"Lenof21" wrote in message
...
In article , "JAMES HAMPTON"
writes:


Hello, Len

That commercial license wasn't a particularly big deal, except that you
were
expected to memorize the "band plan", as it were, for VHF television. I
had
to laugh, no problem with the video or audio carrier nor the allotted 6
MHz
per channel space. First question, I think, was "what is the frequency
of
the video carrier of channel 6 television in the United States?". Well,
I
guessed they couldn't all be that bad, so I flipped a couple of pages,
put
my finger down, and examined the question by my finger. "What is the
color
burst frequency?". Ah, simple. 3.58 MHz .... oops, all of the 4 answers
started with 3.579 .....

NTSC color subcarrier is exactly 3.579545454545454545454545....
MHz. :-)

Frankly speaking, I don't give a damn about that FCC field office test
I took in Chicago in March, 1956. It DID allow me to work at some
broadcast stations and earn a bit of money. I don't remember that
four-part test for a 1st 'Phone as being exclusively about
broadcasting.
Maybe it changed later. Irrelevant.

A whole lot of changes have taken place in radio and electronics in
the last almost 49 years.

So, I had to take it a second time and this time I simply memorized the
splits and took a good hard look at how tightly various frequencies were
specified. Then it was easy.

I took mine just once. Everything. My "Q&A" book was a borrowed
Regulations set then printed up in loose-leaf form. All I did was
memorize what seemed to be important regulations. The theory I'd
already learned from the military experience, high-power HF trans-
mitters plus VHF, UHF, microwave radio relay. No real problem.

Not exactly IEEE stuff.

It was never intended to be such...any more than the amateur
written test is some kind of academic accomplishment.

The commercial telegraph license and radar endorsement were also not very
difficult. Such brain-strainers as "why do you avoid long horizontal
sections of waveguide".

Why would you? :-)

A commercial license is not a noble title indicating a licensee is
"superior" to all other human beings (amateurs included) LOL

I've never stated that nor implied it was. However, a lot of hams
go on and on, terribly full of themselves, on implying that Their
accomplishment is academic PhD level stuff. :-) [ ptui...]

Since 1958 I've been working in the microwaves, topping out at
the top of Ka Band (25 GHz) with only a brief time with some
2mm wavelength stuff where the waveguide had to be coin silver
electro-deposited on a polished copper mandrel (due to RF
surface conduction being too high a resistance with ordinary
silver plated guide...too much loss). I think of that lil-bitty guide
stuff as my "first SMT" exposure... :-)

A couple good reasons why amateur operations aren't widespread
at microwaves, particularly above X Band (greater than 12 GHz)
are Co$t of guide, flanges, measuring equipment, and RF sources;
there's no "magical" round-the-world bounce off the ionosphere as
with HF; so few amateurs know what they're doing at those very
short wavelengths (nearly all the present-day record setters have
commercial/military microwave experience).

One big plus at microwaves is that antenna gain can be terrific
due to beam-forming. Very little power is needed. Sure, there's
no "skip" at those frequencies, it's all line-of-sight, but eventually
there's going to be humans out there, far away. HF techniques
won't be good for interplanetary QSOs. :-)



Hello, Len

I don't know how many amateurs are going to even get much above 1 GHz. As
you point out, high power is not necessary due to high gain antennas being
easy to make (or, perhaps, purchase). The problem might be in the aiming.

I got a bit lucky when I put in my Direct Tv system some years ago. Running
the coax and feeding into the house was easy; the antenna pointing became a
bit more problematic, both due to a bad compass and a poor choice of help.

