A Modest Proposal

Over the course of the World Cup in professional soccer and its intersection with America 250, there has been a flood of stories of how visitors, especially Europeans, are viewing America based on what they're seeing and experiencing firsthand. The reports have focused on their reactions to the random folks they've met, their reaction to American food, American portions, and just how different we are than the stories their media painted about how awful America is. A substantial part of that story is that Europe is undergoing a hot weather period, and how everywhere they visit in the US is air conditioned and European countries generally don't allow air conditioning. 

There were stories of power consumption limits in Europe such that if you had an air conditioner, you couldn't set it to cool below 80 degrees F (which probably isn't correct since there's no Celsius or Centigrade two digit temperature that's exactly 80) but the story brings many things I've read over the years. And there were worse stories, of people who were literally made sick from the heat exposure and got in trouble with the law for running an A/C. 

Like most of the people who grew up in the '50s through the '60s, we didn't have central air conditioning in the homes I lived in while growing up. We were fairly early adopters of window unit conditioners because my dad worked on the night shift (US Post Office) so he would get home at around 4AM and needed to sleep until midday. If you've worked night shifts, you'll know that the world gets much noisier as the day gets going, and his answer was to get a window unit A/C that would let him sleep better and longer. A year or two later, older brother got the next A/C in the house and for a couple of years, we'd move my bed into his bedroom so I could get the cooler air, too. That was only over the summer. I think I got a bedroom window unit the year I turned 13. That house never had central air, but they bought a large window unit for the living room and main living area of the house. 

School wasn't air conditioned until I started high school in the '69/'70 school year. I rode school buses and they were never air conditioned. Walking home from school in whatever the weather was is hardly worth noting as part of life. 

The part of the European Tourist videos that resonated the most with me was their surprise at finding air conditioning everywhere. This morning, I watched this video linked from over at Virtual Mirage. The theme of the video is how of all the things we talk about being thankful for, air conditioning is hardly mentioned. It works and works so well that we absolutely assume it will always be there.  

I've long thought that a technologically advanced civilization couldn't exist without air conditioning. Things like temperature and humidity control that allow even relatively simple technologies to flourish are one thing, but the usefulness for keeping hundreds of people comfortable in an office building could be the biggest advantage. 

Perhaps more than any other group, I think engineers will understand that I think we should propose a holiday be created to celebrate the life of Willis Carrier, the engineer who invented the modern air conditioner in 1902. Carrier was asked to create a way to fix a problem in the emerging printing industry. The printing of four color images required four different printing passes, printing with four different base colors. Because temperature and humidity couldn't be controlled, the paper could shrink or expand enough to ruin the pictures. 

Willis Carrier in 1915 - Image Credit Wikipedia

Carrier was put in a situation when the employer he stayed with after inventing the A/C changed their operating mode because of World War I. Seven young engineers pooled together their life savings of $32,600 to form the Carrier Engineering Corporation in New York on June 26, 1915. I think the modern air conditioner company would love a holiday named after Willis, and that's my only second thought in this modest proposal. While I like "Willis Carrier Day" as the name, perhaps Father of A/C Day would be better. I suggest that we pick a day close to what people regard as the first day of summer, near June 1st. When you start your air conditioner for the summer, honor the Father of the Air Conditioner. His birthday, November 26, is a day when Floridians may be the only people who would think of Willis. 

Those Pico Balloons Again

I can sense the "what are you talking about?" questions in the air. 

Three years ago in February, after the headline Chinese Balloon Incident, I started looking into the responses, starting from the question, "Did The USAF Shoot Down a Ham Radio Balloon?" and first encountered the idea of hobbyists that made small or downright tiny balloons that they'd let ascend into the atmosphere and transmit a low power signal with some information that could be monitored wherever they happened to be. It eventually turned into a fairly long introduction to the topic of hobby balloons that go around the world. 

Again, that was over three years ago, and groups like the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade are still online, and growing. 

Earlier in the week, I came across an article on one of the forums I read where a guy, working on his own, had found a way to get a very lightweight balloon into the upper atmosphere - above most airline traffic - and it made me want to do a post about what he did. Maybe to encourage you, or maybe to encourage me. Let me show a map he posted showing the travels of his cheap little balloon. 

What I really want to show about this is the information in the upper left hand corner. I'll enlarge it, and add it here. 

While the big picture shows what appears to be around 3 laps, this says 3.821 laps - and much more impressive to me: 68 days and 8 hours floating around the world. Just above the bottom of the summary, it says the last altitude was 13.70 km - which converts to just under 45,000 feet: 44,948.

Now here's the embarrassing part. I dutifully saved this image but I apparently didn't leave myself a link to the source where he shows off the heart of the balloon, a folded piece of paper with a few solar cells to power it, and a few small printed circuit boards. They look professionally done, not hobbyist level, and that's telling me that they're probably among the many professionally designed and produced boards used by hobbyists for many things that the developers never dreamed of people doing. Which means I can't say "just do this" and you can launch your own pico-balloon.

I'll keep looking for that, and hope to be able to round it up soon. 

The Ham Radio Series 41 - Ham Radio in the Information Age - Part II

For reference, part 1 was November 12, and I would have sworn it was a couple of weeks ago, not five weeks. 

The theme there was using modern tech to replace time sitting in the chair in front of the radio, listening and watching.  Reduce the hours of BIC time (Butt In Chair) you spend.  In particular, I talked about a web site and phone app called Ham Alert and had an example of how it had worked for me within a matter of days.  

Briefly, the way I set up the "trigger" it used to alert me was that on 6 meters (the 50 MHz ham band), if someone in Florida reports hearing or the software running in their station decodes and reports a station in Hawaii or Alaska, it should let me know.  Your station can generally be configured to report what it decodes (in the digital modes) so that it's possible your station could decode the one you're trying for but it goes through a handful of internet hops along the way.  For example, my station reports what it decodes to PSKReporter without me having to do anything.  It's a setting in the digital mode software called WSJT-X - there's more info on both WSJT-X and PSKReporter in a more detailed article from '22.

At the moment, I have PSKReporter showing a map of everything my station has reported hearing in the last 6 hours, during which the radio was on two different bands, 15 and 12 meters.

The red dots are 12m and the other color are 15m.  At a glance, you can see the 15m dots include locations farther away. 

My emphasis tonight, though, isn't PSKReporter, it's a more direct way of getting your station to alert you if some state, or country or whatever condition you're going after is being heard by your station while you're not sitting BIC in front of the radio. It's called JTAlert, where JT comes from the weak signal mode software called WSJT-X. The main difference between HamAlert and JTAlert is that JTAlert just monitors your station.  The advantage there is you know the desired station is being heard where you are.  The immediate disadvantage is that if your radio is off, like mine was when I got that HamAlert message that someone in Florida was hearing Hawaii, you'll get no alert.  You need to have your station powered on all day everyday, whether you're in it or not

Like HamAlert, JTAlert can be configured to alert you via a message to your phone;  HamAlert requires a 3rd party app to send texts to you but will activate the phone app in your name and send an alert tone.  JTAlert by default will play a sound through your computer sound system - which doesn't do you much good if you're not in front of the computer, and there is no equivalent app. 

I hesitate to say much more other than recommend perhaps watching some YouTube videos or doing some web searches.  For both Ham and JT alert, there are many configuration options that reflect your personal taste in how you like it set up, not to mention that the things you want to be alerted to or track are going to be different.

I'm Partying Like It's 2019

Not really partying.  How about working like it's 2019?  Sweating like it's 2019?  

That's too obscure.  Allow me to explain.  

