Skyfall

The Church of Global Warming alarmists are getting really desperate. They are now claiming with 95% certainty that human produced CO2 is causing catastrophic global warming and that it must be stopped at all costs, otherwise the sky will fall on our heads tomorrow. Humanity needs to extinguish all organic power stations and go back to shivering in caves to prevent further warming...

Warming, What Warming?

Unfortunately for the alarmists, reality just flat out refuses to play ball and back them up. For the past 15 years, despite us having emitted massively more organic gasses than ever before, the earth simply refused to warm up. How many more years of contradicting data will it take to make the Church of Global Warming prophets admit that their computer models are maybe just a wee little bit off kilter? Could it be that there are lots of green things out there that love to breathe CO2?

Global Cooling

Anyone over 50 is old enough to remember their predecessor, the Church of Global Cooling of the 1970s. Their prophesies didn't come true either and amusingly, some of the prophets of the modern church were in the older one - professional firebrand preachers: Repent, repent, the end is nigh...

Moreover, global warming is a good thing. More warming will open up the northern tundra to farming. Russia and Canada will benefit and in the extreme, even Antarctica may be livable one day. Global cooling however, can be a real show stopper - freezing over the northern areas will cause famine and starvation on a massive scale.

Fire In The Hole!

All I can say is that some 20,000 years ago, those cave men must have lit enormous bon fires in their caves to bring an end to the last ice age, so going back to living in caves may not do it...

Comments

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 understood. Therefore,

To C or not to C, That is the Question

As most would know, the Kernighan and Ritchie C Programming Language is an improved version of B, which is a simplified version of BCPL, which is derived from ALGOL, which is the Ur computer language that started the whole madness, when Adam needed an operating system for his Abacus, to count Eve's apples in the garden of Eden in Iraq. The result is that C is my favourite, most hated computer language , which I use for everything. At university, I learned FORTRAN with punch cards on a Sperry-Univac, in order to run SPICE, to simulate an operational amplifier. Computers rapidly lost their glamour after that era! Nobody taught me C. I bought the book and figured it out myself. Over time, I wrote a couple of assemblers, a linker-locator, various low level debuggers and schedulers and I even fixed a bug in a C compiler - not because I wanted to, but because I had to, to get the job done! Much of my software work was down in the weeds with DSP and radio modems ( Synchronization,

Weather Satellite Turnstile Antennas for the 2 meter Band

NEC2, 2 m band, 146 MHz, Yagi Turnstile Simulation and Build This article describes a Turnstile Antenna for the 2 meter band, 146 MHz amateur satcom, 137 MHz NOAA and Russian Meteor weather satellites. Weather satellite reception is described here . A quadrifilar helical antenna is described here . Engineering, is the art of making what you need, from what you can get. Radiation Pattern of the Three Element Yagi-Uda Antenna Once one combine and cross two Yagis, the pattern becomes distinctly twisted. The right hand polarization actually becomes visible in the radiation pattern plot, which I found really cool. Radiation Pattern of Six Element Turnstile Antenna Only a true RF Geek can appreciate the twisted invisible inner beauty of a herring bone antenna... Six Element Turnstile Antenna Essentially, it is three crosses on a stick. The driven elements are broken in the middle at the drive points. The other elements can go straight throug

Aeronetworks sro - Airborne Linux

Search This Blog