I invited a couple of friends over. Since they weren't hams and I didn't
have (as I now do) a cordless phone with both a base and remote (that is
*great* for work on the antenna), nor did we have cell phones, I needed one
guy to watch the set and report signal strength and holler to the second guy
in the kitchen who would holler to me on the roof. I checked the mount to
set up and verify the supporting rod was indeed vertical, set the elevation,
and, using a compass, set the direction of the antenna. They reported
nothing. I went to check the compass again as the elevation was easy to
set. I noticed that the needle was *not* pointing where it should be. I
know that from my porch, the North star sits exactly in line with the back
of my neighbor's house and I was in the proper position, albeit higher, and
North should be exactly in line with the end of my neighbor's house. The
needle should have pointed a bit East of that, but was pointing considerably
towards the East. Sigh. I came back down and got the manual as it shows
the deviation from true North. I went back on the roof, pointed the N on
the compass exactly towards the neighbor's house, and carefully looked
across the compass to see where the antenna should point (with the proper
true headings from the installation manual). I made the adjustment to the
antenna and yelled down. I tried for a couple of minutes and got no
response from below.

Irritated, I packed up the tools and went back down - and found everyone
drinking my beer!!!! Sigh ... ok, I went in to the television to turn it
off - and there was a signal indication of 85! I pulled out the credit card
and called Direct Tv. Bam! On came the whole 9 yards. Further testing the
following day revealed that I could not get a better signal. Lucky indeed.
BTW, by the next day, I had run coax both upstairs to the bedroom and also
into the kitchen, so I only needed one helper. He could watch the signal
strength in the kitchen and yell directly out the window to me. I chose my
helper a bit more judiciously

What does that have to do with 10 GHz transmission? Even purchasing
equipment, someone is going to have to be able to aim the darn thing (gain
comes at the expense of beamwidth, naturally) - and have some idea of local
topography if they wish to take advantage of either natural or man-made
objects. Of course, if the object is moonbounce, taking a dish which will
develop the proper gain (and I'm guessing here - likely approaching 30 dBi),
that thing is going to have to be fairly accurately pointed.

My Morse key has two settings: up and down. I can handle that, but some
folks might not be able to handle something a bit more complex than that
(although many can).

Interplanetary QSOs might prove *very* interesting. You certainly can't
call CQ. You'd have to set up pre-arranged transmit times. Both could
transmit information at a given time and the both wait .... and wait ... and
wait whilst the electromagnetic radiation made its' way at the speed of
light for a number of minutes (or hours, depending upon how close the
planet - likely mars - was at the time). Obviously, mars is quite close to
us only at certain times and even then is what - 35 million miles away?
Don't forget to adjust for Doppler shift as the planets are moving closer or
farther away. Narrow bandwidths can give you better signal to noise ratio,
but narrow bandwidths can also make that Doppler shift a lot more difficult
to deal with. I doubt wideband FM would cut the mustard due to a *huge*
increase in noise with the much larger bandwidth over narrow bandwidth
modes.

I don't think I'm likely to be around by the time ordinary folks can take a
trip to mars ....

Dang, where'd I put my Morse key?
)


73 from Rochester, NY
Jim AA2QA

JAMES HAMPTON wrote:
"Lenof21" wrote in message
...

In article , "JAMES HAMPTON"
writes:



Hello, Len

That commercial license wasn't a particularly big deal, except that you

were

expected to memorize the "band plan", as it were, for VHF television. I

had

to laugh, no problem with the video or audio carrier nor the allotted 6

MHz

per channel space. First question, I think, was "what is the frequency

of

the video carrier of channel 6 television in the United States?". Well,

I

guessed they couldn't all be that bad, so I flipped a couple of pages,

put

my finger down, and examined the question by my finger. "What is the

color

burst frequency?". Ah, simple. 3.58 MHz .... oops, all of the 4 answers
started with 3.579 .....

NTSC color subcarrier is exactly 3.579545454545454545454545....
MHz. :-)

Frankly speaking, I don't give a damn about that FCC field office test
I took in Chicago in March, 1956. It DID allow me to work at some
broadcast stations and earn a bit of money. I don't remember that
four-part test for a 1st 'Phone as being exclusively about

broadcasting.

Maybe it changed later. Irrelevant.

A whole lot of changes have taken place in radio and electronics in
the last almost 49 years.


So, I had to take it a second time and this time I simply memorized the
splits and took a good hard look at how tightly various frequencies were
specified. Then it was easy.

