hello Reg I've downloaded some of your programs.
very helpful, thank you very much.
Were you a maths teacher or something like in a past life?
Excellent programs, from Reg for free...
http://www.btinternet.com/~g4fgq.regp
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Not having an Eastern religion I have no recollection of a past life. But
the nearest I ever got to being a teacher in my present life was to teach
myself after the age of 14. It all happened purely by chance.
Although in the last few years of my career I did present, by invitation,
some one-day lectures to international audiences on the subject of how to
locate faults on oceanic submarine cables. And even in those far-off days,
when the repair ship captain chose to go 1/4-speed ahead and grapple for the
cable, depended on what he had had for breakfast. I understand cables now
contain optical-fibers but still contain a few copper wires for fault
location purposes.
But submarine telephone cables were a small part of my career. However they
did introduce me to transmission lines and communications in general. My
first connection with radio began, indirectly, a few years earlier, during
WW2, when I was a mechanical engineering apprentice in the tool-room and
machine shop of a well-known electric-motor manufacturer.
British-Thompson-Houston.
At the age of 16, while high explosives and incendiary bombs were falling on
the industrial City of Birmingam*, I set-up and operated precision lathes
and millers and broaches and shapers to manufacture what appeared to me to
be very small electric motors. (As distinct from anything up to 1000
horse-power motors and generators which was normal production.)
Having joined the RAF in 1943 as a radar technician, in 1944, by chance, I
came across these small electric motors once again. Actually, the articles
I had helped to manufacture were top-secret selsyns to be used to
synchronise airborne Radar plan-position indicating screens with their
respective airborne, rotating parabolic antennas.
The radar equipment was installed in Lancaster bombers, the most efficient
of the RAF's killing machines. The fire storms on German cities, almost as
good as the gas chambers, were more efficient than the Hiroshima and
Nagasaki weapons of mass-destruction. It just took a few hours longer.
The results of the latter weapons, in 1945, I witnessed and spoke to the few
survivors while wearing my blue RAF uniform. There were no signs of
animosity. The Japanese, an ancient educated and civilised people, were as
polite to me as a sort of tourist, thousands of miles from my home in
Birmingham (which they immediately recognised from a map sketched on the
back of a cigarette packet) as they were to each other.
My programs and Mathematics. There's very little advanced mathematics in my
programs. My arithmetic is entirely self-taught. But there's no two ways
about it - maths is either all right or all wrong. And either way it can
eventually be proved. That's the beauty of it.
University professors write books on it, plagiarise each other, and make a
living under false pretences - but they add nothing except something
illogical and misunderstood (usually a language problem) to haggle about in
newsgroups. Same applies to radio. KISS.
The key to my programs is a logical understanding of distributed electrical
circuits. It's just elementary electrical engineering. If YOU can understand
them then you are well away. If you can't understand them then its because I
have been deficient in my introductory notes.
Your comment on the 'excellence' of my programs is appreciated. But bear in
mind, regarding quality, I have never claimed them to be numerically more
accurate than needed for the purpose intended - whatever that may be.
==============================
*On the same night as the infamous air raid on Coventry, a greater weight of
bombs fell on the City of Birmingham and the industrial Black Country. Three
days later fires were still burning in the adjacent town of West Bromwich.
(These days West Bromwich is better noted for its football team.)
But Coventry, the City of Three Spires, three cathedrals, and Lady Godiva,
was the greatest concentration of war factories in the UK. Tanks, guns,
aircraft engines, fire pumps, motor vehicles, communications equipment were
all being made in the city, all intermingled with inflammable medieval
buildings to be ravaged by fire in the raid. Most of the human casualties
were due to a single bomb - a direct hit on an air-raid shelter.
Incidentally, the 3000 MHz, 50 KW, Cavity Magnetron had just been invented
by Randall and Boot in the Birmingham University laboratories which were
themselves surrounded by large factories, under air attack, such as the well
known Austin motor vehicle and the Aerial motorcycle works.
The magnetron was used to guide Lancaster bomber crews to their unfortunate
targets where 10's of thousands of the inhabitants were burned alive, their
husbands and brothers dying on the Eastern Front against Russian rockets and
T54 tanks.
The magnetron was also used in the 5-year long Battle of the North Atlantic.
On the average a 10,000-ton food and munitions ship was sunk every day. More
than 100,000 merchant seamen, civilians, without military pensions for their
families, lost their lives in Davy Jones locker.
Towards the end of the war German submarine crews were on suicide missions.
U-boat commanders, once detected by radar, had little option but to stay on
the surface, uncover the guns, and fight it out. To submerge they were dead
by depth charges. Their precise locations being located and remembered by
airborne radar.
These days we have other forms of suicide. There are people who are living
such enforced miserable lives and in such oppressed conditions they prefer
to sacrifice their own lives in the hope of improving the future lives of
their families and their decendents.
Citizens of the United States, and others, ask yourselves WHY?
Tonight I'm on a Bordeaux Claret. Vive L'entente Cordiale.
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Reg, Amateur Radio, G4FGQ