At the end of November in '19, Mrs. Graybeard and I replaced the two computers we use every day with new ones.  The main reason was that her computer was dying after the nearby lightning strike we had in August that damaged a lot of stuff in the house - the few things that weren't surge protected.  The computer power supplies were plugged into a surge-protected strip but lightning got into her system by one of those things that appear purely random.  The length and position of the things like the video monitor cables or the Ethernet cables to the network hub. Her computer was dying a little more day by day.  Slowly at first, then faster.  It had to be replaced.

The work in "working like it's 2019" was migrating to our current computers.  Migrating to a new computer is always a tedious if not outright painful process.

For the last few weeks I've been working to start migrating my ham shack computer to a newer box, hopefully for improvements in speed and ability.  For perspective, the machine in the ham shack is a Dell Precision T3500 Workstation and I had one of those on my desk for running design software back around 2010 or '11.  I think the 2019 machine I'm typing on now is faster than the "high performance workstation" from a decade before.  I'm trying to switch to a machine that I hope to be faster than this one.  Without breaking the bank. 

Over the years, many things I do in my station have come to rely on the computer and I see what I believe to be indications of the T3500 being overloaded.  

I went looking for a used/refurbished computer.  This computer uses an Intel multicore processor called a Core i7-9700.  The i7 is the "generation" of the processor, the 9 is the revision level of the hardware, and in both cases a rough rule is, the higher the better.  I honestly don't know what the 700 means but I've looked it up before and didn't lodge any "get this, not that" rule to keep in mind while looking.  Besides there are look-ups to help decipher this code.   

I've been shopping for a Core i7-10700, FWIW.  There are stories down that road, but I'll leave them for another time.

Why do I want a faster machine?  I want to be able to do something like this:

This is a piece of software called SDR Console (or SDRC).  What it's doing there is running seven simultaneous receivers in one ham band (6m).  It allows you to monitor more than just one frequency or mode, which is what virtually all the ham transceivers on the market allow.  In voice or Morse code, you are the demodulator.  With this software, you can monitor a different mode in each of those windows and run more copies of the demodulation software.  Maybe old fashioned CW in one, Radio Teletype (RTTY), or SSB voice in another, as well as the "new hotness" of FT8, FT4 and other error correcting modes.  

Again, why?  Because it's cool.

The Ham Radio Series 40 - Ham Radio in the Information Age

If you're one of the many who think of ham radio only in terms of communications after a SHTF event, you can skip this.  It has to do with features that aren't likely to be available in those days, but is more for people who "play on the radio" now, to varying degrees.

"Playing" maybe not in the sense of chatting on the local VHF/UHF repeaters on the way to and from work, but more for people who pursue the Summits On The Air (SOTA) or the Parks On The Air (POTA), two of the more active and more popular special event or special operation activities around today.  Or maybe folks operating QRP (low power) or perhaps chasing some operating achievement, like Worked All States (WAS) or the thousands of other pieces of "Wallpaper" one can strive for.  

Among the most popular pieces of wallpaper that people pursue is one from the American Radio Relay League, called the DX Century Club, and the first level of that award is for proof of successful two way contact with 100 of the league's recognized countries.  One of my first few posts in the blog history was about getting one of those pieces of wallpaper that I called my Lifetime Achievement Award in ham radio, proof of contact with (always referred to as "working") at least 100 recognized countries on five ham radio bands - what's called 5BDXCC.  Now, 13 years later, I've added another three bands up to 8BDXCC and I'm more than halfway to my ninth band. 

When you're striving for these awards for a certain number of confirmed contacts, whether SOTA, POTA, WAS, or whatever, you need to be aware of who's on the air and which entities you need.  A classic information problem.  Back in the second half of the 1970s when I was getting started, sometimes a group of guys would put up a 2m repeater and tell each other what they were hearing.  Broadcasting wouldn't be legal, so they wouldn't (usually!) say "Hey everybody, I hear Albania on 7.020 MHz CW, listening up 2;" they'd call each other and act like they were just keeping in touch.  More like, "W4ABC this is W4CDE.  I hear ZA1TTM on 7.020.  Do you hear him?" 

This was before home computers existed, well, maybe in the very earliest days of them, so no BBSes and decades before the Internet.  Now with the vast majority of us carrying a computer with us that would have been unimaginably powerful in the late '70s, it's natural to use them to our advantage.  The old standby that "the three most important things are to listen, listen and listen" is still there, but what if you didn't have do all that listening with your butt in your chair in front of the radio?  What if you could be notified that someone near you was hearing the station you'd like to work without actually having them call you on the phone, but send an alert to your phone?  Or what if you could pipe audio from your receiver to another place in the house?  That way, your butt only needs to be in that chair when you're trying to work that station. To take it a logical step farther, let's say you're trying for some particular state or other identifier that only happens rarely or that you've never heard.  You could turn the radio on but you could just be notified while you're doing some other thing that needs to be done.  Minimize your BIC (Butt In Chair) time in front of the radio.

Let me give an example that happened to me in the last week.  There's an application (also available as a website) called HamAlert.  Totally free to use.  HamAlert allows you to set various triggers that define when the program will send you a notice.  You can set it up to send a text message to your phone or the app itself on your phone.  The latest wallpaper I'm working toward is centered on the six meter ham band and the only trigger I've defined is for the last two states I need for WAS, Alaska and Hawaii.  The way the alert works is their software combs many of websites where this sort of contact gets reported, and you tell it what condition you want to be notified of when it happens.  In my case, I chose to be notified if anyone in Florida reports hearing either state. 

Screen capture of my only working trigger.

A week ago, while reading the Sunday comics online, I heard an unusual tone from my phone and when I looked down, I saw a report from HamAlert about a guy in Miami hearing Hawaii.  I don't have the specifics on the guy who reported it, but Miami is around 175 miles south of me.  It seemed unlikely I'd be able to hear the Hawaiian but I went back to the radio, turned it on and there he was.  He was using FT8 mode, which I use regularly, and while he wasn't the only station I heard on the band, there might have been two or three other stations I could hear, all in Florida.  I got the Hawaiian on my second or third call.  Today, I found that he confirmed by ARRL's online QSL method LOTW (Logbook Of The World).  I had sent him a paper card and Self Addressed Stamped Envelope last week. 

In my roughly 20 years playing on 6m, I've never even heard Hawaii, and I wouldn't have gone into the shack without that alert.  This is a multifaceted topic and far too much for a single blog post, so I plan to do "the next few" posts on quiet days on this subject.  I'm not extremely far down this road myself; I've done more in the last two months than before. 

Probably the Weirdest Email of My Life

This afternoon, I got what must have been the weirdest email of my life. Certainly of this blog's life.  It was from Blogger itself: 

Your post titled "Eliminating the Legislative Branch" was flagged to us for review. This post was put behind a warning for readers because it contains sensitive content; the post is visible at:

http://thesilicongraybeard.blogspot.com/2012/01/eliminating-legislative-branch.html

Your blog readers must acknowledge the warning before being able to read the post/blog.

The post is dated January 7, 2012 and talks about the President (Bamster) going around the law to appoint someone to the newly organized (back then) Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  While a bit snarky, I think it was fairly even-handed.  I made fun of both W's and Bamster's administrations doing the same basic thing: pushing through an appointment for a position that requires senate approval by waiting until the senate wasn't in session so they could just appoint them. 

I'll bet that post has had more reads today than at any time in the intervening 11 years since I posted it, when it combines me testing it at least twice and then having the diminutive but deadly Mrs. Graybeard test it as well.  

I can't imagine what could be "sensitive content" about it, but I have a hard time believing that someone stumbled across it while blog surfing and complained about an over 11 year old post.  There is nothing in their email about disagreeing with them, just what to do when you fix it, but since they never told me what was wrong with it, that's pointless.  Although it's hard to be more pointless than an 11 year old blog post about something that was a minor news story back then. 