I took mine just once. Everything. My "Q&A" book was a borrowed
Regulations set then printed up in loose-leaf form. All I did was
memorize what seemed to be important regulations. The theory I'd
already learned from the military experience, high-power HF trans-
mitters plus VHF, UHF, microwave radio relay. No real problem.


Not exactly IEEE stuff.

It was never intended to be such...any more than the amateur
written test is some kind of academic accomplishment.


The commercial telegraph license and radar endorsement were also not very
difficult. Such brain-strainers as "why do you avoid long horizontal
sections of waveguide".

Why would you? :-)


A commercial license is not a noble title indicating a licensee is
"superior" to all other human beings (amateurs included) LOL

I've never stated that nor implied it was. However, a lot of hams
go on and on, terribly full of themselves, on implying that Their
accomplishment is academic PhD level stuff. :-) [ ptui...]

Since 1958 I've been working in the microwaves, topping out at
the top of Ka Band (25 GHz) with only a brief time with some
2mm wavelength stuff where the waveguide had to be coin silver
electro-deposited on a polished copper mandrel (due to RF
surface conduction being too high a resistance with ordinary
silver plated guide...too much loss). I think of that lil-bitty guide
stuff as my "first SMT" exposure... :-)

A couple good reasons why amateur operations aren't widespread
at microwaves, particularly above X Band (greater than 12 GHz)
are Co$t of guide, flanges, measuring equipment, and RF sources;
there's no "magical" round-the-world bounce off the ionosphere as
with HF; so few amateurs know what they're doing at those very
short wavelengths (nearly all the present-day record setters have
commercial/military microwave experience).

One big plus at microwaves is that antenna gain can be terrific
due to beam-forming. Very little power is needed. Sure, there's
no "skip" at those frequencies, it's all line-of-sight, but eventually
there's going to be humans out there, far away. HF techniques
won't be good for interplanetary QSOs. :-)




Hello, Len

I don't know how many amateurs are going to even get much above 1 GHz. As
you point out, high power is not necessary due to high gain antennas being
easy to make (or, perhaps, purchase). The problem might be in the aiming.

That is a big part of it. Even if a lot of hams were there, it would be
pretty much a sked only comms.

This leads to prospective users having a need to work in pairs or
teams. It will not be about making QSO's with multiple people, you will
be wanting to put your equipment together, and try it out. So right
away, the users will need to be interested in mainly putting a station
together and using it a few times, then moving along to the next goal.

And of course, the major attraction of these GHz and up frequencies is
that they DON'T go very far. You have to be the type of user that
doesn't care to make long distance QSO's!

Despite the ARRL's promotion and record keeping, for AIAP's these
frequencies are *very* local.



- Mike KB3EIA -

In article .com, "bb"
writes:

wrote:
http://www.eagle.ca/~harry/ba/eme/

http://www.eham.net/articles/9988
Many of those involved in the project were hams.

73 de Jim, N2EY

Ahh, yes. Hams doing non-ham stuff.
I wonder if they calculated the distance to the moon correctly?

Well, Brian, Jimmie done took the post bus out of Monmouth
often enough, could see the big bedspring radar antennas at
The Labs (there were 3 laboratory installations along the
highway). I'm sure he has contributed his Oral History
recording for the archives as have all the veterans of Project
Diana. [hand salute!]

Maybe he forgot to mention the First Ham in Space! According
to tonight's Jeopardy program clues, Ham the Chimp was the
first "American" in space. :-)

Oook, oook!

Len Over 21 wrote:

In article .com, "bb"
writes:

wrote:
http://www.eagle.ca/~harry/ba/eme/

http://www.eham.net/articles/9988
Many of those involved in the project were hams.

73 de Jim, N2EY

Ahh, yes. Hams doing non-ham stuff.
I wonder if they calculated the distance to the moon correctly?

Well, Brian, Jimmie done took the post bus out of Monmouth
often enough, could see the big bedspring radar antennas at
The Labs (there were 3 laboratory installations along the
highway). I'm sure he has contributed his Oral History
recording for the archives as have all the veterans of Project
Diana. [hand salute!]

