to do so. (It helps if you know the site supervisor or one of the astronomers.)
The adaptive optics system is quite something, if it's anything like the one at the LBT on Mt. Graham. They have been able to make diffraction-limited images with that one. When they turned it on for the first time, the results were so good that they thought it must have been an error. The downside is that it took about ten years to make the first adaptive secondary mirror and get it installed, as it's about 1m diameter and 1.6mm thick, with 600 magnets glued to its backside. A couple of them broke in transit before they figured out how to pack them properly. (I work in the same building as the GMT and the LBT folks.)
I work in millimeter- and submillimeter-wave radio astronomy, where we receive signals in the 60 to 800 GHz range. There is a lot of water absorption of the signal, leaving only certain frequency bands usable. The semiconductors used at these frequencies are rather exotic - we use superconducting materials in our receivers for lower noise, and we cool them to 4 Kelvin. Making a power amplifier to produce even one Watt of signal at 75 GHz is a million-dollar project. In short, it's not likely to be mainstream for at least ten years.
I had to turn off auto updates on my work computer, as the university doesn't yet support 10 officially. That Windows 10 recommender update is really tenacious! Fire is just about necessary to beat it down.
I was in a band called Warrren Frank's Current Name. We played in the Cellar, the U of Arizona Student Union hot spot, for the Eat To The Beat concert series that day. I heard the news on the radio of my 1959 Cadillac as I was driving the equipment over to the place at nine AM. Naturally, our audience was all upstairs, watching events unfold in the big public TV set. It was all right, as the band was doomed anyways.
The cost of putting a ton of anything in space is higher than the cost of putting 1000 tons of that thing anywhere on Earth. The LBT cost a hundred million to build, while the Hubble was a couple billion. The LBT's mirrors have 24 times more surface area than Hubble. So how do you propose to put a 30 meter telescope in space?
Yes, I'm aware of all that. I'm also aware of the fact that nuclear waste is cumulative, and the more nuclear power we use, the more this will be a problem. I don't recall saying that coal was any better. Personally, I am in favor of not using so much energy. Not that I seem to be able to do it, when it's so cheap to buy.
It actually is a fine idea. Perhaps not in their basements, but in a pro-nuclear town where the whole town would be 'hot', and the residents would celebrate their contribution to solving our 'energy crisis' with what is in their opinion the best solution.
Yeah, you would think that the names of the materials use would be the slightest bit interesting to readers of this article. Perhaps the editor didn't want to alarm anyone, and removed that information.
Thanks for the information. I work on both of those telescopes in Arizona. The HHT has receivers covering 200 to 690 GHz. We just installed an ALMA prototype antenna on Kitt Peak, and have a grant to build a four-band receiver system for it that will cover 60 to 270 GHz. These are also used for VLBI interferometry, but that's another story.
I work on telescopes of the sort that were used to make these observations. In fact, I built the spectrometer that the cited author Stephanie Milam used to get her degrees in astronomy at Arizona. The spectrometer (these days) is a big FFT machine capable of resolving perhaps 1 GHz of bandwidth into 16,384 or so channels. The frequency received by the telescope is typically many GHz. The huge IRAM telescope works at lower frequencies than our smaller scopes in Arizona, which operate above 100 GHz. The spectral lines are first replicated in a vacuum chamber in a lab, to make sure that the spectral signature is thoroughly documented.
When I was a freshman in high school, I built an LED digital clock based on an app note in the back of the RCA COS/MOS data book, 1973 edition. It took a lot of wire wrapping, but I made it work. I mounted it in a nice wood-grained box from Radio Shack. It ran on batteries. I brought it to school one day, and got my electronics teacher to give me extra credit for it, and enjoyed showing it to kids on my 8 mile long school bus rides.
So I did about eighty times as much work as Ahmed did, and I STILL didn't invent anything.
Give the kid a break. At least he was doing something remotely original.
As a fellow who built a wire-wrapped digital clock from a couple dozen CMOS chips when I was 15, I am keenly aware of the distinction. Yet it really has nothing to do with this story. I brought my clock to school also, but I didn't get in trouble for it. It had no alarm; it was in a metal box; I was white; it was 1976. Many differences. I think all of them are factors.
I agree that the 555 is not very good, but I LOVE knobs! Knobs are like 5,000,000 times more pleasant than buttons. I just put four potentiometers on my Burning Man art lighting project built on an Arduino shield, so that we can control the mood by changing the parameters a bit.
The progressives are responsible for making our air clean. The big cities in America used to look like China is now, but the EPA was created to do something about it, and has succeeded admirably. People rag about the government overreaching, but this is one shining example of the government solving a big problem. Unfortunately, the EPA has been hamstrung by the conservative Congress, which seems to think that keeping our air from becoming all polluted again is too much of a price for industry to pay. Assholes.
