Einstein and Lead-Acid Batteries

In "SolderSmoke -- Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics" we discuss the way in which Einstein's Special Relativity explains how and why transformers and coils work. I thought it was very cool to be able to see the role of Einstein's theory in our little toroidal transformers. Yesterday The New Scientist (perhaps the best science weekly in the world) brought news that we need to consider relativistic effects if we want to understand how and why our car batteries (and, I suppose, our gel-cells) work:

Thank relativity every time your car starts. Lead-acid batteries get about 80 per cent of their voltage from special relativistic effects.

Check it out (the NS story is short and gets right to the point): http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19978-car-batteries-run-on-relativity.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

Some Tech Humor

Ron Barrett

Apparently Pluto's demotion from planet status might have been a bit unfair. Researchers say that the rival to Pluto that was discovered six years ago is actually smaller than Pluto.

And I thought this BBC skit on computer problems would yield a few chuckles from the SolderSmoke community. (For U.S. readers: Orange is a big ISP/mobile phone provider in the UK and elsewhere.):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAG39jKi0lI

Grote Reber, Radio Astronomy, and Tasmania

Wow, the website of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a real treasure trove, with lots of ham radio info. Check out their page about ham radio's contribution to the exploration of the universe: http://www.nrao.edu/whatisra/hist_ham.shtml

The picture above shows antenna that Grote Reber built in his backyard in Wheaton, Illinois in 1937. It is now on display at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, West Virginia. That's quite an antenna! Imagine the neighbors' reaction.

NRAO has a page devoted to Grote Reber:
http://www.nrao.edu/whatisra/hist_reber.shtml
I had wondered what had drawn him to Tasmania later in life. Here's the answer:

In the 1950s, Reber sought a field that seemed neglected by most other researchers and turned his attention to cosmic radio waves at very low frequencies (1-2 MHz, or wavelength 150-300 meters). Waves of these frequencies cannot penetrate the Earth's ionosphere except in certain parts of the Earth at times of low solar activity. One such place is Tasmania, where Reber lived for many years. He died in Tasmania on December 20, 2002.

ECHOLINK and WINE: Works very well

I've been away from Echolink ever since my eeemachines PC went toes up and wiped out the Windows XP operating system. Echolink had always been a bit difficult to get running, even under Windows, so when I returned the eeemachne to life with Ubuntu, I never really even considered trying to get Echolink running on it. There is no Linux version of Echolink. But then, yesterday, somehow I got inspired. Something told me I should give Echolink a try using the Linux WINE Windows emulator. After all, I'd found that LTSpice worked great under WINE. I went to the Echolink download site, and hit the button. Ubuntu Karmic Koala (the version I am using) automatically fired up WINE and put the new windows program in the appropriate place. Echolink started right up. That night I was able to check into the Sunday evening QRP group for the first time in years. It was great. Now I'm on Echolink in the morning, talking to hams in Western Australia. The cheers for Jonathan Taylor, creator of Echolink! And three cheers for Ubuntu (especially Karmic Koala)!

The Arduino Documentary

Arduino The Documentary (2010) English HD from gnd on Vimeo.

Embedded controllers may seem a bit far afield for SolderSmoke. After all, I kind of gave up on surface mount, and have pretty much resigned myself to "hardware defined radios." (Someone sent me a picture of a T-shirt that kind of captured the sentiment: "I PROGRAM IN SOLDER!") But still, for a number of reasons I find Arduino intriguing. Aside from the amazing things you can do with this device, I like the homebrew, hands-on aspect of it. As you will see in the documentary, there is a real spirit of international collaboration in Arduinoland -- Italians, Spaniards, Colombians, Americans all working together on the project (the documentary itself is also available in Spanish). I also like it because it has its roots in Italy. So, even if you are not into embedded controllers, check out the documentary. I think you will like it.

SolderSmoke Podcast #129

January 8, 2010
SolderSmoke Podcast #129

http://soldersmoke.com/soldersmoke129.mp3

Introducing Cappuccio (pictured above)
"On the Cover of the Hot Iron"
Old tech, new tech:
Hammarlund HQ-100
Lafayette HA-600 (A)
WSPR: VK6 on the grey line, also Wake Island, and Alaska
How I fixed a broken GPU chip using a light bulb!
EMRFD's cool mod of the SBL-1 Diode Ring device (from W6JFR)
MAILBAG

Please send me reports on the audio quality. I made some changes...

Black Boxes No More! Cracking Open CPU Chips!

You guys have to see this. These guys have opened up some old CPU chips and have drawn the circuit diagrams for all the transistors. Then they made models of the circuitry. And they can runs programs on the models! From the site:

Have you ever wondered how the chips inside your computer work? How they process information and run programs? Are you maybe a bit let down by the low resolution of chip photographs on the web or by complex diagrams that reveal very little about how circuits work? Then you've come to the right place!