Maybe he forgot to mention the First Ham in Space! According
to tonight's Jeopardy program clues, Ham the Chimp was the
first "American" in space. :-)

That reminds me--I wonder how Mike Coslo's gas bag launch project is
going. How high will "Leonard" go?

Dave K8MN

Dave Heil wrote:
Len Over 21 wrote:

In article .com, "bb"
writes:


wrote:

http://www.eagle.ca/~harry/ba/eme/

http://www.eham.net/articles/9988
Many of those involved in the project were hams.

73 de Jim, N2EY

Ahh, yes. Hams doing non-ham stuff.
I wonder if they calculated the distance to the moon correctly?

Well, Brian, Jimmie done took the post bus out of Monmouth
often enough, could see the big bedspring radar antennas at
The Labs (there were 3 laboratory installations along the
highway). I'm sure he has contributed his Oral History
recording for the archives as have all the veterans of Project
Diana. [hand salute!]

Maybe he forgot to mention the First Ham in Space! According
to tonight's Jeopardy program clues, Ham the Chimp was the
first "American" in space. :-)


That reminds me--I wonder how Mike Coslo's gas bag launch project is
going. How high will "Leonard" go?

Dave K8MN

It is going okay. I just stopped writing about it here since it was
"impossible to do" 8^)


- Mike KB3EIA -

Mike Coslo wrote:

Dave Heil wrote:
Len Over 21 wrote:

In article .com, "bb"
writes:


wrote:

http://www.eagle.ca/~harry/ba/eme/

http://www.eham.net/articles/9988
Many of those involved in the project were hams.

73 de Jim, N2EY

Ahh, yes. Hams doing non-ham stuff.
I wonder if they calculated the distance to the moon correctly?

Well, Brian, Jimmie done took the post bus out of Monmouth
often enough, could see the big bedspring radar antennas at
The Labs (there were 3 laboratory installations along the
highway). I'm sure he has contributed his Oral History
recording for the archives as have all the veterans of Project
Diana. [hand salute!]

Maybe he forgot to mention the First Ham in Space! According
to tonight's Jeopardy program clues, Ham the Chimp was the
first "American" in space. :-)


That reminds me--I wonder how Mike Coslo's gas bag launch project is
going. How high will "Leonard" go?

Dave K8MN

It is going okay. I just stopped writing about it here since it was
"impossible to do" 8^)

Don't let 'em grind you down, Mike.

If you don't stencil "LEONARD" on the first one, justice will not have
been done. A web site with corroborating photos will be a must.

Dave K8MN

In article , "JAMES HAMPTON"
writes:

"Lenof21" wrote in message
...

NTSC color subcarrier is exactly 3.579545454545454545454545....
MHz. :-)

With the correct integer divisor and correct integer multiplier, it
comes out to 500 KHz fairly exact. Most TV stations of the old
days had color subcarrier generators that were beat against
WWV on HF. It was picked for that very reason. Smart pickers
even back then.


Irritated, I packed up the tools and went back down - and found everyone
drinking my beer!!!! Sigh ... ok, I went in to the television to turn it
off - and there was a signal indication of 85! I pulled out the credit card
and called Direct Tv. Bam! On came the whole 9 yards. Further testing the
following day revealed that I could not get a better signal. Lucky indeed.
BTW, by the next day, I had run coax both upstairs to the bedroom and also
into the kitchen, so I only needed one helper. He could watch the signal
strength in the kitchen and yell directly out the window to me. I chose my
helper a bit more judiciously

Heh. You are probably too young to get involved in a post-war
event called the "beer can vertical." Back when cans were made
of solderable materials, some WW2-age guys had beer parties
to get the cans, solder them together to make a thick vertical
radiator. By the end of one such "vertical," the soldering started
to get rather out of line.

I was a young teener at that time and never did like beer. Still
don't. Don't mix beer and ham construction projects, especially
with a group that doesn't know what they are doing. Never heard
of a "beer can vertical" that stayed up. :-)

What does that have to do with 10 GHz transmission? Even purchasing
equipment, someone is going to have to be able to aim the darn thing (gain
comes at the expense of beamwidth, naturally) - and have some idea of local
topography if they wish to take advantage of either natural or man-made
objects. Of course, if the object is moonbounce, taking a dish which will
develop the proper gain (and I'm guessing here - likely approaching 30 dBi),
that thing is going to have to be fairly accurately pointed.