---

Two weekends ago, I wrote about trying to resurrect an 11 year old PC to take the place of a newer but lower performance PC I use to run a few things in the shop. Since I'm here, let me do a little update to that. 

By the time I posted that, I had gotten it to boot to Win7, but even the simplest things were exasperating.  I'd tell it to uninstall a program, or simply delete a file from a junk directory, and it would just sit there spinning one of it's "processing... processing..." indicators for minutes.  Digging through old DVDs, I found everything that came with this old Dell including some diagnostics and tried to run them.  Originally, it would halt with an error saying something like it couldn't verify it was a Dell PC so it couldn't verify the tests would work and then abort. That took a couple of days to find a way around.  

I gradually improved things, but every time I tried to run a functional test, it couldn't complete testing the older magnetic hard drive.  It didn't fail it, it just never completed the test.  It would get to some block of memory addresses and say the drive didn't provide an Interrupt Request (IRQ) reply fast enough.  Then it would put up a box asking quit or keep testing.  I quit the test several times, and then last Sunday decided to keep hitting Y, telling it to resume testing, thinking maybe it's just one or two bad addresses and after a few minutes, I'd have a list of the bad ones.

That's when I found out it would sit there (doing something or nothing) for up to 10 minutes before starting to retest, and then give me the same question with a different address being bad within a second.  I literally spent 90 minutes waiting for those "Continue (Y)es or (N)o?" prompts.  The kicker is that I could go to the Command line (i.e., DOS) and run the old CHKDSK utility.  That said the HD passed.

I concluded the HD was probably bad.  It's from 2011, after all, and 12 years out of a hard drive is really not that bad.  I looked around the house but couldn't find another drive I could test in its place and after days of debating whether to buy a used drive from eBay, get something newer, or just can the whole thing, went with the second option.  

That drive got here this afternoon, so I plan to try to get that swapped out tomorrow.  And if it doesn't get that computer working, this computer gets another hard drive.

Weekly Small Space News Story Roundup 5

As always, a handful of stories that caught my eye but I don't have a page worth to say about them. 

Rocket Lab resumes booster recovery work

On Friday the 24th, Rocket Lab launched two BlackSky optical Earth-imaging satellites from their facility on the north island of New Zealand.  Instead of attempting helicopter recovery of the returning booster by grappling it with a helicopter, they allowed the booster to fall into the Pacific.  It's part of a longer term study comparing results of helicopter recovery vs. allowing it to be immersed in saltwater and then cleaned out. 

The booster was expected to reach a top speed of 5,150 mph (8,300 kilometers per hour). Aerodynamic drag slowed the rocket’s velocity as external temperatures built up to 4,350 degrees Fahrenheit (2,400 degrees Celsius). Then a drogue chute and main chute deployed to slow the booster’s descent for splashdown. Rocket Lab confirmed the booster reached the Pacific Ocean as intended.

Rocket Lab has recovered six Electron boosters since the first try in November 2020. Four were intentionally recovered from the ocean, and two involved a helicopter catch attempt. The company originally aimed to catch boosters with the helicopter to prevent corrosion on the rocket’s engines and avionics from sea water.

Murielle Baker, a Rocket Lab spokesperson, said “It turns out Electron survives a swim in the ocean well enough that many of its components actually pass re-qualification for flight, so for this mission we are putting the theory to the test of whether we need a helicopter at all.”  Part of the experiment will have the recovery ship flush critical parts of the booster, such as its Rutherford engines, with fresh water to get the salt out of areas most susceptible to the damage.  

Once the booster is back at Rocket Lab’s Auckland factory, the company will disassemble and inspect the nine main engines and remove avionics for examination and re-testing. Rocket Lab has already hot-fired a Rutherford engine recovered from an Electron flight and found it passed all tests to fly again.

In the longer term, they're studying what can or should be redesigned to make it more tolerant of the saltwater environment.

ULA's Centaur Upper Stage has an anomaly during mechanical testing

In Tweet dated Wednesday, ULA CEO Tory Bruno relayed that the Vulcan's upper stage suffered "an anomaly" without specifically saying what happened.

When asked for more details, such as what sort of test it was undergoing, he simply said, “Extreme structural load testing of various worst possible conditions” and added in another tweet that this was "very unlikely" to have implications for the Centaur to be used for Vulcan's debut flight.  Considering the flight is penciled in for No Earlier Than May 4, less than five weeks from today, most anything would affect that unless it was clearly some error in the testing or setup that didn't damage the Centaur V.

Remember the infinite improbability drive?  

Meet GigaGalactic Rockets, a company that states, "our mission is to make the galaxy accessible to all. We envision a future where space travel is as commonplace as air travel, and where people can explore the cosmos freely and without limitations." 

To do that, they are working on creating the GigaGalactic Improbability Drive (GGID), a concept first popularized by space travel theorist Douglas Adams.  Essentially, if you examine the probabilities of being anywhere in the universe, there are only two places you can assign the probability of being.  The probability of being where you are is 1.0.  Conversely, the least likely place you could be is the place you want to go because if you were there, you wouldn't want to go there.  While practically you may not want to go anywhere else, there's a very large number of places with very low probability you'd want to be.  The probability of being where you want to go is 0.0.  If it could be done this simply, you could feed the probabilities of every location in the universe into an inverter making the highest probability being where you want to go.  By using quantum observation principles and manipulating probabilities you're virtually certain to get where you want to go, although you might be a different species when you get there.  

Briefly, their GGID works this way:

• The drive calculates the improbability of a spacecraft reaching a desired destination and then inverts it, making the highly improbable event highly probable.
• The heart of the GGID is the Improbability Field Generator (IFG), a device that creates a localized field of improbability around the spacecraft. The IFG utilizes a mixture of quantum entanglement, zero-point energy, and finely tuned Heisenberg Compensators to manipulate the probability of specific outcomes.
• Central to the GGID is the Infinite Improbability Matrix (IIM), a complex computational system designed to calculate the exact improbability of a given event. The IIM factors in variables such as spatial coordinates, velocity, mass, and even the current emotional state of any sentient beings on board. The IIM integrates high-level quantum computing and probabilistic algorithms to determine the improbability factors required for instantaneous travel.
• Once the IIM has calculated the precise improbability factors, the Probability Inversion Mechanism (PIM) comes into play. Utilizing advanced probability manipulation techniques, the PIM inverts the improbability factors, effectively transforming the highly improbable event (arriving at the destination instantaneously) into a highly probable one.

Resurrection Weekend

No, not that resurrection.  That resurrection weekend is still two weeks away.  This was about as far from that as one can get. 

Back in '18, I needed a little computer that could run my Computerized Battery Analyzer (CBA-IV) and since the native software is Windows, ended up buying a small computer probably more intended for running an audio-visual setup of some kind, called a NUC, made by Intel.  It was fine for that, but it's a Windows 10 box (pretty sure it was my first introduction to Win 10) and like all Windows versions, it slows down over time as the OS gets more bloated.  As I wrote about in July '21, when I told the story of getting 3D Printer control program called Pronterface running:

To make the long story short it took a couple of days to get that to work.  Hours upon hours of those days were waiting for Windows to stop doing shit so I could do what I wanted to.  With machines that aren't on regularly, Windoze 10 is a giant Pain In The Ass - calling home and tying up the machine literally for hours over my WiFi network.

