"Airy R. Bean" wrote in message
...
Always remember to put your trouser leg _OUTSIDE_
your wellies and be _DAMN_ sure that your sand mould
is dry. A spider or two down the tubes causes an explosive
splash-back!




Is that how you fettle castings?



Does the Welly advice hold for your other pastimes?

On 11 Sep 2004 23:31:06 -0500, (Bob Monaghan)
wrote:

we recently had our annual regional Hamcom 2004 convention, at which I had
the chance to catch local microwave and antennas guru Kent Britain's
WA5VJB's seminar on microwaves modifications. My favorite was a obsolete
cell phone 3 watt output chip that does 18 watts nicely on 13.8 Vdc ;-)

You got a part number for that chip, Bob?
--

"What is now proved was once only imagin'd." - William Blake, 1793.

nope, sorry, but it was a more or less typical example of some of Kent
Britain's and others discoveries of easy ways to get onto microwave bands.
Raising the voltage on these chips does great things to the power output,
as that E^2/R goes up fast as E goes up a little ;-)

Another example was an amplifier with many microwave modules, most of the
power was used to produce a linear (digital compatible) output; junk that
overhead, and the power went up from 10 watts or so to over 100 watts ;-)

You might try emailing the North Texas Microwave Society or Kent directly?
http://www.ntms.org/ - we are having a major conference in October I
hope to attend, so I may have more notes there ;-) Kent is also the
author of the "cheap yagi" designs from VHF-CQ and other online sources.

sadly, there was a second seminar at Hamcom 2004 on resources for
microwave wanna-bees. The first were a series of older books on microwaves
and test equipment, with the sensible observation that most of the
affordable test gear being surplused now is described in use in these
older books ;-) The second was a series of newsletters and publications,
some in German/English, from RSGB, and ARRL on microwaves operations etc.

Some of these were described and seen to be quite pricey for the amount of
articles therein ;-( The NTMS has evidently made an effort to build up a
collection of articles and resources related to microwaves, rather than
have each member try to duplicate these costly and hard to find
references.

I am not seeing a lot in the way of homebrew microwave construction or
conversion articles, given some of the relatively easy projects I have
seen described at these seminars and in some ARRL materials I have etc.?
So the conference may turn up some more resources, I hope ;-)

Part of the motivation here is we are trying to "inherit" some big
roof-top microwave satellite dishes from our engineering school as these
get obsoleted as we go online with streaming video on demand. Our club's
roof access port is only ten feet from the bigger dish ;-) It will cost
the school major $ to take this stuff down, so it would save $ to let us
use it - and might provide lots of useful hands-on microwave experience
for some of our future graduates. That's my argument, anyway ;-)

If anybody knows of some microwave homebrew resource and project pages,
let me know!

regards bobm
--
************************************************** *********************
* Robert Monaghan POB 752182 Southern Methodist Univ. Dallas Tx 75275 *
********************Standard Disclaimers Apply*************************

(Bob Monaghan) wrote in message ...
from http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=robot

A mechanical device that sometimes resembles a human and is capable of
performing a variety of often complex human tasks on command or by being
programmed in advance.

A machine or device that operates automatically or by remote control.
endquote:

Depends on your definition and viewpoint; sad to say, virtually all the
world's working robots in factories bear little resemblance to humans
(other than the demo walking robot from Japan, I guess? ;-0)

We had an IEEE sponsored contest to build software for battlefield robots
some years ago (late 1980s IIRC?). End up looking like a video game, which
is what the students wanted to build anyway. ;-)

I'm recording a 2 hour PBS program on videogame revolution tonight, so I
suspect it will be deja vu. However, Tom Clancy, the noted author of Red
October etc., made a point when on campus last year that the military is
using videogames corp. for training, and that the years of hand-eye
coordination training from gaming was a big plus in preparing young men
and women to utilize incredibly complex systems with videogame style
interfaces.

Personally, I wouldn't _want_ an autonomous battlefield robot without
using some human interaction in the loop. No sense making the term "killer
software bugs" come true ;-)

grins bobm

Well, it looks, at current Technological development, that I will
escape this planet without being stalked by killer Robots! However
the flies may be in danger!:

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996366

http://www.ias.uwe.ac.uk/mission.htm


http://www.gastrobots.com

Paul Burridge wrote:
Hi guys,

Well do you think it is? I personally can't think of any other
passtime accessible to the individual which requires such a high
degree of technical knowledge to succeed at. If anyone can think of
something more complex, let's hear it!

Nope.

Try winemaking.

Dana K6JQ

"Dana Myers" wrote in message
news
Paul Burridge wrote:
Hi guys,

Well do you think it is? I personally can't think of any other
passtime accessible to the individual which requires such a high
degree of technical knowledge to succeed at. If anyone can think of
something more complex, let's hear it!

Nope.

Try winemaking.

Dana K6JQ

Amateur astronomers, hackers...

SioL