At S-Band (2 to 4 GHz), engineer-author-ham George O. Smith
calculated that a KiloWatt into a 30 db gain dish at S-Band could
honk into Mars with the receiver using another 30 db gain dish
and running wide-spread (850 Hz) FSK RTTY. Over all distances
in planetary orbits and within seeing distance (planetary occlusion
would be obviously prohibitive). Smith was at Harry Diamond Labs
during WW2 designing/debugging proximity fuses as well as the
long-running series of "Venus Equilateral" stories involving a radio
relay asteroid between Earth and Venus and Mars. In the 1940s,
of course...we've learned that the other planets aren't hospitable.

My Morse key has two settings: up and down. I can handle that, but some
folks might not be able to handle something a bit more complex than that
(although many can).

I've met some hams who can't work a single-unknown variable
algebra problem yet proclaim themselves to be "designers."
They might need a four-week course class to learn to set a
VCR or DVD recorder. :-)

Interplanetary QSOs might prove *very* interesting. You certainly can't
call CQ. You'd have to set up pre-arranged transmit times. Both could
transmit information at a given time and the both wait .... and wait ... and
wait whilst the electromagnetic radiation made its' way at the speed of
light for a number of minutes (or hours, depending upon how close the
planet - likely mars - was at the time). Obviously, mars is quite close to
us only at certain times and even then is what - 35 million miles away?
Don't forget to adjust for Doppler shift as the planets are moving closer or
farther away. Narrow bandwidths can give you better signal to noise ratio,
but narrow bandwidths can also make that Doppler shift a lot more difficult
to deal with. I doubt wideband FM would cut the mustard due to a *huge*
increase in noise with the much larger bandwidth over narrow bandwidth
modes.

The Deep Space Network out of JPL done solved a lot of those
problems long ago. Using lower powers than seemed practical
with bandwidths that seemed impractical in the 50s.

All the numbers are available: Path loss, antenna gain, bandwidth,
just plug them into an equation or nomograph (or search for a
"program" also called a Java aplet somebody tossed together).

The major problem is TIME DELAY and trying to adjust traditional
methods to meet future needs. There's a discernable audio pause
when talking to someone via a comm sat sitting in geosynchronous
orbit and it isn't even at a tenth the distance to the moon. It's 2 1/2
seconds (give or take) doing a Lunar "QSO." Obviously the old
tradition has to be tossed for interplanetary stuff and so the avowed
ham morsemen will have their keys pried out of cold, dead
terrestrial fingers.

Besides, just who is going to deliver the QSLs saying "UR SIG
599!" ? :-)

I don't think I'm likely to be around by the time ordinary folks can take a
trip to mars ....

I'm optimistic. :-) Having worked IN the field of electronics and
communications for a mere half century, the changes to all kinds
of comms have been so vast as to be overpowering the imagination
of even science-fiction writers (George O. Smith didn't think servos
could keep tracking the planets, used humans to do it in his 1940s
stories).

Back in 1954, 1.8 GHz communications equipment was considered
very high-tech. Special vacuum tubes, coaxial resonators, wave-
guide based bandpass filters. Big, expensive, fussy to tune. 50
years later we have consumer electronics cordless phones operating
at 2 GHz and the 5.8 GHz units' cost hovering close to $75 over-the-
counter, plug-and-play. One in three Americans has a cellular
telephone subscription now and those operate around 1 GHz and
some cell phones have digital cameras built in.

Look for VOIP to make inroads on the traditional wired telephone
service making hash out of the old, reliable, trustworthy "long-distance"
calls for ordinary citizens. All them old 'phone gabbers will have a ball
denouncing that damn upstart Voice Over Internet Protocal and
hollering "you can't send telephone calls over the Internet!" :-)

Dang, where'd I put my Morse key?
)

Yup. Don't be late for the ham party where everyone recreates the
grand old "pioneer" days of the 1920s and 1930s with the morse-
Vail "code." Not for me. I love the future just around the corner
just like I've enjoyed all the new developments over the last half
century.