This is a computer I run maybe every few months for a day or two or maybe less than that.  Like all Windows10 computers I've seen, there's no place to tell it that I don't want it to play music files, or show me videos.  I want it to run my battery analyzer or talk to my printer interactively.  Still, every time I turn it on, it has to go look for security updates, and if I have a battery to test that I think is going to run for hours, I need to turn the NUC on two hours before I can start.  And every few cycles of that, I have to sit around and tell it, no I don't want to pay for your cloud storage, I don't want to sync my Android phone because I don't even have one, I don't want your browser because this little machine doesn't need to have a browser on it, and a bunch more crap.

Plus it does other things I personally find annoying, like changing my desktop picture to something I have on one of my other computers.  Doesn't anybody at Microsoft who designs this software think that a user might have more than one picture they want on their computers?  And they might not want them all to look the same?  How about interacting with software like, "when I want it to do something, I'll ask?"

As a result, I got pretty tired of putting up with the NUC and realized I still have the computer that used to be my desktop here, that was replaced in November of '19.  The NUC is on top of the older Dell desktop.

Resurrecting that computer and getting it to run the way it should has been the big job this weekend.  I can't say I'm done, yet.  The biggest problem was that the little CR2032 battery used to backup the clock (and whatever else) had died and getting it to even boot up took most of yesterday.  Since it's a Win 7 machine, long out of support, I don't want it going out on the network.  There are no updates for it to go find and install, so no need for WiFi to be on.  That might be part of what's slowing it down, but I really don't want it calling home all day long to check on something. 

It still takes it far too long to do simple tasks like uninstalling a file, and I'm troubleshooting that.   The root problem, though, is that I haven't had to do anything like this in years, and it has been longer since I had to work on a Win 7 machine.  The other Win 7 computer I have (runs the CNC mills and lathe) has been off the network since Win 7 went away.  It does what I need, when I need it to, every time I turn it on.

Why Would Any Country Want a Balloon Now?

Today, the US apparently shot down another ... something ... over the north Alaska/Western Canada region.  What's going on?  Is this something new?  More to the point, in this era of spy satellites that can read the license plates on cars from orbit, or listen to small radios like your cell phones, why would anyone go to balloons and other low-tech things like that?  

From my perspective, the answer is a simple truism I've quoted many times: physics is a bitch.  There is nothing that a spy satellite can do that a drone or balloon or something in the atmosphere can't do better for a tiny fraction of the price.  Put another way, any instrument that could be used on a satellite can be made smaller, lighter and cheaper, while returning better quality observations if it can fly at airplane altitudes.  

It's difficult for me to put actual numbers here for a few reasons, but the trends that are important are easy to spot and describe.  Let's start with optical resolution, the ability for that telescope looking down to resolve two objects.  The distance they're apart as an angle can be calculated by the separation you want to resolve and the distance to the magnifying optic (mirror, almost without exception).  The resolution angle you want is given (in radians) by the separation you want resolve divided by the distance from the optic, 

Let's say you want to read letters 2" square from 400 miles - about the altitude of the Hubble Space Telescope's orbit. That's an angle of 2" divided the number of inches in 400 miles, or 2/25,344,000 (inches cancel) or 78.9 nanoradians (78.9*10^-9 radians).  Which works out to be 0.0163 arcseconds.  

The required telescope diameter to achieve that sort of resolution is big.  Probably too big for a spy satellite.  You can calculate how big by using information like this:

Lambda is the wavelength of light, and a commonly used value here is 550 nanometers, the color of a nice blue green light.  It turns out that using the equation on the left, the size mirror to resolve two inches is 8.544 meters diameter.  That's a big telescope; 336 inches diameter.  Until fairly recently, that would have been the largest telescope in the world. 

If we reduce the height from 400 miles to balloon height, let's say 11 miles (close to that 60,000 foot level we read about last week).  That shrinks the telescope to a 9.2" aperture, taking it from among the largest in the world to something like this that hundreds or thousands of amateur astronomers own.  

Another way of saying all this is that any telescope will out perform the same size in an orbiting satellite by the ratio of their heights.  400/11 miles is 36.3636.  Divide that 336" scope derived for 400 miles by that 36.3636 and get 9.24".  

The argument for smaller telescopes is pretty strong.  Or even a fleet of smaller telescopes that can be deployed and recovered after their missions.   

A similar kind of argument can be made for radio monitoring and any system that you put up being made more sensitive by being at a lower altitude.  A commonly used relationship for calculating free space path loss uses the expression:

dB = 37 dB + 20log(f) + 20log(d)

Here, f is the frequency in MHz and d is the distance in miles.  Since we don't know a frequency, let's just pick the same for both, I'll use 1000 MHz, and calculate for 400 and 11 miles.

For 400 miles, loss is 149 dB. 
For 11 miles, loss is 118 dB.

Antenna gain is easy compared to optical, but that difference of about 30 dB more sensitive means about 1000 times more sensitive.  Again, it seems like an obvious conclusion that the lower radio can outperform anything in orbit.  The satellite might be able to compensate for that 31 dB greater losses to orbit with a bigger/better antenna, but gain like that definitely can cost.

Junk Science Again: This Time, Gas Stoves

There was an attempt to run the news cycle that started early this week with an attack on gas stoves.  It didn't seem to go as well as they wanted, but it could just be the early stages.  The immediate reactions, including memes and bumper sticker sayings and so on may have been more counter than they expected and it may have been exactly what they wanted; not being insiders we can never know.  

What we can know is that this is the level of so-called science that makes "climate change" seem as well-established as knowing when we drop something it'll fall.  

To begin with, this is not a new idea or a new discovery.  The article it was based on may have been a recent publication but the idea has been floated around for a while and just isn't that good.  To begin with I'm going to copy the abstract from that published article and point out some things. 

Indoor gas stove use for cooking is associated with an increased risk of current asthma among children and is prevalent in 35% of households in the United States (US). The population-level implications of gas cooking are largely unrecognized. We quantified the population attributable fraction (PAF) for gas stove use and current childhood asthma in the US. Effect sizes previously reported by meta-analyses for current asthma (Odds Ratio = 1.34, 95% Confidence Interval (CI) = 1.12–1.57) were utilized in the PAF estimations. The proportion of children (<18 years old) exposed to gas stoves was obtained from the American Housing Survey for the US, and states with available data (n = 9). We found that 12.7% (95% CI = 6.3–19.3%) of current childhood asthma in the US is attributable to gas stove use. The proportion of childhood asthma that could be theoretically prevented if gas stove use was not present (e.g., state-specific PAFs) varied by state (Illinois = 21.1%; California = 20.1%; New York = 18.8%; Massachusetts = 15.4%; Pennsylvania = 13.5%).

As always, this is based on an observation and correlation study, not a study in which every possible variable was controlled for except the one being studied and people were assigned at random to the experimental or control groups who had no way of knowing which group they were in.  That sort of test is very hard and expensive to do, as well as potentially being illegal or immoral, since you're doing something to people that you think could hurt them.  

The yellow highlighted word is very important. A meta-analysis (singular) is when a group of studies are combined to enlarge the data set.  The way this is worded implies this is a meta-analysis of a group of existing meta-analyses (plural).  That means that without extraordinary effort to ensure the studies are as identical as possible; not just that they studied the same thing but that the populations being studied were as similar as possible.  In turn, that means an increase in the chance of having some outcome could have as much to do with variations in the populations, locations, or any other uncontrolled variable as the presence of the thing they're correlating to.  They conclude, for example, " We found that 12.7% of current childhood asthma in the US is attributable to gas stove use."  In a meta-analysis of meta-analyses that's pretty much meaningless.  

