Hi, is everyone hibernating? Nobody is testing gear, operating outside, coming up with new ideas worth posting? If not I hope you are at least sharing this site... We need some action here :o While I'd rather keep this community small with quality people, 287 members is a bit low... I also have been the main poster lately... We all need to contribute to keep this place open. Thanks!
Gil.
I'll try to turn a few my club guys on to it. Most I'm sad to say are not as young as they used to be.
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I'll admit I'm guilty of not doing much at all in the way of radio recently, consequently I have little to post here. The most interesting thing going on in my life right now is also what's occupying the majority of my time; airplanes. I'm currently working on my instrument rating and when I'm not doing that I'm often in the maintenance hanger working on airplanes as I simultaneously work towards my A&P certificate. My amateur radio skills are put to good use though, I've already used my knowledge of electronics to troubleshoot several avionics problems and my instructors are always impressed when I effortlessly identify the Morse Code ID's on VOR's.
FB Chris. I'd love to mount a radio in a.plane some day, maybe an ultralight, which in Europe are more like light sport planes... One quarter wave wire per wing ;-) I sure miss flying, but not holding patterns...
Gil
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Maybe someday I'll work aeronautical mobile although it would likely be phone instead of CW. I'm pretty good at copying/sending code, and I'm pretty good at flying an airplane, but I don't know if I want to combine two "pretty good" activities in an extremely unforgiving environment just yet. 8) Hard to imagine that when they first put transmitters in planes it was with a straight key in an open cockpit! It makes my fully GPS capable plane seem trivial in comparison, hell just my iPad alone that I fly with has more computing power than the rockets NASA sent to the moon..........of course a lot more pilots got killed back in the early days well.
You can't even listen to VOR or MDB station's identification in Morse anymore... :( ;D
Gil.
Quote from: gil on May 10, 2017, 12:52:40 PM
You can't even listen to VOR or MDB station's identification in Morse anymore... :( ;D
Gil.
The VOR's still transmit a Morse identifier and technically so do NDB's but good luck finding a working NDB. Interestingly I sometimes find it difficult to copy the ID's because they are sent at such a painfully slooooooowww speed.
Guilty here too. Work, wife, kids, house... life. Work is over the top right now with 3 projects behind schedule and in the home stretch (short strokes), and I'm involved in all 3. I've done almost no operating this year.
One thing competing with ham radio is marksmanship. I'm back to shooting and reloading regularly.
Same here between work and taking care of the house there hasn't been much time to do anything. And loosing a week with the evacuation oder because of Oroville Dam has put me that much further behind.
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QuoteAnd loosing a week with the evacuation oder because of Oroville Dam has put me that much further behind.
What's going on there? I no longer get that kind of local/regional news...
Gil.
When I get as chance I'll take some photos and post in the Technical forum about how I used a $6 eBay Bluetooth receiver to tie into the planes intercom system to stream aural alerts from my iPad - and iTunes :-) It's not ham radio but it could be and some may find it interesting.
Quote from: KK0G on May 11, 2017, 08:30:29 AM
When I get as chance I'll take some photos and post in the Technical forum about how I used a $6 eBay Bluetooth receiver to tie into the planes intercom system to stream aural alerts from my iPad - and iTunes :-) It's not ham radio but it could be and some may find it interesting.
Please do! I'm interested. I mainly design analog electronics and I've not kept up with how cheap and plug-n-play lots of the digital stuff has gotten.
It's all microcontroller driven now, which is actually easier. The Arduino platform brought a lot of new people into electronics, and now has made its way into transceivers. I am getting into Arduino just to avoid being left behind...
Gil.
Quote from: gil on May 11, 2017, 04:27:32 AM
QuoteAnd loosing a week with the evacuation oder because of Oroville Dam has put me that much further behind.
What's going on there? I no longer get that kind of local/regional news...
Gil.
It all started back on February 7, 2017 with failure of the main spillway on Oroville Dam, at the time of failure the release of water was only 55,000 cubic feet a second. The spillway was designed to handle 200,000 cfs. They shut the spillway down to inspect the spillway and to do some testing. In the mean time with the large amount of rain and run off coming into the dam the water level was rising quickly. During this time the State government was telling everyone everything was okay.
On February 11, 2017 the State reassured everyone that everything was okay, and that the use of the Emergency Spillway would need to be used for the first time when the dam reaches capacity. And they started releasing 55,000 cfs out of the damaged spillway.
