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Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Amazing NASA site: Audio from Apollo Landings

Akshay, VA7AAX, sent me a link to a truly amazing site. NASA has pulled together a huge amount of data on all the moon landings, and they have made it very accessible. Included is a LOT of the raw audio of the communication between the spacecraft and ground. They even have the internal communications inside the lunar lander. If you guys are looking for something to put in your MP3 players (in addition to SolderSmoke, of course) this is the place to go. It is also a great site for audio to be played in the shack while building something. It is really inspiring. This morning I listened to the Apollo 11 landing.

I like the live.365 system for the audio -- you can listen to it in streaming mode, without waiting for a long download.

Here is the site:
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/frame.html

Thanks Akshay! Thanks NASA!

Sunday, March 29, 2009

SolderSmoke Podcast #104

http://www.soldersmoke.com

1 April 2009
Rome Marathon
Billy climbs Vesuvius!
Fixin' up old Toshiba laptop
Solar Power from Donuts and Tea!
Eldon's MEPT ET Phone home machine
More Catalan minimalism: The MOSquito
Book: Thunderstruck! Marconi history
SPECIAL ECHOLINK QSO WITH NIGEL, M0NDE
MAILBAG:
Paul M0XPD new homebrewer, Funster 40, Paraset, and SDR
Preston WJ2V on REAL solder vacuum pumps
Ted AA5CK keys MEPT with iduino
Ken KG6PO on obit of TV pioneer Thomas T. Goldsmith
Art W2HQQ: "Man of High Fidelity" lacks knack
Scott KD5NJR on Sputnik 4, NASA comms
Alan W2AEW Don't smother MEPT oscillators! Books
Steve GOFUW Old Book recommendation. Building WARC rig
Jacki (XYL of KL7R) says hello from volcanic Alaska
Jeff KO7M Why FSK on QRSS?
Jim AL7RV Sends WSPR care package. (Thanks!)

Solder Smoke Cologne! New!


As mentioned in SolderSmoke 104. Check it out! Here is the link:

Solder Smoke -- From the Men at Work Collection

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Troubleshooting and Simulations

Alan, W2AEW, roams the Northeast USA as a Field Application Engineer for Tektronix. This week he sent me an e-mail with some words of wisdom about simulations and troubleshooting. Thanks Alan!

An excerpt from Alan's e-mail:

Funny you mentioned about LTSpice, and wanting to have that puff of soldersmoke whenever you place a component. It reminds me of something that I'd often tell new-hire engineers. Many times, engineers fresh out of school have never touched a resistor - they've often spent their entire education doing bookwork and simulations. I would always caution engineers about this, and try to illustrate that the simulation is only as good as the model you give it. If you ask the simulator to exercise the model in a way it wasn't designed for, it won't tell you that, it will just lie to you. YOU have to be smart enough to recognize the lie. For example, the simulator has no problem putting 10,000 amps through a 1N914A diode - it doesn't know that you'll let the smoke out of it! The simulator must be considered a tool, just as you VOM, scope, counter, finger, nose, etc. are all tools. Each can give you valuable information (and can lie to you). You have to learn to know what you can believe, and what you have to question - and you need to develop ways to look at strange behavior in a number of ways to figure out what is happening.

It reminds me of a story that Jim Williams wrote many years ago (you mentioned Jim Williams in a previous SS episode). He described how, as a child, he was playing with circuits at his neighbor's, and using his (neighbor's) oscilloscope to examine a circuit he was working on. He was getting all kinds of strange behavior, and couldn't make heads or tails of what he was seeing with the scope, VOM, etc. The neighbor (who was definitely afflicted with the Knack) came by and, with moistened fingers, probed around in his circuit for a few minutes. He then grabbed a small value capacitor and soldered it judiciously in the circuit, and everything worked fine. Jim was flabergasted and demanded an explanation. The neighbor said that he suspected that the circuit was oscillating at several hundred MHz, and used his finger's capacitance/loss/etc. to damp this behavior. He continued to explain that since the oscillation frequency was so high, the scope couldn't "see" it. Jim complained that this "wasn't fair"! The neighbor concluded the lesson about how important it is to not-only understand what our tools can do for us, but it is really more important to understand their limitations - because it is when we ask a tool to do something that it can't do, it often won't complain, it will lie. The same holds true for nearly every tool we use, and is a lesson well learned. This story is included in his chapter entitled "Should Ohm's Law Be Repealed?" in his book, "Analog Circuit Design: Art, Science and Personalities" from 1991.

Alan has a lot of great stuff on his web site. Check it out:
http://www.qsl.net/w2aew/

Friday, March 27, 2009

Marconi's Big Ears

Thunderstruck by Erik Larson has countless gems about Marconi. I thought I would share one with you this morning.

When Marconi was born on April 25 1874, an elderly gardener saw the new baby and exclaimed, "Che orecchi grandi ha!" ("What big ears he has!") Marconi's ever protective Irish Mom, Annie, took offense and replied:

"He will be able to hear the still, small voice of the air."

Indeed.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Thunderstruck!



Chris Trask, N7ZWY, recommended this book. I'm really enjoying it. Maybe too much: I was reading it on a crowded Rome bus this week, and was so absorbed by the chapter on Marconi's first efforts to transmit beyond line-of-sight that I didn't notice the pickpocket. He got my little radio receiver/MP3 player. The radio gods let me down that morning!

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Homebrew CPU

Since we were talking about minimalist computing, I thought you guys would be interested in Steve's homebrewed CPU project, aka the Big Mess of Wires. Inspirational stuff! Check it out:
http://www.stevechamberlin.com/cpu/about/
Designer: Douglas Bowman | Dimodifikasi oleh Abdul Munir Original Posting Rounders 3 Column