When I took statistics, we were taught that a meta-analysis was typically less reliable than any one of the studies it was based on because it’s generally all but impossible to determine how well those groups compare on the countless other confounding factors.  I consider what this story is based on to be insignificant findings, regardless of their P value. I ignore those studies until the relative risk gets into the "more than twice as likely" range, that is, instead of this 1.127 risk ratio, it should be over 2.00. 

But it's even worse than that.  

About a year ago, a similar attempt to get people to dump their gas stoves was run, and was written about on Watts Up With That.  There were things in the study that really stood out as bad ways to do a study like this. 

Meanwhile, another expert told a different media outlet that the researchers had encased the kitchens in a Mylar tent to “trap and concentrate the emissions, and then measure the concentration.” No one cooks in a kitchen like that! He said it would “incorrect” to draw any health conclusions from the paper.

From Michael P. Ramirez.com 

As always when this sort of subject is talked about, there's no mention of the fact that if you have an electric stove it's very likely to be gas-powered, or even coal-powered. It's just that the gas isn't in your home, it's "far away" so it's different; they'll worry about that gas causing asthma next week. In reality, the truth is that they're just trying to get rid of natural gas power for anything anywhere.

No, The Climate Change Allegations Have No Basis in Fact

If there's one thing I see over and over looking at published "science" stories in the news is confounding causation with correlations.  Pardon if I sound like a broken record, but correlation is not proof of causation.  Yes it's true (and obviously so) that if two things aren't correlated there can be no link to causation, but the leap from correlation to causation is an extremely large jump to make.  I've written about spurious correlations many times, like this post, with a great table of spurious correlations from Five Thirty Eight.  

Look at the table above; I don't think anyone thinks eating egg rolls causes people to buy a dog, or that eating a fried, breaded fish causes someone to become a Democrat, but the correlation is there to a "Wee P" value as William Briggs likes to say.  The last one is the most absurd; could anyone honestly believe that eating cabbage could turn an outie bellybutton to an innie?  It clearly meets the Wee P value test, which ordinarily set to say if p < 0.05 it's a good correlation, not a random event.

Where I'm going with this is the never ending series of articles we see that link "climate change" (or whatever they're calling it this week) to bad things.  Weather has stopped happening; there's no such thing as a "colder than usual" cold snap like we just had, or a drier season that we might want to have to water our gardens for us; it's all a harbinger of what climate change is going to bring.  

Let's assume that there really is global warming for a moment (and I think the hard evidence of that is pretty sparse and low quality).  Further, let's say it has been going on since the beginning of the industrial age as some warmunistas argue.  That means that every trend in the world since the beginning of the industrial age correlates with climate change.  Every.  Single.  Thing.   Places that have gotten colder, places that have gotten hotter, people getting taller, or heavier; every single trend whether good or bad that doesn't look like random noise correlates with climate change.  

The inspiration for harping on this comes from a paper (pdf, but short at 4 pages) published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), the Heartland Institute, Energy & Environment Legal Institute, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), and the International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC), in response to an observation that the climate alarmist organizations are donating money to news organizations to emphasize their viewpoint.  

Associated Press reporter Seth Borenstein, for example in his recent article “New abnormal: Climate disaster damage ‘down’ to $268 billion,” reported this about the estimated costs of damage due to climate change during 2022:

“This past year has seen a horrific flood that submerged one-third of Pakistan, one of the three costliest U.S. hurricanes on record, devastating droughts in Europe and China, a drought-triggered famine in Africa and deadly heat waves all over.... Weather disasters, many but not all of them turbocharged by human-caused climate change, are happening so frequently that this year’s onslaught, which 20 years ago would have smashed records by far, now in some financial measures seems a bit of a break from recent years.”

The paper then goes on to cover nine headlines, starting out with the floods in Pakistan, Hurricane Ian, and the rest.  All of them are in the realm of normal weather.  We talked about Hurricane Ian here, and how it was an outlier in a relatively inactive season.  The Accumulated Cyclone Energy, a product of strength of the storms and the amount of time they existed, was about 75% of a typical season.  The Atlantic basin produced zero named storms between July 3 and August 31. That was the first time since 1941 that the Atlantic had no named storm activity during this period. The researchers at NOAA and other agencies have looked into the connection between climate change and hurricane frequency or intensity and have steadfastly said there is none.

Last words to the quoted paper:

Regardless of one’s view of what passes as “climate science,” the good news is that even researchers who believe that “climate change” is a problem acknowledge that the number of weather-related deaths and the cost of weather-related damage are actually on the decline – despite ever-increasing emissions and whatever slight warming may be occurring.

 

 

Artemis/SLS Flies!

Many of us had doubts this day would come this soon, but this morning at 1:47 AM EST Artemis lifted off from complex 39B at the Kennedy Space Center and cruised into orbit as though it was a routine mission.  As it basically should have, since the differences between this and other ABF hardware (Already Been Flown) are so small.  In fact, these four RS-25 engines on the SLS Core are all ABF hardware.  All flew on previous Space Shuttle missions.  The least-used of these four flew three prior missions; the most "experienced" flew 12 space shuttle missions.  (From a graphic here)

Space.com put up a video which is a bit long at just over 11 minutes, but it's better to watch in full screen mode.  By a bit long I mean it starts about two minutes before ignition and the core stage is essentially invisible by the 5:10 mark, meaning there's about three minutes of eye candy in there.  

From the backyard here it was quite a sight.  As ignition and liftoff took place the northern horizon was so bright I had afterimages for several minutes; I even saw them when we came inside about eight minutes later.  Not as bright as sunrise, but the brightest rocket I've seen in a long time.  Correction, the brightest I've ever seen because that would have been in the Shuttle era and SLS produces more thrust than the shuttle.  We had clear views of SLS from the time it cleared the horizon until well after the solids dropped and it was starting to go behind the houses across the street to the east.  During the last Falcon 9 launch, by contrast, there were two clouds in the sky and the rocket stayed behind one after the other for all but about 10 seconds. 

I'm going to take the day to both thank and appreciate the people who actually put the ball through the hoop on this one - and those whose work just got started for the mission that's just getting started.  It was a long, difficult job for the people on the pad, the people working on the hardware, software, and everyone who touched the thing.  At the conclusion of the launch control coverage last night, Artemis Launch Director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson gave everyone thanks and encouragement for doing the long, hard jobs.  It was well-said. 

"This is your moment," she said. "We are all part of something incredibly special: The first launch of Artemis, the first step in returning our country to the moon and on to Mars. What you have done today will inspire generations to come."

I was a bit surprised to hear the commentators on NASASpaceflight.com saying much the same, that finally their generation has a rocket to be proud of; a way to the moon (more or less) that hasn't existed in 50 years.  

Lots of good perspective at Space.com and Ars Technica.  

James Webb Telescope Uses a Comically Small Solid State Drive

Do you have a 64 gig USB storage device hanging around; that is, a 64 GB thumbdrive?  You have just a little bit smaller solid state drive than the $10 Billion James Webb Space Telescope, which uses a 68 GB SSD.  That drive holds roughly one day's worth of images and is cycled through daily.

IEEE Spectrum reports Webb generates about 57GB of data each day. In comparison, Hubble generates about 1 to 2GB of daily data. Webb reserves 3 percent of its 68GB SSD for engineering and telemetry data. Scientific data that Webb collects during its mission will also need to be stored on board, as the telescope doesn't maintain constant communication with Earth. However, before the drive fills, which takes about 24 hours, Webb will beam data back to Earth during a pair of four-hour contact windows each day.

Data transmission is a critical component of the Webb mission and has been carefully studied and planned for decades. The telescope is about 1.5 million km (932,000 mi) from Earth at Lagrange point L2. That's a long way to send data. Webb is the first mission to use Ka-band frequencies to send its relatively high amount of data. Specifically, IEEE Spectrum notes that the JWST is transmitting data on a 25.9GHz channel at up to 28Mb/second (0.0035GB/sec). That works out to about 12.6GB per hour.