Remember what Brian Burke said: "Morse code gets through
when everything else does..."

Len Over 21 wrote:

...
NTSC color subcarrier is exactly 3.579545454545454545454545....
MHz. :-)

With the correct integer divisor and correct integer multiplier, it
comes out to 500 KHz fairly exact.

"Fairly exact"? What's that mean?

Any repeating decimal can be written as a rational number, a/b.
That particular decimal above is exactly 315/88: Set that decimal
equal to N. Since two digits repeat, multiply both sides of the
equation by 10^2; we now have: 100N = 357.9545454... Next, subtract
the first equation from this second one; all the repeating 54 pairs
cancel due to this subtraction, giving us 99N = 354.375, a
terminating decimal. To eliminate the decimal point, multiply
both sides by 1000: 99000N = 354375. Now divide both sides by
99000: N = 354375/99000. This fraction simplifies to N = 315/88.
Hence, that original repeating decimal, 3.579545454... is exactly
equal to 315/88.

Note that if you have a repeating decimal with 3 repeating digits,
you'd multiple both sides of the initial equation by 10^3, etc.

Jeff KH6O
--
Chief Petty Officer, U.S. Coast Guard
Mathematics Lecturer, University of Hawaii System

In article , (Jeffrey Herman)
writes:

Len Over 21 wrote:

...
NTSC color subcarrier is exactly 3.579545454545454545454545....
MHz. :-)

With the correct integer divisor and correct integer multiplier, it
comes out to 500 KHz fairly exact.

"Fairly exact"? What's that mean?

Heh heh heh...as "exact" as you can calibrate it to some
accepted standard of frequency.

Hint: It isn't W1AW. :-)


Any repeating decimal can be written as a rational number, a/b.
That particular decimal above is exactly 315/88: Set that decimal
equal to N. Since two digits repeat, multiply both sides of the
equation by 10^2; we now have: 100N = 357.9545454... Next, subtract
the first equation from this second one; all the repeating 54 pairs
cancel due to this subtraction, giving us 99N = 354.375, a
terminating decimal. To eliminate the decimal point, multiply
both sides by 1000: 99000N = 354375. Now divide both sides by
99000: N = 354375/99000. This fraction simplifies to N = 315/88.
Hence, that original repeating decimal, 3.579545454... is exactly
equal to 315/88.

Note that if you have a repeating decimal with 3 repeating digits,
you'd multiple both sides of the initial equation by 10^3, etc.

Suggestion: Why don't you expound over in the math newsgroup?

On the other hand, how would you get a "fairly exact" color burst
oscillator on-frequency and keep it that way?

You have to understand the ELECTRONICS part in order to do
that. That ties into "RADIO." Get the connection? It's peachy
keen to know all about continuing fractions and stuff but let's
look at the number "88." Factoring it out results in an 11.
If you are generating, say a color burst frequency, that 11
would be in the numerator, not the denominator. That implies
a MULTIPLIER of 11. [ever have to build a frequency
multiplier?] A multiplication of 11 is a bit hard to do even
though GE (among others) solved it with tubes back about a
half century or so in the past. [I can tell you how they did it
even if it isn't explained in the ARRL Handbook]

Hint: 56.818 181 818 ... KHz is involved. How?

The numbers only APPEAR to relate, but the numbers aren't
oscillating and generating RF. Try to stay focussed HERE.

So...how much RF have you done up at Ku-Band territory?

Len Over 21 wrote:

Note that if you have a repeating decimal with 3 repeating digits,
you'd multiple both sides of the initial equation by 10^3, etc.

Suggestion: Why don't you expound over in the math newsgroup?

We can always tell when Lennie's feeling "cramped"...as in someone
else has the temerity to DEMONSTRATE the skills Lennie BRAGS about.
Sheeesh.

Steve, K4YZ