Ubuntu

As SolderSmoke listeners know, I'm not really a software guy. In fact, I'm only a marginally competent user of software. But I've taken a liking to Ubuntu Linux. It works, it is user friendly, and it seems to have developed a very cool African cultural thing around it. Check out the names of the various versions and you will see what I mean:

4.10 Warty Warthog
5.04 Hoary Hedgehog
5.10 Breezy Badger
6.06 Dapper Drake
6.10 Edgy Eft
7.04 Feisty Fawn
7.10 Gutsy Gibbon
8.04 Hardy Heron
8.10 Intrepid Ibex
9.04 Jaunty Jackalope
9.10 Karmic Koala (NEXT ONE) October 2009

OK, now back to the radios...

KO7M Suddenly Goes Manhattan

Perhaps he picked up the vibrations from Dayton and FDIM where they were conducting a Sudden Receiver build-a-thon... Jeff, KO7M, (aka the lucky guy with the Piper Cub) recently tried out Mahanttan-style construction -- he built an NE602-LM386 Sudden Receiver... and liked it.

Jeff writes:

Believe it or not, I have never built anything Manhattan style… So, I decided to give it a go and built a little 40m DC receiver designed by Rev. George Dobbs G3RJV consisting of a NE612 and LM386. I have included a shot of it below. I was very pleased with this building style and think I may adopt it going forward. In particular I like how easy it is to make changes. I just used tin snips to make the pads. For the 8 pin IC pads, I cut them 2 cm square and used a hacksaw to saw between the IC pins and up the middle to separate the pin pads electrically by removing the copper. Make sense? Very simple to then bend the IC pins 90 degrees and solder them down. Preaching to choir, I know… But it takes some us a little longer to get on board, eh? J I was very pleased with the outcome.

I like Jeff's technique for the IC pads. I will have to try that.

SolderSmoke 108 will feature an interview with George Dobbs in which he talks about the Sudden Build-a-thon.

W3PM Hears the WSPR Rig he Inspired

I got a nice e-mail from Gene, W3PM. Gene's simple homebrew SSB rig for WSPR provided the inspiration that got me into the WSPR mode. We'd been exchanging e-mails a while back, then he mentioned that he would be away... Turns out, he ended up within range of my 20mW WSPR sig. (The picture shows Gene doing some maritime mobile satellite operating from the QEII in 2002.)

Hi Bill, I just wanted to let you know that I hear your 20 mW WSPR signal each morning around 0500 to 0700 UTC. Your signal strength varies between -21 and -26 dBm.

I am currently on vacation in Fettercairn (GM4YRE, IO86ru), Scotland which is located about 30 miles SW of Aberdeen in the northeastern part of Scotland. I have very limited internet access; therefore, I cannot report WSPR spots in real time. My WSPR transmitter is active most days on 30 meters until we leave Scotland... I run one watt to a low doublet antenna.

73/72 Gene W3PM GM4YRE

Atlantis, HST in Front of the Sun

Check out the little black marks in the lower left of old Sol. That's Shuttle Atlantis and the Hubble Space Telescope (you can see it in more detail below). The picture was taken from Florida by Thierry Legault. He calculated when the spacecraft would be aligned with the sun from his Florida location and took the shot. Well done. More innovative astrophotography at his site: http://www.astrophoto.fr/ Note: Too bad we don't see any REAL sunspots!

Scary Stuck Bolt on Hubble Space Telescope

They had a scary moment during yesterday's space walk. They were trying to get the old camera out. One of the bolts wouldn't turn. It has been in space for 16 years They kept adding more torque, and they knew they were approaching the point at which the bolt would break, preventing -- forever -- the replacement of the camera. In what looked like their last attempt, the got it turning. Bravo! The live coverage via NASA's online TV is really superb. They are using helmet-cams, and you get to see just what they see.

NASA put together a video on the personal stories of the crew members. I think it is a good thing to show kids (Billy has already seen it, Maria is next):

Fixing the Hubble Space Telescope

Gentlemen, NASA TV is the place to be this week. They have the Hubble Space Telescope in the payload bay of the Shuttle and soon they will be going outside to do the kinds of repairs that Knack victms can relate to. (Update: I'm watching a space walk live through the helmet-cam of Astronaut Grunsfeld. They are now lubricating some bolts on the doors of the telescope.)

Here is the NASA description of the repairs.

Two of Hubble's instruments are in need of repair. ACS, which partially stopped working in 2007 due to an electrical short, is the "workhorse camera" responsible for some of Hubble's most spectacular images. STIS is a spectrograph that sees ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared light, and is known for its ability to hunt black holes. While COS works best with small sources of light, such as stars or quasars, STIS can map out larger objects like galaxies. STIS suffered a power failure in 2004 and was put into hibernation to preserve the possibility of its repair.

Astronauts plan to fix both – a challenging prospect since these repairs are beyond the scope of Hubble’s serviceable design. Hubble’s creators envisioned astronauts swapping out components, not performing delicate surgeries during spacewalks.

An interior electronics box of ACS that supplies power for ACS detectors, contains equipment affected by an electrical short. However, its location makes it inaccessible to astronauts. So instead of trying to reach the problem area, astronauts will attempt to bypass those power-shorted components entirely.

The failed power supply is connected by cables to a series of electronics boards, which are within reach but have no power because of the damaged box. Astronauts will install a new power supply to a handrail on the ACS outer enclosure, remove the electronics boards and install different ones that are compatible with the new power supply, and connect them to the new supply with exterior cables. The arrangement simply cuts the damaged box out of the equation.

Innovative tools for the repairs are designed and developed by Goddard engineers and tested by the astronauts for refinements. STIS needs a new power supply circuit board. The repair would be relatively easy but for the electronics access panel, which was never meant to be opened and is attached to STIS by 111 small screws. The screws are hard to grasp with the astronauts' gloved hands, and could create problems if they were to escape and float around the electronics. So engineers have created a "fastener capture plate" that fits over the top of the panel. When the astronauts remove the screws, they will be trapped in the plate. Astronauts will then switch out the power supply circuit board and close off the open electronics with a new, simpler panel that attaches easily with two levers.

3 Kids, 3 Cesium Clocks, Mt. Rainier, Time Dilation

He may not know it, but this dude has a bad case of The Knack. From his web sites:

In September 2005 the kids and I took several very accurate cesium atomic clocks from home and parked 5400 feet up Mt Rainier (the volcano near Seattle) for a full two days. The goal was to see if the clocks actually gained time, even if billionths of a second, as predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity. Does gravity really alter time and can this weird phenomenon be detected with a family road trip experiment?

Ten years ago I wanted to build a LED digital analog clock that would be accurate to better than one second per year -- so I would have the fun of adjusting it when a leap second occurred. This simple goal resulted in a most interesting journey into electronics, horology, astronomy, test equipment, quartz oscillators, rubidium and cesium atomic clocks, hydrogen masers, frequency counters and phase comparators, GPS, Loran C, GOES, and WWV / WWVB radio receivers. That makes me one of the Time-Nuts. By now I've exceeded that goal by a factor of a million: the best clocks in my collection (active hydrogen masers) are accurate to better than one microsecond per year. Excluding national government laboratories, my home time lab now has the most accurate clock in the world.

For info on the Rainier Time Dilation Road Trip: http://www.leapsecond.com/great2005/tour/
For a more general discussion of this madness: http://www.leapsecond.com/

Hey, but who are we to talk, right?