Electronics

Grand knows his stuff – thank you, Sir!

The tip of the soldering iron I tried to use is too big - it bridges all five wires at once. I should’ve stopped and bought a smaller tip but, no, I had to go ahead and try. So now the right-most two of the bottom five are soldered permanently together. Copper braid and solder suckers have failed to clear the bridge.

And before that, they used logarithms which, as it happens, are the basis for slide rules and, later, some of the parts in analog computers.

I’m shifting to an Android tablet, the Insignia Flex (NS-13T001) from Best Buy for $249 and tax. They hit the stores this past Saturday and I grabbed mine shortly after they opened on Monday.

Provided with equipment, space and operating expenses by the National Security Agency (NSA), the museum is immediately next to NSA’s headquarters in Ft Meade Maryland. It contains many very nice examples of systems, starting with completely manual systems and progressing through mechanical, electromechanical and then some very heavy duty computer-based systems, both for the transfer of secret messages, and also for breaking open those secret communications.

In the previous sections, we eavesdropped on a live conversation between two ham stations, one in Windsor Ontario and the other in Venezuela on the northern coast of South America. And I mentioned that while you’ll find hams of all ages working the bands at all hours of day or night, it’s also true that the majority of them tend to be older gentlemen.

In the first part of this post, we had a quick look at a conversation taking place between ham radio stations in Ontario Canada and Venezuela where I just happened to be in the right place, Phoenix Arizona, to “hear” both of them.