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Showing posts with label parachute. Show all posts
Showing posts with label parachute. Show all posts

Sunday, October 15, 2023

Spy Rigs, Para Sets, Bugs, and Enigma Machines -- Dr. Tom Perera W1TP (video)


This is a really amazing presentation by Tom Perera W1TP to the Fairlawn (NJ) Amateur Radio Club. 

There is so much great info in this presentation.  Some of the highlights for me: 

-- The U.S. Civil War telegraphic (wired) spy set was just mind blowing.  I had never heard of this.  

-- The way the Nazis transmitted a signal 1 kc off the BBC frequency, so that Germans who tuned their Nazi-issued receivers to the BBC could be detected by neighbors (from the resulting 1 kc tone!) and turned in to the Gestapo.  

-- "Things don't land gently when dropped by parachute." Indeed.  This was a reminder of the courage of the young women who parachuted into Nazi-held territory during WWII.  Like Paulette.  It was great to see her with her Paratrooper wings on.  AIRBORNE!  And the picture of the operator with the bicycle generator was of Virginia Hall.  See: https://www.npr.org/2019/04/18/711356336/a-woman-of-no-importance-finally-gets-her-due  That portrait hangs in the hallway of the National War College. 

-- How they put the schematic of the PRC-5 right into the box.  Great idea.  But it had a terrible receiver.  One of the schematics showed a 455 kc IF and a BFO.  So they sent in superhets, not just regens. 

N2CQR operating the Para Set of G3ROO around 2009

This video makes me want to build a Para Set. 

Thanks a lot to Tom W1TP and the Fairlawn ARC. 

Wednesday, September 14, 2022

SolderSmoke Podcast #85 With Mike Herr WA6ARA June 8, 2008 WIZARD ISLAND!

When I was putting this podcast up on YouTube, I needed a picture of Mike Herr WA6ARA who was my guest on this episode.  I found a picture of Mike activating a summit... THE SUMMIT OF WIZARD ISLAND!   That is Wizard Island (above).  Mike and his wife are shown at the summit (below). 


I really liked talking to Mike, and to listening again to our conversation.  But I realize now I should have asked him about parachutes!  I'd been talking about the great picture of the Phoenix lander under canopy as it descended to Mars.  Mike made and tested parachutes for NASA!  


You can fire up a YouTube playlist that will bring you a steady stream of SolderSmoke podcasts here: 

Here is a report from Mike on the Wizard Island activation: 

Monday, May 24, 2021

Parasets, Parachutes, and Tubes in "A French Village" Season 3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Un_village_fran%C3%A7ais

In season 3, Episodes 7 and 8, resistance members parachute in from London.  They are equipped with what looks a lot like a paraset.  One of their tubes develops an open filament.  The Germans engage in radio direction finding.  The Morse code is fairly good (but not great).  All in all, there is quite a bit of radio-related material. 

"A French Village" is a very well-done series.  But it is (of course) quite dark. 

Saturday, January 9, 2021

A Parachute that Flies Home Autonomously

 

Too often ham radio bloggers and podcasters tend to focus their efforts on the projects of, well, older guys like us.  I think it is a good idea to direct attention toward young innovators, the next generations of people who are working on interesting new projects using new technology.  

Yohan Hadji is definitely one of these young innovators.  He is 16 years-old and is working to develop a system that would guide the parachutes of descending balloon payloads to designated safe landing areas.  Having spent a lot of time chasing the parachutes of Estes rockets, and after having to PERSONALLY guide my own parachute to a safe landing area (sometimes without success),  Yohan's project caught my attention.  

The videos above describe the project.  

A Hack-A-Day article provides good background: 

https://hackaday.com/2021/01/07/gps-guided-parachutes-for-high-altitude-balloons/#more-454705

And finally, if you want to support Yohan's work, he has a GoFundMe site: 

https://gofund.me/c0ae8d1f

Sunday, January 3, 2021

An End to the HDR - SDR Conflict? Kevin AA7YQ Combines the Best of Both Worlds

We've had some pretty amazing contact with Kevin AA7YQ over the years.  Kevin and I originally bonded due to our common experience with parachutes  (he was smoke-jumper, I jumped while in the army).  Kevin once used a parachute to insulate a QRSS beacon.   And one day, while thinking about SolderSmoke during a drive through Montana, Kevin turned on his rig only to hear... ME!  He caught one of my infrequent CW contacts. TRGHS.  

