greatartiste

If you ever want to see how many radio amateurs are out there in the field doing activations (summits on the air , parks on the air even bunkers on the air) in your part of the world then this website is excellent ..

https://fieldspotter.radio/

Sometimes if they get to hot or following many many heating/cooling cycles the insulation varnish on the transformer windings starts to fail leading to short circuit issues.

For a human who deals with student work or reads job applications spotting AI generated work quickly becomes trivially easy. Text seems to use the same general framework (although words are swapped around) also we see what I call 'word of the week' where whichever 'AI' engine seems to get hung up on a particular English word which is often an unusual one and uses it at every opportunity. It isn't long before you realise that the adage that this is just autocomplete on steroids is true.

However programming a computer to do this isn't easy. In a previous job I had dealing with plagiarism detectors and soon realised how garbage they were (and also how easily fooled they are - but that is another story). The staff soon realised what garbage these tools are so if a student accused of plagiarism decided to argue back then the accusation would be quietly dropped.

Check if your phone has dropped to 2G. It is rare to find a location which only has 2G coverage but when it happens while voice/sms works OK data speed drops to almost zero.

When my Mother first started wandering my first thought was there had to be some technical solution but I'm afraid the way that the mind with dementia works means that there isn't.

We tried both Airtags and GPS trackers but neither worked that well. My Mother was never one for carrying a handbag so wouldn't pick one up out of habit when leaving the house so they couldn't go in that. We tried attaching them to clothing or putting them in pockets but if something feels unusual or not as it should then she would remove it.

In addition GPS trackers need to be charged and we found the granularity of data from Airtags in the suburbs wasn't that great (sometimes only updating once an hour or so).

Back in the late 80s I had a job servicing the 2 way radios used by bus drivers. Then you could smoke of buses & it caused a lot of problems not just for the passengers but for the electronics getting into volume controls , channel selector switches and that sort of thing. You would open up a radio and inside the contents had turned a yellowy brown colour , often it was impossible to make out the original colours of the wires. The trick was to put the entire radio circuit into a bath of luke warm water with washing up liquid. After 10 mins or so the nicotine residue would float up and form a yellow scum layer on top of the water. Quite disgusting.

Once at a Farnborough air show many years back there was a display from an aircraft maintenance company with small sections of the skin of old airliners. On those if there was a small imperfection of the metal skin or the seal to the window or a door you could actually see a brown smear of nicotine on the white painted skin. It allowed ground staff to spot problems at an early stage.

These things are now everywhere , not just litter but an environmental horror story and a fire risk as well. Previously I had seen them & wondered what they were then this Big Clive video explained all ..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N65DpT2nqEI&ab_channel=bigcl...

I must admit the ones with 1500 mah batteries are very useful.

No I must admit that is even lower than I thought they were capable of , yet somehow doesn't surprise me.

Yes I'm seeing those as well. The pictures are just a little to perfect & the job history non existent.

I never thought I would say this but LinkedIn seems to have gone even further downhill than it was a few years ago. You know things are bad when even the low end recruiters seem to have left the platform. These days 90% of the contacts/connect requests I receive are from dodgy pension "advisors" trying to get their hands on my pension pot cash.

I bought an SoundBlaster16 DSP card on the basic premise it had a DSP on it as I wanted to do some audio processing. Not sure if it actually did have a DSP IC in it as Creative never released any info on how to program it. The disappointment was made up for because the day after my card arrived the supplier sent a second one by mistake then the day following a third one. They never realised their mistake so I was able to sell the spare two so had some spare cash for more useful toys.

Not sure where you are but this may be linked to the number of resignations and vacancies in many big companies at the moment. I have been trying to buy some high value electronic instruments at work for the last 12 months but it is turning into a nightmare. Some suppliers won't reply to emails , others promise to arrange a sales engineer to visit but never do. Finally one company seemed interested and sent a pre-sales engineer who took details then vanished , then I was told that engineer was ill but another would come out to get the same info. They came out then the same happened again and I'm told the pre-sales engineer has left and another needs to be sent out.

This same pattern seems to be repeating a lot these days.

It's quite possible the manager who wanted the post you applied for has gone and your appointment had been forgotten about. HR would have been involved but don't like to leave their homes at the moment so this happens.

Back in the day I used to have to repair the CRT monitors for these. They were incredibly heavy and you could do yourself serious harm just lifting one from a box onto your bench. The reason for the weight was that once you had removed the plastic cover there were several layers (depending on the model) of metal screening around the circuit boards. An unusually good level of EMC screening for that time. I presumed these things were all built to military/govt spec to prevent TEMPEST eavesdropping ? Anyway removing all of that wasn't a quick job.

As for the IT part of the workstations I don't ever remember them going wrong they just ran & ran.

Thanks for your post. I'm aware of Jindalee and the Russian OTHRs which claim to detect aircraft (and I believe the claim) but they are very different from WSPR.

