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

PCB Mill

PCB Mill Kit My latest toy is a small PCB Mill, a CNC 3018 Pro, there are many available from Ali Express for the enormous sum of 285 Dirhams or so, which is about 70 Euro. I thought that even if it didn't work at all, it would not be a big loss. Assembled CNC 3018 Kit It will help if you have a little previous workshop experience, but these machines are so simple and relatively slow moving, that any radio-geek can safely experiment. Carving With a V-bit in a Puddle of Oil Of course I can have boards made in China by Dirty PCBs , but what is the fun in that? The problem with making PCB antennas, is that you need to experiment to change the design 1 mm this way or that, to tune it just so and just such and having to wait 2 weeks for each experiment doesn't work. A few hours playing with a router is more practical. It turned out to be a pretty nice little kit, made from aluminium and 1/4 inch Bakelite (paper reinforced phenol formaldehyde). This Pre...

Yagi Antenna for 900 MHz ISM Band

I like tinkering with wire antenna designs, since they are simple and cheap to make. Mr Yagi invented his antenna about 100 years ago, but there are still some things left to learn about it. 900 MHz ISM Band Yagi The 900 MHz ISM band ranges from 902 to 928 MHz. Covering the whole band with a single Yagi antenna is difficult, since they are inherently narrow band devices. Consequently some tweaking is required and the result below is a desensitized design that can be built and replicated quite easily, but you need a network analyzer - "To Measure, is to Know!" A Yagi generally consists of a Reflector, Radiator and one or more Director elements, arranged on a boom. For a small Yagi, a wooden ruler works a treat, since one can easily mark the position of the wires. The wire elements are fastened to the bottom of the ruler with hot glue. The wire elements are made from straightened out jumbo size paper clips. The balun, is tw...

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 ...

Aeronetworks sro - Airborne Linux

Search This Blog