Posted on 02/05/2018 8:42:43 AM PST by NRx
What about the “mirage” theory that a natural phenomenon obscured the iceberg until it was too late?
I’ve got four female hams in my unit. One adult General.
Love the Cowboy Net thing.
I just got into Software Defined Radio, and introduced it for the first time in class last week.
They applauded!!
(Why?)
SDR runs on a computer, though it is hooked up to an antenna. If you have an antenna switch, you can use it to look at various band as a waterfall display. You can ‘see’ when someone is transmitting. You click on the little white squiggly line and you can fine tune it to hear and talk on that conversation.
Lots of freeware out there for it. Now they want to use the base stations we have, where as before they didn’t. Tuning to one frequency and CQ’ing to the ether is pretty old school.
I saw that when I was watching the video posted, on another video. What a tragedy. It said the Californian operator didn’t preface his message correctly, but another steamship had warned the Titanic operator about the ice, and he stuck it under his papers because he was just too busy sending personal messages, the same reason he told the Californian to shut up.
Interesting stuff.
Going to a ham meeting tomorrow night. (Attendance went up when they added food - meeting in a restaurant.)
Please feel free to ping me and keep me post on ham stuff. (Thought I’m a bad ham. My OM was an antenna engineer - EE. So he’s really into it.)
There are no bad hams, just lousy places to put antennas.
73’s
AF7RU
Let me know when the book is out. You can’t be that bad. I had to look up ‘XYL’.
Not familiar with that one, or I've read about it and forgotten about it. Not familiar enough with some of the funny optical things that can happen at sea to render a worthwhile comment.
I think the best explanation is that the sea was glassy calm and there were no waves breaking against the ice and pretty much no ambient light until the cast of Titanic's own lights made it more visible.
Sometimes an XYL ex-Young Lady is referred to as a WF (wife)
Hams have humor. (I guess that’s why they’re hams. ;) )
Book is in the draft state. Now I *have* to finish
73s
Coal Fire, Not Just Iceberg, Doomed the Titanic, a Journalist Claims
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/03/world/europe/titanic-coal-fire-iceberg.html?_r=0
Survey of experimental work on the self-heating and spontaneous combustion of coal
https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/books/book/903/chapter/4651331/Survey-of-experimental-work-on-the-self-heating
WHAT SANK THE TITANIC? THE POSSIBLE CONTRIBUTION OF THE BUNKER FIRE
https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2004AM/finalprogram/abstract_80510.htm
That Theory About A Fire Sinking The Titanic Isn’t Exactly New
https://jalopnik.com/that-theory-about-a-fire-sinking-the-titanic-isnt-exact-1790656207
I’m not a HAM, but I had to stick 16 GPM in my Navy “A” School to advance. I actually did it the faster of my entire class, and received the Samuel F. B. Morse Award.
As that was over 20 years ago (24, in fact), I have to say my sticking skills have deteriorated almost as much as my body and mind! Heh heh
Takes practice. I can do about 10 reliably, and I have an app on my phone that helps. I use it like a video game.
Good skill to have - Morse Code. I stayed a tech for many years, not able to crack the 13 WPM. (Though life got in the way of the hobby.)
Advanced when they dropped the code requirements.
Crazy enough, I got up to about 35 GPM’s... being a ditty chaser for 6+ hrs a day helped :-)
But, during “C” school, I was all ELINT. Ended up doing a little bit of everything, voice, radar/sonar, morse code, video... you name it, everything from 0 to 10.2 GHz was my playground.
Wow! Quite a bandwidth.
Thank you for your service.
I passed my Technician license last spring so I could start integrating it into our Scout troop. I’m setting up my radio room and I can’t wait to get a nice antenna and link it to a good ratio that links to my computer. I have become fascinated with the visual representation of the traffic on the bands.
Thanks for the great post!
sad
Congrats on tech. And teaching young people.
Computers have really taken over and integrating in the hobby. But Ham Radio was the ancient social media, internet.
73s
My advice on antennas, to start, is use a dipole you build yourself FIRST.
The beauty of dipoles is you can wind them up and put them in a backpack. Now there are SDRs that work on cellphones without needing wifi.
Everything is getting smaller.
Thanks for the info! I joined a HAM club and there are a lot of people that enjoy helping. I just have to find time to study the hobby more.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.