Skip to main content

UAE Vehicle Test

As an expat in the UAE, it doesn't make economic sense to buy a fancy new car if you have no idea how long you are going to be here.  My own vehicle is a young and sprightly 2004 Dodge Durango 5.7 litre V8, which does 0 to 100km/h in about 7s,  uses only 14 litres per 100km in fuel and cruises at 120km/h at slightly more than idle speed.

The Al Ain Traffic Department has a large test centre, driving school and registry, which is always overcrowded and getting a vehicle processed there can take half a day if all the Dust Devils are smiling kindly upon you.  This year, I went to a small test centre in Al Foah, a village on the outskirts of the city instead.

They open at 8am and I was first in line.  I had my car serviced at the dealer the week before, so I left the service papers on the front seat.  The test then took only a few minutes.

For the exhaust test, the vehicle is put on a dynamometer, but since the big Dodge is all wheel drive it always just climbs off the machine, so they test it at idle, which is probably not much use.

Inspection = 120 Dh
Insurance (3rd party UAE and Buraimi) = 750 Dh
Parking fine in Dubai = 100 Dh
Registration = 105 Dh

In by 8am and out 30 minutes later - probably less than the time I would have spent looking for parking at the main test centre and well worth the 15 minute drive to get there.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

On topic comments are welcome. Junk will be deleted.

Popular posts from this blog

Unlock CRA PDF Forms

Unlock Canada Revenue Agency PDF Forms It appears that there is a relatively new PDF feature to prevent casual copying and saving of a file and that some programs save PDF files with these foolish features active by default.  Many forms from the Canada Revenue Agency are locked in this way, which makes it difficult to do one's taxes, since one can fill the form, but cannot save it.  One can only print the form.  It should be possible to print to a file or export it to a new PDF file, but it is far better to reset the annoying anti-taxpayer flags, since the 'printed' form cannot be edited easily any more and I always manage to make a mistake or three that need to be corrected after review. If there is a Linux (virtual) machine handy, install qpdf and use it to reset the silly flags: $ su - password # dnf update # dnf install qpdf # exit $ qpdf --decrypt lockedfile.pdf unlockedfile.pdf One doesn't need a password to unlock these flags, so the fix is instant. La voila! He...
Post a Comment
Read more

Parasitic Quadrifilar Helical Antenna

This article was reprinted in OSCAR News, March 2018:  http://www.amsat-uk.org If you want to receive Satellite Weather Pictures , then you need a decent antenna, otherwise you will receive more noise than picture. For polar orbit satellites, one needs an antenna with a mushroom shaped radiation pattern .  It needs to have strong gain towards the horizon where the satellites are distant, less gain upwards where they are close and as little as possible downwards, which would be wasted and a source of noise.  Most satellites are spin stabilized and therefore the antenna also needs circular polarization, otherwise the received signal will flutter as the antennas rotate through nulls. The helical antenna, first proposed by Kraus in 1948, is the natural solution to circular polarized satellite communications.  It is a simple twisted wire - there seems to be nothing to it.  Various papers have been published on helix antennas, so the operation is pretty well ...
2 comments
Read more

OpenEMS with Octave and SciLAB

I wanted to do some advanced RF antenna development work and needed an electromagnetic field solver that is a bit more up to date than NEC2 .  Commercial solvers from Matlab , Ansys and others are hideously expensive (in the order of $20,000 to $50,000) and do not fit in the wallet of a hobbyist or a small consulting company.  Recently, openEMS became available and it fills the niche with a capable free tool.  In general, openEMS is a solver - a Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) numerical engine.  You interact with it through Octave , which is almost identical to Matlab .  You can watch a good video by Thorsten Liebig here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=ThMLf0d5gaE   Getting it to work is a little painful, but it is free, so bear with it - then save a backup clone, or a zipped copy of the whole virtual machine directory and NEVER update it, to ensure that it keeps going and doesn't get broken by future updates, right when you are ...
Post a Comment
Read more