Analog computers weren't built of TIP120s or LM386s or 2N2222s. They were built with 12AX7s and 5U4Gs, and the later ones of Philbrick K2-Ws. By the time the TIP120 came out, DEC was building PDP-11s out of TTL chips. TTL is rather dumb nowadays, as we have CMOS.
One thing is true about the old parts, though... you can still buy them. I've had occasion to work on some 15 year old electronics, and none of the bigger chips are made any longer. We can still get 741s to fix our 40 year old spectrometer, but no Xilinx 4003s to fix the 20 year old one, nor CoolRunner CPLDs to fix the ten year old one.
The TIP120 is not too efficient, but if you're already going to be dropping a couple volts in the transistor, it simply doesn't matter. Our radio telescopes use very low resistance coils to control the attenuation of a microwave signal using a device called a ferrite modulator. Its voltage drop is about 1 volt, and the lowest power supply available is 5V, so it works fine. Plus, we have a bin with 50 of the darn things in the parts cabinet. So there, Tom! (I jest. He's one of my best friends.)
I work on the 12 meter radio telescope on Kitt Peak. It was built in the mid sixties, refitted with a new dish in 1982, and replaced last year with an ALMA prototype antenna. We still use the old filter bank spectrometers. They were built in 1973-4. This item.
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Curtiss-Wright makes a circuit board that would be perfect for this work. This board is an FPGA next to a DAC that can spit out an RF signal whose modulation is about 6 GHz wide, calculated by the FPGA. Using this technology, ANY type of waveform or modulation can be sent to the radar transmitter.
I just ordered (for my radio astronomy job) its cousin, which is all A/D converter, as our radio telescope doesn't have a transmitter, just a receiver.
This reminds me of when Caldera systems sued IBM, thinking that it could get an easy win. Ha! Guess who had $50 million to waste on lawyers. Not Caldera.
I have a 2" diameter jar with half a megabit of core memory, but it's not strung yet. They are extra-tiny cores. My coworker saved the core from a PDP-11 computer, I think it's 16k bytes. One board for the cores, one for the driver circuits.
The USB charging port is only 5V, and the resistance of water, even salt water, is high enough that it shouldn't disturb the charging process. I can see why you wouldn't want to submerge your 120V hair dryer in the bathtub with you, but this is a completely different scenario. Am I missing something?
There are two logos one uses for UL stuff: The backwards UR which means a recognized component, and the UL which means a listed complete product. A claim that the battery being UL listed (if such a thing is even possible) constitutes the necessary safety testing is a bad move, as the entire hoverboard assembly needs to be tested and UL listed for it to have some hope of being safe enough for your insurance adjuster to buy you a new house when your hoverboard burns it down.
I recently got a tour of the 200 inch Hale telescope, which is outfitted with an optical eyepiece, although it was daytime so I didn't get to peek through it. My have to stop by at night some time to do so. (It helps if you know the site supervisor or one of the astronomers.)
The adaptive optics system is quite something, if it's anything like the one at the LBT on Mt. Graham. They have been able to make diffraction-limited images with that one. When they turned it on for the first time, the results were so good that they thought it must have been an error. The downside is that it took about ten years to make the first adaptive secondary mirror and get it installed, as it's about 1m diameter and 1.6mm thick, with 600 magnets glued to its backside. A couple of them broke in transit before they figured out how to pack them properly. (I work in the same building as the GMT and the LBT folks.)
I work in millimeter- and submillimeter-wave radio astronomy, where we receive signals in the 60 to 800 GHz range. There is a lot of water absorption of the signal, leaving only certain frequency bands usable. The semiconductors used at these frequencies are rather exotic - we use superconducting materials in our receivers for lower noise, and we cool them to 4 Kelvin. Making a power amplifier to produce even one Watt of signal at 75 GHz is a million-dollar project. In short, it's not likely to be mainstream for at least ten years.
I had to turn off auto updates on my work computer, as the university doesn't yet support 10 officially. That Windows 10 recommender update is really tenacious! Fire is just about necessary to beat it down.
I was in a band called Warrren Frank's Current Name. We played in the Cellar, the U of Arizona Student Union hot spot, for the Eat To The Beat concert series that day. I heard the news on the radio of my 1959 Cadillac as I was driving the equipment over to the place at nine AM.
Naturally, our audience was all upstairs, watching events unfold in the big public TV set. It was all right, as the band was doomed anyways.