My station transmits 10 watts (and that's on the high side for WSPR) into an omnidirectional wire antenna. Some WSPR stations use directional yagi antennas but that information isn't contained in the WSPR data. A WSPR transmission lasts around 1 minute 50 seconds but the frequency shift/signal strength is only calculated the once during that transmission (not sure if by averaging). A transmission has to start within a second of the start of an even minute. Some stations are GPS locked but I just click the PTT on my radio to start the transmission while looking at the time on my digital atomic receiver clock.

In answer to your questions some WSPR stations transmit every 2 minutes while others like mine only transmit once or twice an hour.

I can't agree more , reading this every bullsh*t alarm in my brain was triggering. In his report Mr Godfrey never mentions the frequencies used for the WSPR transmissions. This mode can be used on VHF/UHF frequencies where it may reflect from aircraft. But 95% of WSPR transmissions are on frequencies below 30 MHz and most likely below 20 MHz. These have long wavelengths and highly unlikely to be affected by an small (in wavelength terms) aircraft. If it could be affected by aircraft then Mr Godfrey would have to take into account the movement of every aircraft in that region at the time which he doesn't appear to be doing. As a note of explanation I'm a radio amateur and a WSPR station operator , its a brilliant tool for propagation studies but not for this.

Sadly not all Agilent/HP equipment uses rotary encoders like this. One of their function generators was brought to me with a clear rotary encoder fault. I opened it up expecting to find a rotary encoder like this. But instead found they had implemented it using circular tracks on the PCB and the knob turned a metal wiper which shorted out the tracks as it turned. After a couple of years of use the tracks start to develop grooves and wear out. There isn't much you can do without replacing the entire front panel which wasn't economic to do. I think within 5 years we binned 15+ of those units. Old HP/Agilent equipment was beautifully made but in the few years before the sale to Keysight quality took a real dive.

There can be a very fine line. A few years ago I worked with someone who was a bullying objectionable arse especially to younger staff. Eventually it all caught up with him and with HR breathing down his neck he managed to acquire a Asperger's diagnosis which was his get out of jail free card. A colleague of mine called it 'medicalising c*ntishness'.

I do some work in a certain field of digital signal processing. From time to time I look at the latest academic papers in that field and am always shocked by the poor quality. Probably 90% of the papers couldn't be repeated due to a lack of source code , the worse ones just have Simulink 'blocks' to illustrate the code. The techniques in this field used by industry for commercial products are never mentioned it's as if they exist on another planet. I can only presume anyone who knows what they are doing in this field works in industry while what remains in Universities have to produce a certain number of papers every year despite the quality. It really is a waste of everyones time and effort.

The Russians have just started transmitting from a new OTHR called Konteyner ..

https://planesandstuff.wordpress.com/2020/02/25/russian-othr...

also ..

https://planesandstuff.wordpress.com/2020/03/06/konteyner-fo...

The HF bands are full of OTHRs at the moment. There are Russian ones , Iranian ones and a British one from Cyprus among many others.

This is an interesting thread as despite working for many many years in IT I know next to nothing about SAP. I have worked with people from all parts of the IT ecosystem over the years but not SAP. It appears to be its own little closed world that some people enter but then never leave.

That observation aside does anyone know who writes or customises the SAP NetWeaver for Windows programs ? Is that the function of a highly paid consultant somewhere ? I have seen a few of these in different places and the common factor is they always look like they were written in Visual Basic circa 1992. The one I use makes the same beeping sound if a transaction fails as it does if it succeeds. If the transaction fails this is signalled by status box text saying so in a green font but if it succeeds then text says that in a red font. It takes a special mind to come up with that !

Years ago I was involved in a project to scrape certain info out of a SAP system with a web interface. It would have been easier to do it with a API but my conversations with the SAP people at work were going nowhere (is it me or do SAP IT people have no concept of how things are done outside the world of SAP ?).

Anyway I started looking through the Javascript the browser automatically downloads and found there was 10s of MBs of un optimised code only a tiny percentage of which was being used. It was horrific and it was easy to understand why the system was so mind blowingly slow.

That works - Many thanks

I did that and am trying to access via Twitter but just hit the same paywall.

My wife used to be a Talk Talk customer in the days of dial ins. Anyway 5 or so years back they suddenly started billing her credit card again monthly for the service she had cancelled years before. We couldn't stop this online as their system claimed no knowledge of her so I had to call the support numbers listed on the Talk Talk website. These went through to the usual Indian call centre but what went on there was very unusual. The first operator wanted my wife to post him her VISA statements to his home address (as they would get lost in the post if we sent them to Talk Talk). Another call brought an operator who said he could only trace what had happened if my wife gave him her VISA number and CVV over the phone !! I tried to call their Fraud Prevention office but got another Indian who wanted a VISA number before we could proceed.

After multiple calls one day a call was answered by an Irish voice who was very apologetic and arranged a refund which arrived a few days later. Attempts to tell Talk Talks UK office about this went no where as all calls seemed to go to the same Indian call centre.

Since I have read that Talk Talk had closed their Irish call centre for reasons of cost and now all support is from their Indian call centres. Avoid this company at all costs.