The first of our projects is aimed at the classic MOS 6502 processor. It's similar to work carried out for the Intel 4004 35th anniversary project, though we've taken a different approach to modeling and studying the chip. In the summer of 2009, working from a single 6502, we exposed the silicon die, photographed its surface at high resolution and also photographed its substrate. Using these two highly detailed aligned photographs, we created vector polygon models of each of the chip's physical components - about 20,000 of them in total for the 6502. These components form circuits in a few simple ways according to how they contact each other, so by intersecting our polygons, we were able to create a complete digital model and transistor-level simulation of the chip.

This model is very accurate and can run classic 6502 programs, including Atari games.

http://www.visual6502.org/

I had some technical (operator!) problems with Audacity this morning. Podcast 129 should be out tomorrow morning.

10% Discount Coupon for SolderSmoke -- The Book

http://soldersmoke.com/book.htm

Enter code READ2011 at checkout. (Offer ends January 31, 2011*)

Solar Flux Graph

The projected 2013-2014 peak doesn't look that great, but at least it appears that we are climbing out of the bottom of the cycle.

SolderSmoke Podcast #129 has been recorded and should be out in a day or so.

Propagation Improving

Yesterday spaceweather.com was reporting that a big sunspot was coming around the solar rim. I guess it arrived! Last night my WSPR sig was picked up by VK6XT during what must have been a gray-line situation, but this time with me going into sunset. Then, just about all night I was being picked up by VK2DDI. So, there may be hope for this solar cycle. 2011 seems to be off to a good start!

More WSPR DX

I was pleased to find this report (above) on my screen this weekend. Wake Island.

This morning I saw that yesterday I was picked up by one of the world's most globe-trotting hams: Laurence KL1X (by his remote-controlled station Kl7UK).

GO WSPR!

A Blast from the Past: THE HAMMARLUND HQ-100

I'm sitting here in the shack at 0645 EST on the first Sunday morning in 2011. Coffee is on. And so is my OLD Hammarlund HQ-100. I have it tuned to a friendly AM roundtable on 75 meters. And it sounds GREAT. Nothing like a receiver that is as broad as a barn door to let you appreciate that great AM sound.

This receiver and I have some history. I bought it in the Dominican Republic, probably in 1993, probably from my friend (now SK) Pericles Perdomo. It had suffered the ravages of the Dominican radio environment from both ends: I think I found signs of a lightning surge at the front end, and of a power surge at the AC input. The audio output transformer was bad also. This was one of my first tube-type renovation project. I had a lot of fun with it.

There are no crystal filters in this receiver. If you want to narrow it down, there is a Q-multiplier (so --yikes!-- this receiver is at least in part a regen). In its original configuration the Q multiplier doubled at the BFO, but I guess my anti-regen feelings were at work even then: I took the 100 kc crystal calibrator and put a 453.5 kc crystal in there -- so that calibrator now serves as the BFO. This seems much more civilized.

You can see in the picture that the clock is gone. Mine was in pretty sad shape when I got it. Plus I thought it looked kind of goofy in that otherwise very beautiful front panel. So I took the clock out, patched the hole, and gave the clock to a very grateful Hammarlund collector.

The AM really sounds great. I can see that I'm going to need a 75 meter dipole so I can match this receiver up with my DX-60 VF-1 combo.

If You Could SEE The Night Sky at Radio Frequencies

Image courtesy of NRAO/AUI

SolderSmoke is mainly about radio, but we make frequent detours into astronomy. The picture above nicely combines the two fields. This is what the night sky would look like if our eyes received at radio frequencies! Here's how the National Radio Astronomy Observatory describes their image:

This composite picture shows the radio sky above an optical photograph of the NRAO site in Green Bank, WV. The former 300 Foot Telescope (the large dish standing between the three 85 foot interferometer telescopes and the 140 Foot Telescope) made the 4.85 GHz radio image, which is about 45 degrees wide. Increasing radio brightness is indicated by lighter shades to indicate how the sky would appear to someone with a "radio eye" 300 feet in diameter. The optical and radio skies reveal "parallel universes" containing quite different objects. The extended radio sources concentrated in a band from the lower left to upper right lie in the outer Milky Way. The brightest irregular sources are clouds of hydrogen ionized by luminous stars. Such stars quickly exhaust their nuclear fuel, collapse, and explode as supernovae, whose remnants appear as faint radio rings. Unlike the nearby (less than 1000 light years distant) stars visible to the human eye, almost none of the myriad radio "stars" scattered over the sky are really stars at all. Most are luminous radio galaxies or quasars, and their average distance is over 5,000,000,000 light-years. Radio waves travel at the speed of light, so distant extragalactic sources appear today as they actually were billions of years ago. Radio galaxies and quasars are beacons of information about galaxies and their environs, everywhere in the observable universe, ever since galaxies first formed. Investigator(s): J. J. Condon, J. J. Broderick, and G. A. Seielstad

Higher definition images and lots more info is available here:
http://images.nrao.edu/Miscellaneous/Surveys/321 Three cheers for the NRAO!