I've got to say that I was annoyed initially by the statement that the downlink issues had been studied and planned "for decades" but then realized it was correct.  The program planning began in 1997, more than two decades ago, so it's correct.  The originally planned launch date was 2007.  More details on how the schedule slipped over the years is here. 

My home turf is radio design, so moving over to that I read that the images are sent over a 25.9 GHz Ka-band channel, (pronounced as the letters K and A separately not as "Kah" or "Kay") chosen for its higher available data rates, which translates to higher bandwidths.  There was a design trade of using a more established band, like X-band (7-11.2 GHz) instead of Ka.  For the required antenna gain to get the needed transmitter data rates (bandwidths) required an antenna that was physically larger, and they concluded it was too big for the optical designers to be comfortable around it.  That 12.6 GB/hour rate that IEEE spectrum reports means that the day's 57 GB of image data takes around 4-1/2 hours to transmit.

There are other channels used for technical data exchanges.  Those are in S-band, where many spacecraft operate.  An uplink (ground to Webb) at 2.09GHz transmits observation schedules at about 16Kb/s.  Webb "talks back" (downlinks) at 2.27GHz at 40kb/s.  This is where Webb transmits engineering data, including operational status and system health.

The JWST image released on the 12th of Stephan's Quintet, a famous grouping of five galaxies about 290 million light-years away in the Pegasus constellation. The compact galaxy group was discovered way back in 1787.   Yes, it's five not four - the one in middle, slightly lower right element of an obvious trio, is really two galaxies, NGC7318 A and B.  If you think you've seen it before (and you're not an amateur astronomer) you might remember it from the Christmas classic movie, It's A Wonderful Life.

You might be asking why 68 GB?  That would require access to program records to answer, but my guess is it's really something like a 128 GB drive or bigger that's radiation-hardened and not the consumer-level drives we're used to.  They're expecting Webb to last for 20 years instead of the originally-intended 10, so that drive needs to be more robust and withstand cycling better than the typical ones.  The "brute strength and awkwardness" approach to withstanding cycling better is simply to have tons more memory locations than its rating. 

First Virtual Reality Headset to Include Smells Coming

Human Factors engineers have been working since the onset of the Covid-19 lockdowns, and remote working via Zoom (and other software), to understand why productivity from home has not kept track with productivity at the office.  Maybe their explanation didn't surprise them or won't surprise you, but it sure surprised me; what's missing is the smells of the office.  They don't have detailed lists of the smells, but it could include the mix of perfumes with different coffees, or maybe the mix of lunches in the break room microwave oven (we used to call that "mullet in the microwave" back in the old days).  

It turns out that the virtue reality/augmented reality and metaverse industry was already pursuing the idea of digitally synthesized odors (DSOs) to bring a new dimension of realism.  Imagine playing a video game in which you can smell an attacker sneaking up behind you; or adding odors to a completely virtual world like that in Avatar.  You can almost smell the gaming software industry money flowing in. Now consider it in a virtual office sense.  Maybe two years ago you flew into Mumbai and smelled that... aroma... that starts as soon as the aircraft air system starts to take in external air.  Maybe next year you can smell Mumbai at home. 

Scratch that.  Bad idea.  From what I've heard from co-workers, Mumbai is pretty excruciating.  If going on trips to places like Mumbai makes you feel important and you like that, you'll probably get good feelings when you smell the Mumbai air.

At least one manufacturer, YoYo Dyne Entertainment, in Grover's Mill N.J., is aiming to bring a first-generation olfactory-enhanced (OE) headset to market in time for the 2022 holiday season, despite setbacks caused by two competing DSO technologies competing to dominate this emerging market.  

As with most technologies that show up overnight, the history of the tech behind this "Smell-o-Vision" headset goes back years and is actually a product of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). 

Digital odor synthesis was invented in the mid-1990s as part of a DARPA research program and has proven its value in several generations of the U.S. Army's battle training simulators. As reported in the April 1, 1995 issue of Electronic Design, the original DSO system, developed by Dr. Apri L'Fuhl, was based on a recently discovered class of organic compounds, known as "Primary Odorants (POs)." 

While each PO has its own distinctive smell, they can be combined in precise ratios with one or more other POs to create a wide range of completely different scents. Modern DSO systems typically use a small cartridge, containing an array of capsules each containing a different PO compound. Each capsule is equipped with a small heating element and a MEMS-based valve that can precisely meter the compound into a vortex mixing plenum where the desired scent is created.

Thanks to the POs’ unique properties, it takes only takes 32 different compounds to produce tens of thousands of unique odors. When Dr. L'Fuhl's team sought to commercialize the technology in the early 2000s, they introduced a new collection of 64 POs that could produce what they referred to as high-definition digitally synthesized odors (HD-DSOs).

The problem with this sort of research is that individual perceptions of odors is very individual.  What's needed is a standard way of measuring and rating the DSOs, as well as standard ways of evaluating and reporting the results.  Enter the Microsoft Nose.  Our noses are connected to the brain over massively parallel neural pathways from the roof of the nose into the brain.  That information needs to be conveyed to the processors in the gamer's headset.  Literally, they needed a nasal network. 

Image credit: Microsoft

YoYoDyne was the first company to license the technology, designed into the OE-VR headset seen in the top picture.  The headset will be entering production early this summer in a repurposed automotive accessory plant, located just outside Flint, Mich.

Branded as the Overthruster-Full Impact, the OE-VR headset will take its place as the flagship product in YoYo Dyne's 2023 collection of its iconic Overthruster series of gaming gear. With a retail price of $799.42, it will come with a basic 32-odorant cartridge, suitable for general-purpose use. The company also will be introducing a series of specialized cartridges that can be used to further enhance specific applications.

“We'd anticipated that there would be a big demand for a high-def cartridge that could create exotic odors to complement the alien landscapes that players encounter in many science-fiction-based VR games” said John Bigbooty, YoYo Dyne's VP of marketing. “We also expect our 'Smell the World' cartridge to be very popular, especially, if Heaven forbid, another nasty COVID variant forces us back into lockdown.”

VP Bigbooty is ahead of the crowd.  He's already introduced a product that he expects to be a Big Thing for the working-at-home set, after consultations with Human Factors Engineering consultants where he found a large percentage of former office workers who now work remotely who expressed a deep nostalgia for the smells of their old workplace.

“To meet this demand, we developed the Daily Grind odor cartridge. When combined with a small software app, it can take a remote worker through a full week of the routine and random smells they miss.”

“We worked hard to faithfully reproduce the environment that office workers call their comfort zone” continued Bigbooty. “When you log in to work, your Full Impact VR headset will greet you with the smell of fresh-brewed coffee that will become increasingly stale as the day goes on. Your day will also be punctuated by occasional bursts of ozone and toner from a virtual copying machine as well as random whiffs of body odors from your virtual co-workers.”

Main source for this article is electronics trade journal, Microwaves & RF, in an overview article on the technology.  

Resolving Some Technical Difficulties

I have some computer issues to deal with, so I've got nothing else. 

This is a Windows 10 computer and I'm perpetually annoyed enough with 10 that I've felt no urges to upgrade to 11.  Pay them to torture me?  Is it gambling that 11 will annoy me more, or is it a mortal lock certainty it's going to annoy me more?

