It was warm enough to be outside longer than ten minutes. The weatherman says this may be a record cold, so I wasn’t just kidding the past week. See the hardy souls heading out fishing even in this. Today you get the disjointed ramblings of everything on my plate, but that is often a comparison I invite. It should be a nice long entry. Here’s my day in any order.
The chill was so bad this morning I had to make a pot of hot chocolate and really hot chicken soup to get underway. It was above freezing, but you could easily see your breathe in the air. This will be a terrible welcome for Wallace if he is expecting the usual balmy, calmy, palmy winter days. I finally e-mailed the Riverside Inn up in Titusville, explaining the impossibility of getting their prices on line. By now, I am expecting the hotels in that area to crank their prices before launches. What gives me a laugh is to see them with empty parking lots when that happens. As my search widens, I find there are places who will let you park your car where you can see the launch, and they only charge $10. Nor could I be held to any motel reservation should I find out their price exceeds that of the finest camping gear.
The skies are reminiscent of Montana, bright and cloudless but freezing on the ground. This reminded me of my research on Doppler radar and I did make a few conclusions I neglected to report last month. For example, since I can only receive (not transmit) there must be a formula that allows for the fact the radar beam [I am seeking] is not being reflected 180 degrees back to the transmitter. How do I find the location of the transmitter and thus develop the correct conversion formulae?
A number of ways, actually. I could just triangulate the brightest bloom picked up (by an antenna). Or I could look very carefully at where the beam rotates next time there is a diagram on the weather channel. Or just drive over and MapQuest it. Either way, although I can detect the pulses, I have no way of displaying them as seen in the movies. You know, where the Pearl Harbor operator looks at the scope and says bogies bearing this and range that. That is beyond anything I can do.
I know they are radio waves whose travel is measured in millionths of a second. A radio wave [I think] travels around 270 yards in one microsecond, so the receiver has to really be fast. I’ll hunt around, but I don’t have anything that can collect such tiny pulses. Radar books are very hard to find and most of them are less concerned with theory than navigation. Where did I recently read about a meter that will display events in nanoseconds?
The Internet is also a loser at travel distances. If you plug in two addresses, it finds the route it wants, not the one you travel. To confirm my theory, I used Google maps to follow US1 and it does indeed wind up the coast through every jerkwater town, often sharing the same route as Dixie Hwy. Even allowing for 20% more distance, the route is still basically north-south and is probably less than 200 miles. I’ll try to measure it with a road map that has small distance markings. That’s doing it the hard way.
I found blueprints for a solar heating device that used only radiation. Usually there is a pump to keep the heated water circulating, but this had a coil immersed near the bottom of a water tank where by convection, the water was always cooler. The natural heat difference kept the water flowing by itself. I shall try to get more on it, such as how the water moves at night. And it is simple and easy to calculate I need a solar cooker for most things on my diet.
Following up on Bellamy’s statements about the Peru’s fishing grounds, I read some more on the local industry. They don’t use nets, there are so many fish, they put a suction hose over the side of the boat and vacuum up the catch. Learning from example, they had better regulate that practice or cut it out all together. I knew a normally positive guy, Pete Halford, who visited Peru back in the 80s. He never had much to say about the place. He did, however, own the world’s largest pet barnacle in a glass jar.
Last, I was finally able to find some midi to MP3 conversion software which I’ll be testing shortly. There are ever more sites that offer downloads, but in fact only send the script for the download. In other words, unless you computer is connected to the Internet, you get nothing but wasted time. And the idea of actually paying money for such software is still a foreign concept to me.
[Author’s note: Addendum to the radar experiment. The following is for review, as I do not yet have a specific location to store this information. For the technically inclined, this clarifies the goals and keeps me out of trouble. The idea is to detect the beam, not to do anything with it. I am the world’s oldest beginner at this hobby and have to start somewhere. This is a description of that start.
The experiment is in several stages. First of all, I rig up four LEDs with varying resistance and note the relative brightness of each. Then, enter the Arduino. The resistance should vary the brightness, which the Arduino accomplishes by pulse width modulation (PWM). The idea is to find out what the relationship, hopefully linear, is between resistance and PWM. I can’t tell how many times the bulb flashes on and off per second, but I can see if the bulb is on or off and how bright it is. Follow the logic?
The computer code of the Arduino can be examined to tell the frequency of the PWM. We now have a poor man’s wave detector. I’ve learned radar is in the 9000 to 9700 mH range and these waves, passing the correct antenna, produce electrical current which can be used to light a small LED. Then I should be able to find the matching PWM. By then, I will have timed the beam as shown on TV and know when to expect a bloom. End of Experiment 2011-001. Sorry if you thought I was building a crystal radio kit.]
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