Blackberry REACT July 2008 NewsletterQuick ClicksReflective vinyl tape: SOLASSOLAS means "Safety of Life at Sea," and it's a Coast Guard rating for life-saving devices. This tape is rated SOLAS, and it reflects very highly. You can stick it to your rain gear, back packs, the insides of your car doors so they reflect lights of oncoming cars, and so on. Thirty-foot rolls are $35 for one-inch width, and $50 for two-inch widths. 72-hour meal kitWalmart's online store has a Mountain House 72 Hour Kit of food - a three-day supply of freeze-dried food in pouches for one person. You need to pour in boiling water, then you can eat it right out of the pouch. Freeze-dried food has a longer shelf-life than canned foods. The page lists the menu of the meals. Canned bacon!One case of 12 cans of bacon for $110. Ten-year shelf life, and it the bacon stays together till you unroll it. Mmmmmmmm. Sticker ShieldSticker shield is a piece of plastic that you put adhesive stickers on. Then you put the sticker on your windshield using the Sticker Shield as the adhesive. It sticks with static electricity like those 'change your oil' stickers they put on your car's windshield. No scraping, no adhesive, no scoring on your windshield when you need to remove the sticker. Radio set assembling room, 1925A photo of a factory with mostly women assembling radios. No assembly line - each worker had a box of all the parts she needed, and the tools to do it with. (Louise Brooks bobs were definitely the in hairstyle.) The photo was taken at the Atwater Kent factory in Philadelphia. Remember when we had factories in American cities? The original HTAlthough popularly called the walkie talkie, the SCR-536 was officially designated a handie talkie. It weighed between 5 and 7 pounds with the battery and operated about 8 hours on one charge in receive-only. The antenna was 40 inches long; pulling the antenna out turned the radio on, pushing it in turned the unit off. The radio was developed by Galvin Manufacturing, which became a part of Motorola. Motorola i333Compare and contrast the walkie talkie with the Motorola i335 cell phone shown here being dropped off a building and run over by a car. Weight: too little to matter. The Harmonium: Mechanical Fourier Analysis and SynthesisIt's not exactly steam punk, but this lovely wood and metal device mechanically calculates (with gears) sine wave functions and plots them on graph paper for you. Gasoline hoardingA lovely couple in Massachusettes were hoarding gasoline in plastic jugs they kept in their closet. Nine jugs with an estimated 45 gallons. You'll never guess what happened. (Hint: the article includes an interview with a fireman.) Skin-tennaTransmitted RF is channeled out sideways along the skin, instead of being transmitted out into the aether. This is a boon for people with medical underpants - oops, sorry, that's medical implants. Your implants can communicate wirelessly to other implants to or to a sensor. The only implanted device mentioned is a pacemaker, and no mention is made of who the pacemaker wants to talk to or why. Unusual lack of sunspotsScientists are expressing puzzlement at the lack of sunspot activity. There's an international solar conference at Montana University, and solar physicists had expected the previous solar sunspot cycle to have ended by now. Such cycles typically last about 11 years. The longest observed lack of solar activity lasted 50 years (known as the Maunder Minimum), coinciding with the Little Ice Age from 1650 to 1700. This article blames global warming entirely on the sun and has some information on the Little Ice Age. Maunder Minimums may occur every 200 or 300 years, disrupting the shorter 11-year sunspot cycle. Cycles of Little Ice Ages have been traced back to 8700BC, according to the article. Another article traces the records of ice ages based on core samples, recorded temperatures (after thermometers were invented), tree rings, and so on. A lack of sunspots is affiliated with lousy HF radio days. Here's a completely incomprehensible page on propagation as predicted by sunspots: and here's a completely readable explanation. If sunspots have an effect on global warming, maybe the sacrifice of long-range communication for cooling off the earth would be worth it. Disaster centersAfter the 1995 Kobe Earthquake, someone realized they had no place to put people whose homes were destroyed - there were too many for existing shelters. Architectural Record Magazine has an article on a shelter recently completed that is normally a tennis court, but in the event of an earthquake or a typhoon, the building will be converted to a regional relief center. It is called, for reasons left inexplicably unexplained in the article, the Miki Disaster Management Park Beans Dome. It contains nine tennis courts, a cafe, and men's and women's locker rooms, along with administrative offices. More photos of the interesting structure are at TreeHugger. The dome looks like a tennis ball stuck halfway into the ground. Altoid tinsSome of you may know of do-it-yourself amateurs for building radio transmitters into Altoids tins, so