Widespread use of CFL and LED lighting (with the cheap power supplies and ballasts) aren't helping the RFI front, either.
And the interference is even worse on some shortwave bands than the AM broadcast band...
They are the primary and secondary halves of an "Austin Ring" transformer, which is used to get 120V power onto the tower to run the aircraft marker lights. The design is to reduce capacitance between the primary and secondary far below that of a conventional transformer, so as not to short the RF signal on the tower to ground.
Flashover spark gaps for lightning protection are also found at the tower base, but usually in the form of a ball gap. They are set to flash over at voltages just a bit higher than the peak RF voltage at 100% modulation.
The tower itself generally acts as the antenna radiator, and sits on a big ceramic insulator at the base. The tower is at a high RF voltage in reference to earth ground.
Attaching auxiliary equipment to an AM tower would be a nightmare because of this fact. everything on the tower would be floating at hundreds/thousands of RF volts above ground. The power into and data out of the equipment would need special decoupling/filtering to keep the RF on the tower and out of the power/data lines. Sensitive electronics in general aren't going to like becoming part of an antenna like that, and the loading effect of bolting "stuff" onto the tower may shift the FCC-regulated radiation pattern of the station, as well.
Ever since NYC's "Radio Row" on Cortland and Canal streets was cleared out to put up the World Trade Center. And smaller shops used to be found in most areas, but nearly all have closed down due to declining sales and increasing rent.
Ham Radio became more of an "appliance operator" hobby than an exercise in building your own gear or modifying military surplus. Hobbyist electronics in general has become more about downloading "sketches" and plugging pre-made "shields" into an Arduino than actually hacking hardware.
Ebay started to absorb the better stuff that used to show up at hamfests and flea markets, leaving the dwindling number of them full of 386-era PC junk and Chinese electronic toys for twice the price you could find them for on Alibaba.
About the only old-fashioned surplus store left in the greater NYC area is P+T Surplus in Kingston, NY. They seem to be scraping by selling mostly metals and materials to artists and the like. For years , they got most of the surplus from the various IBM operations in the area, from office furniture to test gear and semiconductor fab equipment.
in just about every jurisdiction I'm aware of. Of course, your work needs to be inspected to the same standards as that of licensed contractors.
Licensing comes into play when you want to work on OTHER PEOPLE's houses, or perform such work in exchange for money.
Exactly. That sounds more like a union work rule, and that's coming from someone WITH an electrical license....
No evidence has yet shown a definitive link between MJ smoking and lung cancer. But MJ smoke contains many of the same known carcinogens as tobacco smoke, or smoke from burning ANY kind of dried plant material, for that matter.
The lack of cancer in pot smokers then would seem to come down to a few key differences:
The amount of material being smoked. Even the heaviest pot smoker is going through a LOT less material and inhaling a LOT less smoke than your typical tobacco smoker. A pack of cigarettes is the rough equivalent of an ounce of pot as far as the amount of material being burned and inhaled. A pack or more a day cigarette habit is pretty common, but smoking that much pot per day would be pretty much incapacitating for most users.
Tobacco is typically treated with all kinds of additives, burn rate modifiers, flavorings, "impact boosters", etc. Marijuana is just dried flowers.
The tobacco plant has a natural tendency to sequester radioactive material from the soils it is grown in. Commercial tobacco is usually grown using rock phosphate as a fertilizer, which contain trace amounts of polonium, uranium, radium, and thorium, all of which stay in the leaves and are inhaled when the tobacco is smoked.
In the lungs, nicotine acts like a bronchoconstrictor, tightening up airways and paralyzing the cilia of the lungs, reducing their ability to sweep out and remove deposited particulates from the smoke. THC and other cannabinoids are bronchodilators, which may enhance the ability of the lungs to "self clean" to some degree after smoking.
Many of the cannabinoids also have documented anti-cancer properties in and of themselves.
Maybe the "board swappers" worked that way, but back when I was a bench tech in the consumer electronics repair biz, troubleshooting was generally done to component level, which was really only practical if complete schematics and parts lists were available. Your shop either had OEM service manuals (if you were an authorized service center for that brand, or you wanted to spend the $$$), or 3rd party service literature such as Sams "Photofact" folders available. You had to know how to use a multimeter and a scope, and actually understand electronics, as opposed to following a symptom flowchart and swapping parts.
Swapping defective modules or subassemblies for good ones was generally only done on large console TVs which were repaired in the customer's home (by newer, less skilled techs), if at all possible, rather than hauling them to and from the shop and risking physical damage. Even then, the bad boards came back to the shop and were refurbished and put back into stock by the bench techs during slow periods.
Sure, you can fix an iPhone by swapping the individual modules. But if you want to do component level repairs (see Louis Rossman's YouTube channel), access to the schematics (which have leaked onto the web) is a huge help.
Most repair shops did just fine dealing with the transition from discrete transistors to integrated circuits, which took place slowly beginning in the 1970s, and was pretty much complete by the 1990s. Even the advent of surface mount technology in the 1980s was dealt with by shops that wanted to work on items like camcorders and other portable gear.
But once standards like analog audio and NTSC video went away, and signal processing was being done in copyrighted firmware rather than analog ASICs, manufacturers figured out that they could hide behind IP laws, multiple layers of DRM, and crap like the DMCA to justify withholding repair manuals, schematics, and even components.
The issue here is that the sellout Dems that pulled away from the drug import bill in no way represent "The Left". None of the Dems really do. Certainly not Cory Booker, who was most responsible for killing the Canadian re-importation bill the first time around. He comes from NJ, where Pharmaceutical companies contribute heavily to his campaign coffers.
The closest thing we have to an actual leftist in Congress is Bernie Sanders, who is an Independent, not a Democrat. Maybe Tulsi Gabbard, or sometimes Elizabeth Warren on one of her good days. Even Sanders is really only "left" if viewed in a US context. Pretty centrist compared to most European labor/left parties.
The rest of the Dems are so beholden to their corporate masters bribes (aka "campaign contributions") that on issues of economic justice and corporate hegemony, there really isn't a whole hell of a lot of difference between the Dems and the GOP.
offer him a comfy seat right inside one of the engine nozzles....
if they went into the plumbing aisle, to discover that a piece of 1/2" pipe doesn't have ANY dimension that actually measures half an inch....
What the gods would destroy they first submit to an IEEE standards committee.
