Shows you how much attention I pay to religions predicting the end of the world. I never heard a word about the rapture until it was over. If mortal existence ended at 6:00 PM y’day, it didn’t have any effect on my bingo game. See the kind of important things I miss by not reading newspapers and watching TV? Next thing you know, somebody will come along and tell me there’s a war going on.It being my day off, I read six articles on antennas and related matters. It would be hard to find worse reading. All of it is full of jargon and gobble-de-gook. The beginner’s material starts of by expecting the reader to be overjoyed that the new Google Android is “backported”. I can hardly contain myself. Oh, and you are supposed to know what this new Android is, because it isn’t the other Android. This one is a copy of the Arduino brainboard I’ve been using.
The time I spent reading is easy to explain. I’ve run out of projects to do with just LEDs. I need some other type of sensors to do more robotics. A good robot needs vision of some kind, not just flashing LEDs. I know I’ve gone here before, but the sensors are so damn expensive. Motion, infrared, and pressure sensors start at around $30 each. A three axis accelerometer is $60 and speaks a foreign language.
Sensors are another blind alley of the electronics world. Very little information is available at the learning level. I’ve not found a single source that describes if it is possible to build one from components. In the end, I’ll likely just buy one and find out later the alternatives. For instance, nobody said a word about the Arduino being unable to store live data or print graphs of the results. Not one word, the bastards.
Same with antennas. Of the 50-odd sites visited, not one of them has a clear explanation of the most critical part: how to connect the wiring to the antenna. In the one or two instances that had a picture of the joints, none had a written set of instructions. It is really this wiring that changes the antenna from a piece of wire into something that works, yet nobody on the planet Earth has the brains to explain it so a newcomer would understand. I’d do it, but this blog is not an electronics textbook.
But I’ll tell you about the wires to use. That’s plural “wires” because you need two. Since I use only dipole antennas, the wires go to each end of the dipole, or in the case of a split dipole, to each half. The first type is two identical wires in a plastic strip casing, a product known as “TwinLead”. You’ve seen this wire if you’ve ever hooked up an ouotdoor television aerial. That’s all it is, two wires. They are held apart by the plastic casing (this casing and the distance apart are very important, don’t mess with them).
[Author’s note: I was surprised to learn about this twinlead wire. We know that antennas are directional, but they are also anti-directional. You see, the twinlead itself also acts as an antenna, but the theory is that the television station will transmit on a plane parallel to the ground. The twinlead is supposed to run from your antenna down to the TV, which is vertical to the ground. Hence, it picks up almost no signal. Now I see why the antenna should be at the highest point on your roof. It prevents you from running a long wire sideways to your television set. Those “standoff” insulators running down the antenna mast are also important. Twinlead is affected by nearby metal.]
The other common type is coax, and the outer wrapping is always the ground. I borrowed this photo from Flat-Broke Experimenters, as they are one of the few sources that keep explanations simple. The (unknown) author flatly states that in his 30 years experience, he is convinced all antenna people don’t have a clue what they are talking about. If he’d had Google back then, he could have figured that out in fifteen minutes.
Furthermore, mistake or not, in the absence of any clear documentation, Agent M and I are proceeding with the assumption that wireless Internet and WiFi are the same thing (just you try to get a straight answer out of anybody about that) and that both are ordinary FM radio signals. It is no easy matter to find accurate information about this type of subject, although strangely after you find out for yourself, a lot of the people you asked earlier start acting like, “Oh, is that what you meant.”
Last, that was Big Al on the line. He’s the guy researching the Internet for a single valid business opportunity. I’ll talk politics with the Al, but my knowledge of names and current actions is limited. I know the concepts but not who is championing or opposing anything. Big Al says we are on the verge of civil disobedience. I say the government learned in the 1960s the danger of not having every person on file and will never make the same mistake again. Dare protest today and your name goes on the profile list.