here's another take on what to do with your empty cans: a solar-powered theremin. For those that don't know what a theremin is, watch the video at that link. And remember Good Vibrations, from the Beach Boys (which didn't actually use a theremint, but who cares). Psst! Wanna know what's in that placarded truck ahead?The Dept. of Transportation has published the 2008 Emergency Response Guidebook which details what all those placards mean on trucks carrying chemicals, poisons, toxins, radioactive liquids, and compressed gasses. The booklet is available in a couple of formats, but I downloaded the .pdf file. It gives the various classes of dangerous stuff, the 4-digit ID number, and instruction on how to read the placards. Their number one instruction is the best. Approach cautiously from upwind until you figure out what's in the container. In our area, we have trains, 18-wheelers, and smaller trucks that carry all sorts of hazardous cargo on the tracks, the freeways, and our streets. Be careful if you approach an accident until you know there has been no release of hazardous gasses, liquids, or powders. Article on ARRL.org mentions us!Ward Silver wrote an article for ARRL called "Using Community Events to Promote Amateur Radio" and mentioned Howard, Louise, and me at Maker Faire, along with the other hams who helped out. Since this is the ARRL, no mention was made of Blackberry REACT, but we'll see if we get an article in the REACTer. Scroll down for photos. New, light fuel cell announcedThe fuel cell is being tested by the army and is said to provide 25W of power and weigh 2 pounds. Much more information and a couple of confusing photos at Defense Update The fuel cells weigh from a couple of pounds to about nine and replace the 'normal' load of over 25 lbs. of batteries each soldier requires for a 3-day mission in the field. One of the uses of battery-powered devices is one we might identify with. A soldier on a combat mission may be taking fire from a group in a cave on a mountainside a mile away. There is a jet in the air ready to bomb or strafe the cave if you can tell the pilot where it is and tell him where you are so he plays safe with you. I'm sure we've all had the experience of trying to tell Net Control where someone is and having Net Control then try to send first aid there. Soldiers carry GPS units so they know where they are. They also have binoculars with GPS and laser range finders. The soldier looks at the cave with the binoculars, gets the soldier's location from the GPS, the compass direction of the cave, the distance to the cave from the laser, then computes the latitude/longitude of the cave, and sends that information to the pilot, who then either programs it into a JDAM bomb or locates the cave on his map for strafing. The internet age comes to the battlefieldAn article on more nearly typical uses of all that battery- powered gear and how aggravating communications can become. Save Our Stuff-.-. --.- -..According to Wikipedia, land telegraph stations had long used the
convention of sending CQ (-.-. --.-) to alert stations to messages
of general interest. Marconi Wireless adopted that for its wireless
telegraphers, and it later added a D to the string for distress
calls. The letters CQ had no meaning; whether the D was added to
CQ for "distress" is unknown. Sending CQD results in this sound
being heard by wireless operators: ... --- ...According to several sources, ... --- ... was used by the German government wireless telegraphy service as a distress signal in 1905. The dots and dashes were not associated even with the letters SOS at the time. And it was not limited to three dits, three dahs, and three dits. Operators were trained to send three dits, three dahs, then repeat in a continuous sequence without spacing; the ship in distress would send continuously until the operator on the ship heard no more radio traffic on the receiver. All stations upon hearing the sequence of ... and --- were to cease transmitting and prepare to copy. When an international body found that CQD was too easy to misread, it adopted ...---... By convention the signal is sent without spaces between the strings of dits, dahs, and dits. In International Morse Code, those dits and dahs means SOS, so that became the vocalization of the distress call: SOS. The letters have no meaning; the pattern of dits and dahs is easy to remember, easy to send, and easy to recognize: di-di-dit-dah-dah-dah-di-di-dit The use of three dits, three dahs, three dits as the international distress signal was adopted on November 3, 1906, to become effective July 1, 1908. Happy 100th Birthday, SOS. KHAQQ calling ItascaAnd so on July 2, 1937, Amelia Earhart sent her last transmissions to the US Coast Guard cutter Itasca before Fred Noonan and she disappeared forever seventy-one years ago. Events
UpdatesDuring the August meeting we will discuss having Event Emergency Protocols for events we volunteer for. The Concours d'Elegance had a call for an ambulance, and it couldn't get into the grounds to pick up the person needing assistance. Ken Della Santina will be bringing refreshments. |