Now we hear that OM Kevin may be poised to end the HDR-SDR civil war that has for so long been dividing our great podcast.  Can Kevin's new rig heal our wounds and allow us to enjoy the beauty of SDR waterfalls while not forsaking the joy of hardware defined rigs?   Kevin will soon launch a blog describing his effort at rig-building. See below for a preview.  Stay tuned.  

Kevin wrote: 

I am currently working on a new rig design.  It is a hybrid HDR(Hardware defined)/SDR radio that incorporates some classic superhet design along with some of the more useful features of SDR.  I have found that pure SDR is really not that enjoyable for me.  I love using GNU radio to mock up and test design concepts, but SDR basically dilutes the “magic” of radio to nothing more than software and touchscreens, stuff we use every day all day.  Its not the Ham Radio I grew up with as a kid and was fascinated by.  On the other hand, I have always fought temperature drift, large variable capacitors minimal tuning range, and associated with classic VFO and VXO designs.  In fact, in 1997, for my senior capstone design in EE at Montana State University, I designed a 20m superhet that used a DDS LO.  At the time DDS was cutting edge technology I used an AD7008JP50.  I had to beg and plead with ADI to get a couple samples for my design, since they exceeded my self-funded college student project budget. ðŸ˜Š  But that’s another story.  SDR has made me grow extremely fond of the waterfall display.  I love having the visual “situational awareness”  of what is going on in a moderate bandwidth outside of the spot I am tuned to. I also am a big fan of digital filtering and modification-ability that comes with boot-loadable microcontroller designs.  So this design includes most of the real highlights of SDR but does not take the fun out of designing,  building, and operating a HDR.

Anyhow, this design is a big goal of mine to complete and build in 2021.  I am not retired yet so I still have to balance, work, family, and tinkering time, but I am very excited about this project.  I have “noodled” this design to the point of what I have achieved full-on “analysis paralysis”.  That is, I keep designing and redesigning, optimizing, and figuring to the point where after months of thought, I have nothing to show for it ðŸ˜Š.  So my New Years goal for 2021 is to make “good enough” rather than “perfect” design decisions and move forward.  I will keep you posted on the design and possibly start a blog so I can get some peer review input from the greater RF Design/Homebrew community on my project.  I’ll keep you informed on my progress.

Saturday, April 5, 2014

Parachutist's Helmet-Camera Images Falling Meteorite



Just because it is pretty cool.  Also, we like parachutes, meteorites, and Norway.

Our book: "SolderSmoke -- Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics" http://soldersmoke.com/book.htm Our coffee mugs, T-Shirts, bumper stickers: http://www.cafepress.com/SolderSmoke Our Book Store: http://astore.amazon.com/contracross-20

Thursday, April 18, 2013

Yellowstone, Smoke-jumpers, and SolderSmoke on 20 CW


Bill,

It has been a long time since I have written to you.  I’m the ex-smokejumper up here in the great winter wonderland known as Montana.  I thought I’d drop a quick note to say howdy and fill you in on the crazy string of events that happened this afternoon.

To refresh your memory…. I stopped jumping fire in ‘09, I have continued to be employed with the US Forest Service as a radio technician.  Part of my duties is to do annual maintenance on all of the Gallatin National Forest VHF handheld radios.  So every winter I update the programming and check the VCOs, RX specs, modulation, and TX power on about 250 handheld radios (luckily the USFS provides me with a handy Aeroflex 3500 service monitor that speeds up this task, but I digress). 

Anyhow I had finished programming and tuning a large batch of radios and today I was making my rounds to deliver them to the various offices.  My route was from Bozeman (where my shop is) to West Yellowstone (where I used to jump out of) … through the North side of Yellowstone Park to Gardiner), then  following the Yellowstone river north up the Paradise Valley (where I grew up as kid) to Livingston (where I live now).  I must say it’s an absolutely beautiful drive that took me to 6 of my delivery points.  This time of year Yellowstone Park is closed to normal traffic, but official Gov’t use is permitted, so you see very few other vehicles, it’s a pretty neat time of year to be in the Park.