I try to remember to backup the drives on this computer weekly onto a local backup hard drive, a Western Digital "My Cloud" Network Attached Storage (NAS) which is within arm's reach, not to somebody else's computer (AKA - 'the cloud').  Windows 10 kept the completely serviceable Windows 7 backup and restore utility, so I've been running that for around five years.  It doesn't take long, and today it barfed for the first time ever.  It gave me an error message, "Backup encountered a problem while backing up file D:\Misc\. Error:(STATUS_WAIT_2 (0x80070002))," which told me absolutely nothing except that something went wrong.  Where I'd expect it to tell me which file failed, I see no filename, just a period (dot).  When I went to look at the D:\Misc directory to see if I could figure out what file it had trouble with, the entire directory was gone off this computer. 

The longer version of that story is that there are actually two backups on the My Cloud drive, one that I did by just copying every directory and every file from this computer to the network backup drive, and a totally different backup that Windoze creates on the backup drive.  The ones I copied are completely readable, while the Windows backup is compressed in some way into one giant file to save space.  The drawback to Windows' backup is that the backup isn't readable by humans.  That meant I couldn't check it to see if the D:\Misc directory was there in today's backup at all.  I looked at the backup I created and the D:\Misc directory was there, but the most recent files on there were from December of 2020. 

I could copy that directory from the My Cloud over to this computer, but it wouldn't be up to date.  How different was the one in the Windows backup?  For the first time ever, I tried to use the restore part of the Backup and Restore tools.  I was able to use the backup that Windows created last weekend to restore that directory.  The files are pretty much the same dates as my old backup except for the latest ten, which are dated from January of  '21 up to last weekend and not 12/20.  I typically run the backup routine weekly on Sunday, but it moves a day or so either way.

Why did Windoze Backup screw up my hard drive and how can I keep it from doing it again?  I have no idea.  So now I'm trying to understand it.

From the Podcast Macabre.

Air Force Finally Retires 8" Floppy Drives

You may have seen this entertaining little story going around the last couple of days, but the Air Force has finally retired 8-inch floppies from the missile launch control system.  Those would be the strategic missile launch facilities.

Five years ago, Ars Technica reported on how shocked the CBS News program 60 Minutes was to find that 8 inch floppies were still used to store data for operating the Air Force's intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) command, control, and communications network. The system, once called the Strategic Air Command Digital Network (SACDIN), relied on IBM Series/1 computers installed by the Air Force at Minuteman II missile sites in the 1960s and 1970s.  Five years ago, the Air Force offered the view that the hardware (which virtually everyone thought was long obsolete) provided a cybersecurity advantage.  I can see their point to some extent; certainly nobody is going to casually leave an 8" floppy disk in the men's room as has been done with a USB drive. 

Today, the Air Force is singing a different tune.

[T]he service has completed an upgrade to what is now known as the Strategic Automated Command and Control System (SACCS), as Defense News reports. SAACS is an upgrade that swaps the floppy disk system for what Lt. Col. Jason Rossi, commander of the Air Force’s 595th Strategic Communications Squadron, described as a “highly secure solid state digital storage solution.” The floppy drives were fully retired in June. 

The IBM Series/1 computers remain, however, in part because of their reliability and security.  

Air Force officials have acknowledged network upgrades that have enhanced the speed and capacity of SACCS' communications systems, and a Government Accountability Office report in 2016 (28 page pdf) noted that the Air Force planned to "update its data storage solutions, port expansion processors, portable terminals, and desktop terminals by the end of fiscal year 2017." But it's not clear how much of that has been completed.

When I think of electronics from the '60s and '70s, my thought isn't "reliability" so much as "end of life".  I have some 1960s radios, in case you're wondering how I know.  Electronic components are often referred to as having a bathtub-shaped reliability curve; steep walls on both ends and a long flat bottom between the walls.  When the parts are first put into service, they go through a short period of "infant mortality" failures as various problems (both in fabrication of the parts and of assemblies they're in) cause the components to fail.  This is followed by a long period in which the failure rate is quite a bit lower and parts fail essentially at random.  Finally, parts wear out and fail - literally dying of old age - and the bathtub side curves upward again.  These computers should be well into these later failures, but they do get constant attention from folks very experienced with these computers; probably the greatest living experts on these systems.  I'm guessing they need this attention.  Along with lots of spare parts.

Ars notes:

Civilian Air Force employees with years of experience in electronics repairs handle the majority of the work. But the code that runs the system is still written by enlisted Air Force programmers.

For those who have forgotten what 8" floppies looked like - or never saw one.  These were pretty much considered obsolete when I first had a computer that I worked on as a technician in the late 1970s.  Our first computers around the house used 5-1/4 floppies that just were a smaller version of these, before the 3-1/2" floppies in a hard plastic case.  So, so long ago...

WiFi 6 vs. 5G - Coming Soon to a Computer Near You

The coming next generation of cellphone data services, 5G, has gathered lots of attention.  So much attention that there are already lawsuits over Verizon and AT&T advertising they have 5G even though nobody really does.  I hope it's obvious that 5G means "Fifth Generation", as opposed to the currently widely distributed 4G (fourth...), LTE (long term evolution) and so on.  For reasons I don't really understand, 5G is gathering much more hype - probably because it's coming at the same time as the "Internet of Things", IoT, (as I call it, the Internet of Things That Don't Quite Work Right - IoTTDQWR) and the IoT is gathering lots of suspicion as reporting everything you think do or say to some Them.

Electronic Design magazine's newsletters treat us to an interview with Cees Links of the Netherlands, one of the original inventors of WiFi.  With the title, "Wi-Fi 6 vs. 5G: Why Trying to Pick a Winner is Missing the Point", it's really not about which makes the better network so much as talking about making the networked radio experience better all the way around.

Perhaps you've missed the buzz about WiFi 6 coming, so the Verge has a good introductory article on some of what's different.  Like 5G, it will be "real soon now", probably by the end of this year, because the specification doesn't appear to be released yet.  

This is where I find Cees Links' perspective good to read:

Of course, some of the messaging around 5G is just marketing hype, showcasing the favorable points and ignoring the less favorable ones. The claim is that 5G with 4 Gb/s will be faster than Wi-Fi (.11ac) with 1.3 Gb/s. The immediate counter argument is that Wi-Fi (.11ax) with 9.6 Gb/s will be faster than 5G.

But will these speeds be achieved in real life? We’ve seen this before, these glossy promises of high-speed access being wiped away by the hard truth of “but I still cannot get a decent connection in the basement,” or something similar, because—and here’s the real headline—how good will 9.6 Gb/s Wi-Fi be in the basement, if the connection to the home is 300 Mb/s, or even less? It seems like we’re working on the wrong issues, doesn’t it?

To begin with, let's get something out of the way.  5G isn't going to get all new spectrum and while they do go into chunks of spectrum previously unused by phone data links, 5G also reuses other frequencies the older generations use.  This chart from Keysight Technologies, a long time test equipment maker, is color coded:

The purple numbers are 3GPP or LTE frequencies repurposed for 5G and the teal numbers are new 5G frequencies.  The important points are the spectrum reuse, that many of the 5G frequencies are currently in use, and to point out that those numbers on far right go as high as 40 GHz.  These frequencies don't penetrate either the atmosphere, walls, or leaves on trees, and other bits of the environment very well.  Yes, running more power can help, but they can't run unlimited power due to safety regulations and the extra power just doesn't buy much. 

Better coverage inside the home is one of the key characteristics of the new generation of Wi-Fi, now called Wi-Fi 6 (based on the IEEE 802.11ax standard). The distributed concept behind this new version of the Wi-Fi standard (also called Wi-Fi mesh) helps to distribute internet to every room in the home, with the main router at the front door, and small satellite routers (also known as repeaters) on every floor and in every room. This enables internet service providers to sell and support solid internet connectivity everywhere in the home—all good news!

