Anyone in the Palm Beach area or nearby interested in becoming a ham? Come on, join us, it’s fun!
As posted to the HelloRadio list:
Announcement!
Attached you will find the February Ham Radio Class/exam sessions scheduled for 2016 at the American Red Cross in WPB, Fla.
This is a weekend class with the exam on Sunday morning.
The class is free, the exam is $15.00 and the ARRL study manuals are $30.00 and are available at the ARRL.
If you know of someone who would like to earn their Ham Radio license,
feel free to forward, copy, post the attachments and help to mentor a
new Ham into the hobby of Amateur Radio.
Albert Moreschi AG4BV
ARRL Instructor/VE aug77@att.net 561 714-6673
American Red Cross Disaster Services
So I figured if I’m gonna rant about stupid construction, I might as well also mention how not to run a facility air conditioning system.
First, the chillers.
A chiller is essentially a giant version of what’s inside a drinking fountain. It sucks heat out of water and kicks it into the air (usually, but not always… I’ve seen one that heated a swimming pool!)
Or in this case, it does fuckall nothing.
That’s the unit, installed outdoors. The long insulated weinerschnitzel on the bottom is the heat exchanger that circulates water around the evaporator coil of the sealed refrigerant system. This one uses, or used, R-134A. I wonder if it’s all still in there? The two devices on top are a pair of compressors.
It may be the Suzo-Happ Ultimate Pushbutton but it still has its limits
Like, "not 32 amps at 12vdc, you savages"
In other news, Miami-Dade and Broward counties are currently being terrorized by a large group of ATV and dirt bike riders.
Fun times. I’ll probably be able to get photos of all the rare cats in Neko Atsume before I can get home tonight. Thanks, douchecasseroles.
On a side note, Neko Atsume is the most meta thing ever. It is a true slice of modern life and Internet culture– we buy imaginary things in it and take pictures of cats.
I’d always wondered upon seeing airflow readings in cfm displayed on a room thermostat on a VAV (variable air volume) system as to where that data came from.
Well, here’s my answer. Inside a VAV box displaced during construction, I found this peeking out.
The top tube with holes in it faces the incoming airflow and is thus a Pitot tube. The dome in the middle covers and shields the end of the other hose which is the static pressure tube. A differential pressure sensor in the control unit that measures the difference in pressure can thus derive the speed of airflow, and multiplying that by the area of the duct opening gives you the volume. Simple as that.
This is actually kinda simple as vav terminals go. Some are more intricate and contain blowers. All this one has to control the airflow is a butterfly valve damper.
VAV is one of those things that looks good on paper but in practice leads to weird comfort issues. Thankfully our facility averts those all by simply never getting cool enough, so the airflow just runs full tilt all the time. Problem solved, now get me a curry chicken empanada.
Step 1: Loop a really cheezy reggaeton beat.
Step 2: choose one —
* If you’re featuring Pitbull: you’re already set
* If not: Run your vocals through the worst possible granular synthesis then time compress it, causing audible glitches from the sampling intervals and generally making it sound like you’ve got a dude rapping into a digital toilet
On a side note, that thing hanging from the valve is called a Nut-Locker and evokes some strange mental associations made even stranger by the fact one's staring at it while taking a leak.
You’re a superstar!
No, I’m not looking up examples of this for you. You’ve heard them already. Do you really want to hear more? Probably not.
This ginormous inverted pyramid of piffle is supposed to use a multi track recording of a jazz performance to interactively demonstrate to a visitor how each instrument contributes to the piece.
Unfortunately it’s implemented very badly. For one thing, if the signage is to be believed, it doesn’t work right at all. When you press a button, the selected instrument is bumped up a couple dB, but it’s by no means noticeably isolated.
Second, check this baby out. This is the speaker system seen at the top of the first picture. Not shown: in the table base is a powered subwoofer that’s not shown on the prints, I have no clue where its audio source comes from, and it was once guilty of having blown out violently, filling the gallery with capaci-funk.
That’s twelve Klipsch 70v driven speakers, each on its own circuit back to the central a/v system, where it has twelve different amplifier channels.
So today the time came to simplify… when two of the 8 channel amplifiers flipped out. The prints at left are next to useless due to countless undocumented emergency repairs over the years.
It’s not looking so great in the rack right now; the cabling will need to be cleaned up. For now it’s kinda one-year-temporary until many of the exhibits using the current system will be decommissioned.
Looks like bukkake udon all up in that poor rack. ... No, get your mind out of the gutter.
What a mess… At least Jazz Jam was using a TON of still usable amp channels, and it sounds perfectly fine with the inputs and outputs merged.
I made an awful little passive mixer out of 1k resistors and perfboard that shall never be spoken of again. Okay, as my boss says, “Good Enough For Museum Work”. Yaaaaaaaaaggghhhhh
There’s a bright side to this– when those Crown amps die, Crown fixes them. It’s $402 maximum to get the amp back to us fully happy and operational again. A new one runs about $3600, so…. that’s a damn good repair cost.
I’ve been equally happy with the support and service from Crown’s broadcast/rf division. Always a nice company to work with.
Here’s a several hundred pound portion of pure 1990s ridiculousness. It’s a Ryko Voyager II car wash. Something is badly wrong with the wheel scrubber on the left side (right of this picture) but it’s in otherwise great shape. The nylon filament brushes are kinda out of favor but they can be easily changed out.
It’s probably really lightly used though. It’s in the middle of nowhere.
The current model, Softgloss Maxx, I’ve seen some of those go to the scrap heap after three years of use. That’s just not a great thing to do to someone who’s invested a couple hundred grand in a wash.
So that, if you’re wondering, is why you still see so many of these older Ryko car washes being moved around, rebuilt, and kept in service everywhere.
If you use a Softgloss maxx and look up in the gantry, there may be a pair of nozzles on a weird gimbal structure that lets the machine rinse under a hatchback car or SUV’s air deflector. This was actually my idea and I gave it to their hopefully former director of R&D so he would shut up and leave me alone one day. Good times…
What ever happened to them making actually good systems? Well, I get the feeling that dude was in a good part responsible, he was very fond of the idea of making the machines wear out over time and even the idea of software as a service to the wash PLCs. You keep paying for a service or you’re stuck with a bay full of stationary plastic.
Back in the 90s, though, stuff was still built to last.
Such is, sadly, the modern American way. Le siiiigh
