I finally found a use for Hewlett-Packard printers. You know, the company that puts printers on sale a month before they discontinue manufacturing the cartridges. I reverse engineered an HP 1200 with a pickaxe and a carbide tooth electric saw. It yielded four electric motors, a dozen wheels and rotors, a host of gears and a small box of connectors and cables.
My plan to ventilate rather than air condition is paying off. The electric for the month came to just $32 without taking any measures to save money. I have visions of my father stomping around the house turning out lights and turning down the heat, yet he still died as broke as the day he was born. I take the opposite tack, I set everything to the comfort level and relax. I estimate if I accidentally leave a fan running day, it costs about 15 cents. But when I get home, there is no dash for the A/C for the room is already cool.Agent M did not make the meeting, so I used the time slot to shop for materials. And I finally constructed a superb Darlington pair. This is a primitive device that uses two transistors, one driving the other, to produce a "gain of 10,000". I built this blind, meaning I don't know what or how it is supposed to work. You can thank the "experts" out there for that. For example, not one of them stated what was gained 10,000 times. Watts? Volts? Amperes? Certainly not dollars.
However, taking the position it must be current, I proceeded to built an example. Another annoyance was the lack of documentation on which transistors to use. Going on-line just gets you a shit-load of useless specifications. So I picked two random transistors out of my parts bin. The resulting apparatus is extremely sensitive to something. Merely touching the wires, or placing your hand near the cables causes (in this case) an LED to light up. Sometimes it will flicker by itself, a condition that some claim is "detecting ghosts". I hope they are joking although they sound serious.
Next logical step was to connect the Darlington pair to the club's dipole antenna. (Why do I get the impression "Darlington pair" is a British expression?) Result: nothing. No configuration of the wiring produced 10,000 times anything. Yes, there are quite a number of ways two wires can be connected. Yet, my results were negative. I say that to mean I did not get positive results, of course, there is no such thing as a true negative situation if you learn something.
You've correctly guessed that we now know a lot about what does not work. Agent M and I have discussed the tests in detail. It will turn out to be something simple, but that is hardly a credit to all the hundreds of "experts" who fail to spell these things out for beginners. Like computer text writers, electronics people tend to present their material in isolation. They tell you how to build an antenna, but not how to hook it up and test it. You may well wonder why no electrician will ever be elected president.
Agent M and I have concluded that we should forge ahead with the experiments until they work. The other option seems to be to laboriously learn to calculate everything with no guaranty that will pan out either. Our consensus is that if we need any calculations done, we'll wait until later and hire one of those on-line experts to do that for us. And when he is done, he can sweep the floor, flush the toilet, and turn out the lights.
Meanwhile, of the hundreds of documents I've read, at least 160 are specifically about antennas. That is why I know there is no easily-located single source of information on the subject. All of our progress to today has been the result of amalgamated tidbits of data, often discovered when reading other topics. For example, in six articles on the Darlington, I have yet to find out what it actually does.
This doesn't mean we are operating in frustration. It is most upbeat at the end of every meeting to realize how much we've learned. I spent the hot part of the day at home drinking blueberry tea. It was in a sampler from Publix. It turned my teeth blue for a couple of hours. I had not planned on staying at home as a measure to save money, but it sure does work for me. Now I understand why there are so many commercials and flyers bombarding people to go out or order food in. I must get twenty pizza offers a month.
The supercomputer is in the shop. It is a custom design and that means it can only be tested thoroughly in the field. The video card, a $150 extra, was taxing the power supply, which is also a custom job, so it is back to the shop under warranty. Meanwhile, the electronics testing goes on manually.
I have both the rotor and stator of the variable capacitor built, but not assembled as a working unit. But I forgot more than most people will ever know about constructing those things.
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