As a consumer, I think I'm pretty typical in that I don't care what radio protocol I'm using, WiFi 6 or 5G; I just want it to work right.  Anywhere - whether that's here at my desk or if I need to communicate from the side of a road at some point.   The drawback to all this is that I need to go buy new hardware and I think I'm a pretty typical consumer in not wanting to do that.  There are no 5G cellphones yet (and my bet is that it will be years before 5G gets here to the small town).  Likewise, there are no WiFi 6 routers yet - the 802.11ax specification is expected to be implemented by the end of the year.  It seems to me WiFi 6 will be here before 5G, but that would require I buy a router, then repeaters and then things that go on the other end of the WiFi link. 

Cees Links raises some interesting points about the cellphone industry coming from a background of the heavily regulated telephone industry, selling frequency access while the WiFi industry comes from a background of using unlicensed frequencies.  When the cellphone providers think of providing data services like 5G, it's like bringing the phone twisted pair to your house: what you do in the house is up to you.  Likewise, the WiFi provider thinks of selling you a router and then you make everything work.  Nobody has done a good job of integrating the router and the cellphone data stream.  That's probably what consumers want more than disjointed pieces of hardware and data services that just don't seem to work right.

About That Captcha Thing

Two days ago, some of us had some discussions about Blogger's use of Captcha.  Some said the ones showing up on my site were harder than elsewhere. 

I'm using straight up Blogger from Google.  No add-ons.  Nothing fancy.  I thought the only effect I could have on Captcha was either to turn it on or turn it off.  After swapping a couple of chats with experts on their forums, I've found I can't even turn it off.  It's effectively hard wired on. 

According to the webpages they referred me to there's no way for me to affect anything.  I was briefly hopeful I could return to the type 1 Captcha puzzles because those always seemed easy, while with the pictures, I find I mess up often without knowing why. 

(what they call reCAPTCHA V1)

Unfortunately, I don't see that it's even possible to revert to V1.  Their website is stressing a V3 that is supposed to be easier on humans but better at blocking bots.  Users won't do anything - they'll just use the site and V3 will block the spots.  

Does Captcha do anything worthwhile?  Couldn't prove it by me.  I got half a dozen Spam comments today that were all to very old pieces (one was from 2010) and they clearly not were not written by English speakers.  I have no idea what Captcha does besides annoy people because those comments were only stopped by my setting to moderate comments on posts more than 14 days old. 

The Google community folks didn't recognize a way in which my Captcha tests could be harder than any other sites' tests.  

Although I tried to turn it off, I can't even do that.  I'm stuck.  

Blast From the Past

The last few weeks have brought some on and off work on something I haven't been doing in years.

Telescope making.

I got interested in astronomy as a kid and had my first good telescope by junior high school (a 4" f10 reflector - good is a relative term).  In those days, we'd see stories about people who made their own telescopes complete from grinding a mirror through making a mount for it.  There was a Mars opposition at some time during my high school years, and I bought a kit to make a mirror.  I was going to do it!

Except without someone to guide you through the rough points, it's not necessarily easy.  In my case, I banged the mirror on my work stand (a 55 gallon drum, which my parents graciously allowed in my bedroom) and took a big chip out of it.  Instead of finishing the mirror and painting the chip flat black, the accepted wisdom of how to fix such things,  I tried to grind the chip out and, well, never did get that 8" mirror made.

Fast forward 20 years to about 1990, now an adult working for Major SE Defense Contractor, when I got the bug again.  This time, it was the information age and the internet offered this precursor to the web called Newsgroups.  Buoyed on by the folks on sci.astro.amateur, and with the help of a really great book, I made my first successful mirror and first good telescope.  For those who will understand this, it's a 6" f8 mirror; that is, 48" focal length, and a Newtonian Reflector.  It makes a good size, but like a lot of addictions, it leaves you wanting more.  (I rush to add that those newsgroups are still there today!)

I started a bigger mirror, 10" f6.  I missed the focal length; it came out f5.6 which is still perfectly usable.  This was a more difficult mirror, but a 10" mirror gives a serious advantage over the smaller mirror.  Area goes up as radius squared, so it has a little under 3 times the area as the 6" mirror.  I completed the 10", again with some help from people I met on the newsgroups.  I built the telescope as a Dobsonian, altitude-azimuth style mount.  This is actually the second iteration of the telescope, when I replaced the typical cardboard tube with a metal tube.

By extreme luck, I completed this telescope in early 1994, the year that Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed into Jupiter.  Nobody in all of human history had ever seen such a thing, and we saw the impact marks on Jupiter from our backyard through this telescope.  Armed with star charts and the old fashioned method of "star hopping" (going from landmark star to star in your finder scope until you find the object you're looking for), I spent several years exploring the sky with it. 

The story goes a bit sideways here.  These telescopes have a lot going for them but they have a serious drawback: they don't track an object so that you constantly have to reposition the scope while looking at a planet or other object to compensate for the apparent motion in the eyepiece.  On higher powers, say 300x or more, the earth's rotation can cause a planet to drift cross the field of view in perhaps ten seconds.  (As a side note, this is half the speed of a clock's hour hand.  A star on the celestial equator goes from east to west in 12 hours.  That's the same as going from 3 to 9 on a clock - only the clock does it twice as fast)

It's now in the early 2000s, and my career had gotten to the point where I had "more money than time" and with that the funds to buy a commercial telescope with a computerized tracking mount and a new feature called "GoTo".  With a GoTo system, you typically tell a handheld controller what object you want to view and it moves the telescope until it puts that object in your field of view.  I literally saw more deep sky objects in my first night with that scope than I used to see in a season without the GoTo feature. 

One night, we set up a test in the backyard.  We put the commercial telescope, an 11" compound reflector side by side with my 10" reflector.  We pushed the same magnification on both scopes.  Both Mrs. Graybeard and I thought the image in my telescope was better. 

This led to a plan to go back to using mine and getting a mount for it that allowed tracking and GoTo.   Much to my surprise, I don't have any pictures of the telescope at that time.  I repainted it blue because the original paint job chipped maddeningly (I bought the tube pre-painted inside and out) . 

This Christmas, I moved the telescope on the tripod out to the shop, as I've done every year, and one of the casters disintegrated - sort of a flat tire.  I had to put wheels on it.  I thought bigger casters would be better than the ones it had, so they got upgraded from 1-3/4" diameter to 4".  A little shop time was required to build mounting hardware for them.  Those are 4" casters simply because I had them.  They were for some project idea or other that got replaced. 

I had some generalized fixing that had to be done.  The mount was loose and I didn't recall how to tighten it.  I figured that out this week.  Finally, the telescope and mount could be reunited.  This isn't "done done" but is pretty close to it. 

The big telescope tube is 12" diameter and 60" long, for scale.  Oh, for closure, look to the right of the black mount and you'll see and odd-shaped blue structure with a white disk on its side.  That's my 6" f8 reflector that I started the story with.  (The black box with the orange strap on a cart is my smoker.)  It's in a square, plywood tube, but it's a Dobsonian style mount, too. 

I connected the controller computer to the mount and turned it on.  It acted like I'd turned it off the minute before.  Never missed a beat.  There's still a little bit of maintenance to do on things but it's usable.  The thing is, I haven't used it since the year was in single digits, like '08 or '09.  Our neighborhood trees (including my own) have grown up so much that it's difficult to see the sky, and what we can see is light polluted.  To use it now, the 4" casters won't cut it.  Those are fine for the porch, but to get it out to where it can see even a sliver of sky, I need 20 or 26" mountain bike tires on the mount.  Or garden cart wheels.  And that's another redesign and building project.