On February 12, 2017 the emergency spillway was used and all was going as planned by the State. I can't remember the exact time but by early afternoon the order was given for everyone in the Feather River water shed below the Oroville Dam to evacuate immediately and that the Dam may fail within the next 60 minutes, so 200,000 people went running.
On February 14, 2017 they started lifting the evacuation order for certain areas, and about a week for all orders to be lifted.
To date the Dam is still in various failure modes. The Emergency Spillway is in failure mode and is unable to be used. The main spillway is still damaged but they continue to use it to maintain water level. The Power House on the Dam continues to have issue because of excessive use as a way to release water because the main release valve for the dam has been damaged for the past 7 years and is unable to be used. The main Dam wall that is 770 feet tall has a failure point on it that they are trying to hide from the public.
Quote from: Joe on May 11, 2017, 02:32:24 AM
And loosing a week with the evacuation oder because of Oroville Dam has put me that much further behind.
Many facts here, hopefully all correct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oroville_Dam
And this is Wikipedia at its best: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oroville_Dam_crisis
This topic interests me since many friends and relatives live downstream of huge dams in Scandinavia.
Geez... As usual it seems officials will lie to cover their ass. Sounds right out of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Nobody to take responsibility or do anything productive...
Gil
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I grew up in Chico, 18 miles north of the Oroville Dam, so upstream😀. We used to take field trips in school to the dam when it was being built in the early 60s. Since then I have run Telecom cables inside of the dam itself. If it ever breaks is going to be a big deal with a lot of life/property loss. I never understood why the emergency spillway was made out of dirt. It just stands to reason that if water went over it it would wash the earthen made dam away and breach the dam, and I dont have a engeneering degree:-) I guess they never though they would have to use it.
Joel
N6ALT
Time to dig out your low VHF gear - Sporadic E season has arrived. I see contacts happening right across Europe on 6M.
I knew something odd was happening when I was getting good signal reports into the UK on 20M!
http://www.dxmaps.com/spots/mapo.php?Lan=E&Frec=50&ML=M&Map=W2L&DXC=ING2&HF=N&GL=N
Yes, I need to try my PRC-352 again, but 6m FM is hard, too few people using it...
Gil.
Quote from: Sparks on May 12, 2017, 01:52:24 AM
Quote from: Joe on May 11, 2017, 02:32:24 AM
And loosing a week with the evacuation oder because of Oroville Dam has put me that much further behind.
Many facts here, hopefully all correct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oroville_Dam
And this is Wikipedia at its best: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oroville_Dam_crisis
This topic interests me since many friends and relatives live downstream of huge dams in Scandinavia.
All the info is correct, just got my hands on two independent reports, the Dam is nowhere near safe or will be ready for this rainy season. They have found major structural cracks in all the flood gates that they tried to hide with paint. The main drain valve at the bottom of Dam is and has been inoperable. Out of the 56 sensors on the Dam only 3 work.
With all the work that's been going on nothing has been started on the emergency spill way. The green spot on the face of the Dam has been swept under the rug they dropped the water level below that point so the grass will die off. There are problems with the valves to the power generators which is currently the only way to get water out of the Dam. This should be a interesting winter.
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Wow Joe. That doesn't sound good. Are there links you could post on this? I have friends in central CA that would be interested.
Hi Bob, this is a link to there preliminary report.
http://documents.latimes.com/report-finds-serious-design-construction-and-maintenance-defects-oroville-dam-emergency-spillway/
Pm me your email and I can send you the 124 page report, I don't have a link for the new one because it was emailed to me by a friend.
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Another link summarizing the report
https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/just-in/2017-07-27/bob-bea-takes-us-deep-dive-through-his-dire-oroville-report
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To be perfectly frank, when politicians tell you 'All is well.' you should be prepared to take care of yourself, because this is a common theme. I remember one particular earthquake in the Los Angeles area, where the commercial radio and TV were reporting 'no damage' and that we should continue our day, however, the ham 2 meter system was rife with first hand reports of broken gas MAINS spewing fire, cracked overpasses on the highways , buildings collapsed and more. "All is well" rarely is.
One other was a loss of power over several Western states, which was being reported as a local outage, but my HF ham radio running on a vehicle battery told a very different story in real-time from hams in those States, using emergency power.
RadioRay ..._ ._
It was that way before the evacuation, the state kept saying everything was fine, and a certain amount of erosion of the emergency spillway was expected. If it wasn't for Butte County Sheriff Honea being at the right place at the right time and talking to a geologist about the true danger. The people would have been left in the dark. Sheriff Honea is the only reason there was a evacuation after he learned that a potential complete failure was possible within a hour.
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