So... Think BIG in 2011! Happy New Year and 73 to all!

Storm on Saturn (with radio waves)

There is a big and very unusual storm on Saturn right now. You can see it in the image above. It was taken by amateur astronomer Jim Phillips using an eight inch telescope. I've been out before dawn for the last two mornings trying to see the storm with my 6 inch Dobsonian reflector telescope. I get very nice views of Saturn and Titan, but I can't quite make out the storm. Conditions have not been great, and I'm not sure the storm was in view when I was looking.

The folks at spaceweather.com note that it is generating some static:
Instruments on NASA's Cassini spacecraft are picking up strong bursts of radio static. Apparently, lightning is being generated in multiple cells across the storm front.

Space weather indeed!

Our New SolderGlobe >>>>>>>>>>>>>

I really like this little globe. The red dots record past visits. But the fun part is the flags and city names that pop up showing who is currently looking at the site. Very nice.

You can make the globe spin faster (or backwards) and you can tilt the axis of rotation up and down with your mouse. Give it a spin!

Halogen Lamps and Heat Guns to The Rescue!

Hi Bill,

Your recent success with baking your Sony Vaio gave me the courage to attack my flat screen monitor. The most expensive thing in my entire computer setup is my "LG" brand monitor. It's the only thing that I've purchased new. Everything else came from the curb, or the surplus store. However, it started going on the fritz a few weeks ago.

While browsing around the chat groups on the internet I found out that many monitors from the past few years have had bad capacitors in them. So I opened it up, hoping to find a blob of leaking chemicals near a cap. "It should be a quick fix" I thought. However, everything looked great. No bulging caps, or leaking chemicals. I then turned the circuit board over, and instead of seeing a shining city of perfect solder joints, I saw a cloud of grey. Practically every solder joint was cold.

This is where your laptop baking got me thinking.

I didn't have a halogen lamp handy, but I did have a heat gun. So I put the gun on the high setting, and very slowly passed it over the board. It left a gleaming trail of solder joints.

When I started to connect things back together again, I heard a rattling. It seems that I heated the board up enough to allow some components to completely fall out. Luckily they were through-hole components (nothing surface mount), and were easy to solder back in.

Once everything went back together... success!

One thing to note, at one point I got a nasty zap from one of the caps on the board (I'm assuming for the back light). Even though we're not working with tubes and CRTs anymore, you still have to take heed and discharge high voltage caps before working on anything!

-Keith VE3TZF

Blue Light in Dark Ice

Down in Antarctica, the "Ice Cube" neutrino telescope was completed this month. It is an amazing piece of gear in an awesome location. Essentially, they use a 1 kilometer square piece of pure Antarctic ice as the detector -- when a neutrino hits a water molecule, it makes a bit of blue light and from this light the direction of the neutrino can be determined. But there is a problem: cosmic rays can create the same kind of blue light. So there's noise. They need a filter, right? Yes, and for this purpose they use... THE EARTH. They put the blue light detector at the TOP of the cube and look DOWN, down through the Earth! Only neutrinos get through.

For more details: http://www.icecube.wisc.edu/info/explained.php

SAVE 25% on SolderSmoke -- The Book (and other titles)

R/C Plane with Camera over New York City

This is really amazing. You should watch it in HD. 120 mile range? Maybe from the top of the Empire State building, right?

More info here:

http://singularityhub.com/2010/12/21/breath-taking-aerial-video-footage-from-new-york-city-taken-by-a-rc-plane/

DXers: What is my path to VK6XT?

I've been looking with pride at the WSPR map (below) showing that my little beacon has been received by far-off VK6XT. He picked me up again this morning, again only once. That makes three days in a row, each day only one report. Each time VK6XT is the only station in the Oceania area receiving me. And each day the my signal makes the trip around 1025 UTC. Now, I'm not a skilled DX'er, but it seems obvious to me that we are dealing with grey-line propagation here, right?

The image above shows the view from the sun at 1025 UTC today. Obviously the day/night terminator is along the perimeter of the earth in this image. So, I guess my little sigs could have been travelling either short path over Northern Europe and down over South East Asia OR they could have taken the long trip down over South America, over Antarctica, and on to Perth. My guess is that the short path is more likely. In any case, as cool as it is, the map drawn by the WSPR system is not how the sigs actually travelled.

I hope you DX hounds out there will chime in and tell me if I'm on the wrong path here...