Technically, making transceivers work when there are 30 of them in vehicles next to each other can get difficult. People wonder why you can buy a dual-band walkie talkie for $60 but the one in the police car costs much more. If it's well engineered, the one in the police car has some RF plumbing that isn't in the $60 walkie talkie.
You are exactly right. One thing though, it's "Ham" or even "ham". It's not an acronym. Thanks!
You do know that science isn't the only reason to go to space, don't you?
There is the issue of continuing the existence of the Human race, and whatever other life we choose to bring with us.
Planets and suns aren't sure things, you know. We sort of take ours for granted, but there is the evidence of the sky around us. And the ominous silence of a galaxy that should be filled with intelligent life...
Is anyone still taking June 7 seriously? And where is it supposed to happen now? Cape Caneveral instead of Vandenberg? I would certiainly drive down if they held it at Vandenberg. I was there for the first try on DISCOVR.
The first test was supposed to come off much earlier than May. There are both commercial launches and government ones in the way, and there was the Helium pressurization issue which put some things off schedule.
It's said that making a mistake in manufacturing work on equipment for the Russian space program could have consequences a lot worse than just being fired.
It's true that we place more value on lives of famous astronauts lost than we place on all of those people inconveniently freezing to death because they have nowhere to sleep but our city sidewalks, etc. Nobody's holding a years-long investigation about them.
And I am totally, totally pissed off at all of the news coverage that goes to a few westerners killed on Everest compared to the 10,000 little people who got buried alive in Nepal.
But I am not sure any of this says a thing about what nation will lead in space.
Saturn V is the ride to orbit, not the vehicle for the astronauts. You can't just count the cost of Saturn V against the shuttle, you need to count the cost of one or more vehicles that were never built, because the Apollo would not have been sufficient to the task.
Make that "Little Joe II test for the Apollo capsule". The Saturn V sat that one out
The first big test is next week. They will do a crew escape test from a scaffold, rather than a rocket, with the Crew Dragon getting away from an assumed "exploding rocket" on its Super Draco thrusters, and landing safely for the presumed crew. I doubt the capsule is reusable for much other than drop tests after an escape, and soft ground landings for the capsule are not scheduled to be a feature until well after the start of its manned use.
There will be a full escape test after this, perhaps later this year, in which the rocket is launched and the capsule escapes at Max-Q. Something like the "Little Joe II" test for the Saturn 5 when I was a kid.
Soyuz has killed its own astronauts. Progress is an unmanned Soyuz.
Crew Dragon and Falcon will kill astronauts too. Much as I cheer for SpaceX and hope for a wonderful future, this really is rocket science and people will die. That is the price we pay.
It's actually pretty easy to prompt a visit from the army if you pop up on frequencies where you are not expected, in some countries. Never mind any nice citizen-consulting sunshine-respecting mostly-independent part of the Executive Branch like FCC. Guys with guns come.
There are more licensed hams today than ever before. Part of that is because we modernized the licensing rules and don't have a Morse code test any longer (for which I take partial credit). And they already have a commercial niche. Most of them have jobs. Many of us got those jobs because of the skill we developed through Amateur Radio. In general they pay as well or better than offering ISP service to the boonies.
We don't want to see commercial use of those frequencies, even if such use would help some folks get more equipment, because if that happened, there would not be room for Amateurs any longer.
You should consider that all of the ham HF frequencies together are smaller than one WiFi channel. And they have global range. So, if you offer a good bandwidth signal to some home in the boonies, you have potentially used up that freuquency for the whole world!
I really have noticed people who were looking for me, standing outside of the mailbox store looking confused.
What's the point of the external marker? I never had issues identifying an Uber vehicle when it was coming to pick me up. External markers are obviously needed when you're hailing vehicles on the street, but they don't do that.
I'm familiar with the Microchip implementation. This is a 300-MHz-class 32-bit processor. Not particularly modern and not really fertile ground for R&D.
We did have two or three suggestions from commenters of open MIPS processor implementations, some of which are more modern. One uses a proprietary high-level HDL, which I haven't investigated.
The hostile environment is sometimes present in subtle ways, such as important discussions that occur spontaneously in the men's restroom
Look, if you find your work environment to be hostile then that's entirely your opinion and none of us here can really judge except through what you just wrote.
That said, what you just wrote makes me wonder if I woke up this morning in a parallel universe. Important discussions happening spontaneously in the men's restroom? Seriously?
I have spent my entire life being a man. In this time I can remember exactly zero conversations that took place in the bathroom at work. I have never taken part in one, I have never overheard one happening whilst I've been doing my business there. I do not believe this is some bizarre fluke - there's a strong social convention amongst men that nobody interacts with each other in the restroom. This social convention is only slightly less strong outside the workplace: it's extremely rare for men, even friends, to dawdle or hold a conversation longer than a few sentences in the bathroom. This is one reason why men's bathrooms tend not to have long queues outside them.
In contrast if I had a pound for every time I've been out with a bunch of women and one stood up to say, "I'm going to the bathroom" and suddenly the others all decided they needed to go right at the same time
If you seriously believe that men are frequently having important business conversations in toilets then I don't know what to say to you. You either work in an extremely weird office, or you live in a country with radically different social norms, or no such conversations are actually happening but you've already decided you're being excluded somehow and can't figure out how or when, so decided to blame potty breaks. In which case you're just paranoid.
The best book on programming for the layman is "Alice in Wonderland"; but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.
