On Feb 16, 5:27�pm, Leo wrote:
On 16 Feb 2007 16:22:45 -0800, "
wrote:
On Feb 16, 3:10?pm, Leo wrote:
On 14 Feb 2007 22:43:58 -0800, "
wrote:
From: Leo on Wed, 14 Feb 2007 17:50:23 -0500
wrote:
On Feb 13, 7:15?pm, Leo wrote:
On 13 Feb 2007 16:43:31 -0800, wrote:
On Feb 13, 5:13?pm, Leo wrote:
On Sat, 10 Feb 2007 15:12:59 -0500, Leo wrote:
On 8 Feb 2007 18:01:57 -0800, wrote:

If 250,000 miles isn't accurate enough for you, then you must fault
your buddy Len too. Because he stated the distance as a quarter
million miles....

Hiding behind Len now, are we....?

Never thought I'd see the day!

(him too, I'd reckon.....)

*TRUE!
aybe it's because tomorrow (the 14th) is Valentine's
*Day and he has a crush on me? :-( * horrors!]

Gaaaaaaaaaah! *hat an image that created!!!

Quick....pass the mental floss!

*Ech...I have these moments every time I come in to this
*Din of Inequity... :-(

Quite natural, that.....

* Well, it's cheaper than going to those fake Hollywood horror
* movies and I can have my own popcorn.

That was quite odd.

*I thought it quite SOP (Standard Operating Practice) of him.

It seems to be......it's odd, though.

*True, but you have to realize where you are and what he is.

And where he is......still hiding (behind you? - hey, move over and
let's see! (ee hee!) , unable to face reality.

* Well, he lost his cool yesterday and gave K4YZ a slap on
* the wrist with a wet noodle. *He do dat 'bout twice a year
* (perhaps to show off his "manliness"?).

Mucho macho! *Guess we need to add "putz" to the list of personal
accolades that he's acquired here on the battlefield!

That kind of answers your question in an earlier post, though - why
isn't he on the radio doing DX with CW? - or something along those
lines. *There's something here that keeps on drawing him in -
something that is missing in his radio hobby. *Otherwise, he's be
there! *He says that he spends quite a bit of time on the radio - but
who knows? *(he's always here on the NG's, furiously pounding the
beejezus out of his keyboard!).

Wonder wassup wi' dat?

We will never know, I suppose, he be very close-mouthed
about anything of his off-newsgroup life. So much so that
he is close to the style of K4YZ of the "I've got it [document]
in my wallet and it's nobody's business to see it..." school
of 'referencing' what he says.


There are quite a few lines in the preceeding posts that he has chosen
not to comment on......no rebuttal, no contest. *uess he figured that
no one would notice!

I'll be happy to point them out again when he returns with another
load of chaff.....

* No matter to me. *Hey, the guy has a "judge roy bean" complex
* and wants to be "all the law east of the Pecos." *Let him.
* shrug

That's Mr. Bean to you.... *

Jawohl! click, click


*Mental picture of Cranky Spanky trying to "correct" the
*guys at JPL, especially their QC folks. :-)

He once claimed that Industry Canada was wrong......look out, JPL!

*I'll pass the warning on to them.
PL is just a whoop and
*a holler from my place...been there...:-)

Do they have a wind tunnel? *hey could null him out with a bit of
Newton's Third....

* They 'borrow' one from another NASA agency. *That was the
* one they rigged to test the Mars Rover's "bouncing balloon"
* deployment system. *That was shown on a recent TV cable
* documentary.

* While JPL started out with JATO bottle design in WW2,
* they drifted off into unmanned spacecraft by the 1960s
* and stayed in that field of work, divorced organizationally
* from California Institute of Technology (their origin) and
* established somewhat close to Pasadena's Rose Bowl.
* Note: *"Somewhat" is an Angeleno term and "somewhat
* close" could be several miles to us down here. *:-)

I didn't realize that JPL's first project was the JATO - thanks for
that! (makes sense!).

JPL's most-notable achievement (in my book) is the Deep
Space Net (all located well outside of the Montrose-
Pasadena area) with its stable PLLs and cryogenic
front-ends plus the DSP and software to make all the
received data as "clean" as possible. That and the really
deep advance planning on design of the space probes
and rovers...with knowledge that some of controls and
instrumentation and probe computers might malfunction
therefore lots and lots of safeguards have to be added.

Once in a great while, they do screw up...which gets a
lot of negative publicity. Like their orbital mechanics folks
mistakenly using a metric "wrench" instead of an English
one. A rather expensive screw up but we humans are
kind of noted for that. :-(


*"The squeaky wheel gets de grease" as the old saying goes.
*He gottum two degrease, collitch degrease. *rom a
*university that was the SECOND one to build an electronic
*computer...

Without his help, fortunately....

* Yes! *:-) * But Eckert and Mauchly DID crib ideas from
* Atanasof at Iowa State...as was proven in the federal
* copyright trial held in the US much after ENIAC had
* been sold off.

Got a chance to see some of the remaining parts of ENIAC at the
Smithsonian a few years back. Amazing machine - and an incredible
piece of engineering in the vacuum tube era.

On the University of Pennsylvania self-promotion section
about ENIAC they show an internal project of putting the
entirety of the ENIAC architecture on a single IC! :-)

Humans be too impressed by physical bigness, I think,
certainly when it comes to electronics. They don't,
generally, appreciate the amazing amount of functionality
that can be done with micro-circuits.

Of course, some like to do things just for the fun of it.
A professor up in Oregon state has built an all-RELAY
microcomputer function-alike. Fills a half dozen tall,
shallow glass-front cabinets in one room of his house.
Appears to be built of all-new parts. Rather slow, of
course, but the "clock" can be slowed down to show
human senses how the sequencing and logic paths
behave when instructed to do certain tasks. Outside
of being an instruction aid, it has no practical use
except to entertain him and anyone getting a demo.


After seeing what a BC-221 can do when properly modified, I have no
doubt that Jim could have made a pretty nifty antenna switch out of
it! *

Cranky aside, I personally think that the BC-221 "Frequency
Meter" was over-praised. Yes, it has a VERY stable tunable
oscillator and the accompanying book of numbers allows one
to "read" (heterodyne, really) out to five places, maybe six.
But, it never "metered" anything. Still, it was better than
nothing back in WW2 times.

One had to wait until around 1955 (?) to get a true frequency
meter that read out directly any input directly up to 10 MHz.
HP 524. BUFF...Big Ugly Fat Fellow of an oversized
cabinet. Used to calibrate those things. :-(

Did you know the WW2 SCR-300 Walkie-Talkie (FM, low
VHF range) was VFO-controlled? UK had a near copy but
with a different nomenclature. Used an internal crystal
oscillator to spot-check dial calibrations, allow mechanical
corrections of the pointer on the dial. The post-war PRC-8
family did the same sort of thing, "channels" were VFO-ed
and spot-checked with an internal crystal oscillator. No
BC-221 needed to set frequencies with those, no box of
crystals needed to set up a new network. Incredible
engineering design for the terrible operating temperature
ranges encountered..


* [Heil off to one side, muttering, "You're not funny, Leonard."]

.....speaking of damp horologists..... * *

"We Vulcans have a saying, 'Only Nixon can go to China'."

[line from one of the Star Trek movies...:-) has absolutely
NO relevance to anything we were talking about, but then
neither have the morsemen in here busy trying to
assasinate characters]


* [No electrons were annhilated in the writing of this message...]

...just moved around a bit

"Green" newsgrouping. :-)

LA