Continuing….I stopped at the smokejumper base to deliver their radios and visited with some of the “bros” for a bit then headed on my way.  As I drove off I was thinking of my very last fire jump in Yellowstone and it reminded me that I had written to you back in ’08 about my last jump and listening to “Soldersmoke” while waiting for my ride home.  So today as I drove on through the Park I turned on the old Yaesu FT-747 that I installed in my work truck to accompany me on some of these long drives.  I did not have the mic or key with me, so I was “voiceless”, but I put the 20m stick on my hustler antenna and turned it on anyway.  I enjoy tuning in to some CW while driving and just listening to random QSOs to make use of my drive time by honing my CW skills.  Just after I turned on the radio I heard some a W7 station calling CQ and listened for a while in hopes that it might be W7ZOI, I always am listening for the callsigns of the QRP gurus out there, no luck though it was not Wes.  I continued listening for quite a while.  On the final leg of my trip from Gardiner to Livingston, I was just north of Yankee Jim canyon in Paradise Valley when I heard a very rhythmic CW pattern.  It was almost musical sounding, so I tuned it in good, put the narrow filter on and listened.  It sounded like the OP was using a Vibroplex bug key, due to the long dash patterns, but the way he keyed it was almost like CW R&B..it was a little tough to copy but fun to listen to none the less.  Anyhow as I continued listening, his callsign was KC0MTC in Des Moines, IA and you can guess who he was talking to…none other than yourself, N2CQR!!  I couldn’t believe I had just been thinking about “Soldersmoke”, in fact I had even checked the podcast on my iPhone before leaving West Yellowstone to see if a new podcast was posted yet.   Then a hour or so later, I hear you live on 14.058500 MHz.  What are the chances.  I was frantically thinking of a way to jury rig a cable of some sort to plug into my key jack.  I was hoping you would make another contact so  I could pull over, take a 15min safety break,  rig up a key out of headphone cable or something and give you a call by touching the wires together.  Unfortunately, you disappeared right after the QSO with KC0MTC.  I think you went QRT after that.  I tuned all around the CW portion of 20 searching but no luck. 

Either which way, I got a big kick out of it and thought it was quite a coincidence.  I figured you would appreciate the story.  So here is your signal report into Montana …

You were just above the noise this evening, which is quite high S3-4 due to the engine noise in my mobile. You were readable most of the time but dipping into the noise occasionally.   I heard you tell him you were QRP but missed the power level you were using.  I’d give you an RST of 549, this was about 1730 MDT.  Not bad at all for QRP and 1800 miles or so….KC0MTC was booming in a solid 599.

Anyhow 73’s,

Kevin – AA7YQ

Friday, April 10, 2009

Parachutes and QRSS

Kevin, AA7YQ, has made innovative use of a parachute. You are right Kevin, this must be a first:

Howdy Bill,
It’s Kevin here in Montana, the ex-Smokejumper. I’ve been meaning to write again. Thanks for the nice comment on SS #100 I got a kick out of it. Anyhow, just thought I’d drop you a note to let you know I finally had a weekend to design and build up a QRSS beacon. I used a Cypress PSoC CY24123A uC to function as the Crystal Oscillator, and keyer. The final is two paralleled BS-170 MOSFETs running in Class-E mode to give me about 560mW out with a 7.5volt Lantern battery as my supply, total system power efficiency is about 63%(RFout over DC in), I’m sure this could be significantly improved, but good enough for now. After several hours of tweaking the capacitor values I finally got the oscillator to fall into the 100Hz window. That was MUCH harder than I had anticipated. With the original version I switched the PA on and off for true QRSS 3 CW, but found this made a significant frequency drift problem. So I added a couple parts and modified the PSoC code a bit, now its running CWFSK, switching about 1.1pF on and off one leg of the XTAL, shifting the frequency about 10Hz and much more stable.

My first tests were with the board sitting on the bench under the desk lamp. This caused all kinds of drift problems. I then put the beacon in a Tupperware container and placed it inside a soft case cooler. I was looking around the shack for a blanket or something to further improve the insulation, when low and behold sitting in a garbage sack… was a condemned FS-14 parachute (equivalent to the SF-10A) that I was planning using for something useful. So I wrapped the chute around the cooler and stuffed it all back in the garbage sack. Surprisingly, temperature stabilization was achieved, beyond my expectations.

The beacon is running good now, nice and stable. I’m fairly certain, that in the history of mankind, no one has ever used a parachute to improve the temperature drift characteristics of a QRSS beacon. Anyhow, I plan on having it fired up quite a bit, so that my antenna is actually put to some good use. It seems I rarely get a chance for one to one contacts anymore. Most of my free time is spent designing and building the radios I never use. Ha. I guess the design and building is the real fun for me.

Anyhow, I’ll talk to you later. 73s Kevin, AA7YQ

PS the Beacon is sending “AA7YQ” followed by a several second pause. It’s showing up on the K6HX grabber between 10.140050 and 10.140060.

Designer: Douglas Bowman | Dimodifikasi oleh Abdul Munir Original Posting Rounders 3 Column