The cost of putting a ton of anything in space is higher than the cost of putting 1000 tons of that thing anywhere on Earth. The LBT cost a hundred million to build, while the Hubble was a couple billion. The LBT's mirrors have 24 times more surface area than Hubble. So how do you propose to put a 30 meter telescope in space?
Yes, I'm aware of all that. I'm also aware of the fact that nuclear waste is cumulative, and the more nuclear power we use, the more this will be a problem. I don't recall saying that coal was any better. Personally, I am in favor of not using so much energy. Not that I seem to be able to do it, when it's so cheap to buy.
It actually is a fine idea. Perhaps not in their basements, but in a pro-nuclear town where the whole town would be 'hot', and the residents would celebrate their contribution to solving our 'energy crisis' with what is in their opinion the best solution.
Yeah, you would think that the names of the materials use would be the slightest bit interesting to readers of this article. Perhaps the editor didn't want to alarm anyone, and removed that information.
It does improve national security, because now the folks who would want to go to war will have to think twice about it.
Thanks for the information. I work on both of those telescopes in Arizona. The HHT has receivers covering 200 to 690 GHz. We just installed an ALMA prototype antenna on Kitt Peak, and have a grant to build a four-band receiver system for it that will cover 60 to 270 GHz. These are also used for VLBI interferometry, but that's another story.
I work on telescopes of the sort that were used to make these observations. In fact, I built the spectrometer that the cited author Stephanie Milam used to get her degrees in astronomy at Arizona. The spectrometer (these days) is a big FFT machine capable of resolving perhaps 1 GHz of bandwidth into 16,384 or so channels. The frequency received by the telescope is typically many GHz. The huge IRAM telescope works at lower frequencies than our smaller scopes in Arizona, which operate above 100 GHz. The spectral lines are first replicated in a vacuum chamber in a lab, to make sure that the spectral signature is thoroughly documented.
When I was a freshman in high school, I built an LED digital clock based on an app note in the back of the RCA COS/MOS data book, 1973 edition. It took a lot of wire wrapping, but I made it work. I mounted it in a nice wood-grained box from Radio Shack. It ran on batteries. I brought it to school one day, and got my electronics teacher to give me extra credit for it, and enjoyed showing it to kids on my 8 mile long school bus rides.
So I did about eighty times as much work as Ahmed did, and I STILL didn't invent anything.
Give the kid a break. At least he was doing something remotely original.
As a fellow who built a wire-wrapped digital clock from a couple dozen CMOS chips when I was 15, I am keenly aware of the distinction. Yet it really has nothing to do with this story. I brought my clock to school also, but I didn't get in trouble for it. It had no alarm; it was in a metal box; I was white; it was 1976. Many differences. I think all of them are factors.
I agree that the 555 is not very good, but I LOVE knobs! Knobs are like 5,000,000 times more pleasant than buttons. I just put four potentiometers on my Burning Man art lighting project built on an Arduino shield, so that we can control the mood by changing the parameters a bit.
The progressives are responsible for making our air clean. The big cities in America used to look like China is now, but the EPA was created to do something about it, and has succeeded admirably. People rag about the government overreaching, but this is one shining example of the government solving a big problem. Unfortunately, the EPA has been hamstrung by the conservative Congress, which seems to think that keeping our air from becoming all polluted again is too much of a price for industry to pay. Assholes.
Analog computers weren't built of TIP120s or LM386s or 2N2222s. They were built with 12AX7s and 5U4Gs, and the later ones of Philbrick K2-Ws. By the time the TIP120 came out, DEC was building PDP-11s out of TTL chips. TTL is rather dumb nowadays, as we have CMOS.
One thing is true about the old parts, though... you can still buy them. I've had occasion to work on some 15 year old electronics, and none of the bigger chips are made any longer. We can still get 741s to fix our 40 year old spectrometer, but no Xilinx 4003s to fix the 20 year old one, nor CoolRunner CPLDs to fix the ten year old one.
The TIP120 is not too efficient, but if you're already going to be dropping a couple volts in the transistor, it simply doesn't matter. Our radio telescopes use very low resistance coils to control the attenuation of a microwave signal using a device called a ferrite modulator. Its voltage drop is about 1 volt, and the lowest power supply available is 5V, so it works fine. Plus, we have a bin with 50 of the darn things in the parts cabinet. So there, Tom! (I jest. He's one of my best friends.)
You're one to talk... you use a PDP-11! I at least send mail from my "modern" IMSAI 8080.
I work on the 12 meter radio telescope on Kitt Peak. It was built in the mid sixties, refitted with a new dish in 1982, and replaced last year with an ALMA prototype antenna. We still use the old filter bank spectrometers. They were built in 1973-4. This item.