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Oh so true... I had a Radio Shack setup. Two small bookshelf speakers and a receiver unit that was dimensionally the same as the speakers. 5 Watts, maybe. In the early 70s, I wanted to upgrade. I wanted the Marantz, would have settled for the Yamaha, but ended up with a Wintec R1030. Interestingly, I still have it.
I also remember riding my bike from Wheaton, MD to the Lafayette in Rockville. Lafayette had higher end gear.
Me...I worked a summer in '71 as an intern at the GM Tech Center (in the carburetor flow room - shows how long ago THAT was). That winfall allowed me to buy two things; a Datsun 510 - I know, blasphemy - and a Pioneer component stereo system (separate tuner & amp, 100W and speakers w/ 12" woofers). I was "Da Bawz" when I went to college the next year.
JoeP and Company: Building a (presumably) multi million dollar exotic electromagnetic wave emitter, with all of the latest and greatest technology, tools, and engineering minds money can buy.
But can't be bothered to use a $10 Stanley plumb bob. Uses 3/4" nut tied to wire instead. Well done sir.
I'll be honest, i wish i had your problems. Finding good work is TOUGH right now. I've got almost 2mill in backed up CERs because we don't have the internal labor. Outside labor is just about impossible to find and when you do it costs 3 times as much.
I have nothing useful or visually interesting to add to this post so here is a picture i took outside my back door the other day.
JoeP and Company: Building a (presumably) multi million dollar exotic electromagnetic wave emitter, with all of the latest and greatest technology, tools, and engineering minds money can buy.
But can't be bothered to use a $10 Stanley plumb bob. Uses 3/4" nut tied to wire instead. Well done sir.
Heh.
They're actually the flanged square-nuts that you use inside unistrut. But point taken.
The transmitter itself, and surrounding components, was about $1.1m. Add in the rest of the room, the electrical work, the plumbing work, etc., and we're just shy of $2m overall.
All of the RF pipework is done as far as the output ports on the switchgear which will feed the main and aux antenna combiners. A different company will make those hookups, hopefully within the next week or so.
We installed all of the amplifier modules today (72 of them), flooded the cabinets, re-bled and topped up the cooling systems, and turned it on.
Started very slowly, just running it into the test load. Got it up to about 27 kw, and decided to call it a night and start back up again tomorrow. End goal is 32.6 kw, which is what we need to put into the main combiner to make full licensed coverage.
I took this one earlier today. 4 of the 6 rectifiers currently running. Was showing the new guy some calibration and verification procedures.
4 of 6 is good for a Saturday. Weekdays all 6 are running 8k amps at 60-80 volts.
Typically each load is only in the tank for about an hour. Our product mix was slow today.
Jeremy is the broadcast coordinator at Sears tower. Basically, he's in charge of the communal RF systems: the antennas, the combiners, the poles, pretty much everything that happens to my signal after it leaves my switchgear.
Two weeks ago, we were up on Sears 100 discussing my new feedline run to the west combiner. He was talking his usual **** about how Covid is an overblown hoax. He reminds me a lot of Braineack in that regard. Vaccines are BS, it's just a bad cold, the mortality rate for healthy people is zero, etc...
The Friday before last, we spoke on the phone, and he sounded pretty rough, explaining he'd gotten a positive covid test result, and was going to be out for a few days.
This past Monday, I learned he was in the hospital on a ventilator.
I just got word that he died today. He was 49.
To give you some idea about how fit and healthy this guy way, after the Chicago River flooded Sears and knocked out all power last year, this dude walked up 102 flights of stairs to open the main breakers in all of the TV and Radio rooms, so that our transmitters wouldn't freak out when the power was eventually restored. None of us even asked him to, he just knew it was the right thing to do.
Is the whole Covid situation being used and manipulated by politicians for political gain? Absolutely.
Are liberals using this manufactured crisis as a platform to advance their agenda of increased government control over every facet of our lives? Very clearly so.
Are corporations such as Pfizerna absolutely cashing in on it? Hell yes.
Does any of this make it less serious? No, it does not.
Last edited by Joe Perez; Dec 11, 2021 at 08:47 PM.
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I'm a senior software engineer that works almost exclusively with other university qualified engineers and am shocked that several of them believe that Covid is mostly hype just like Jeremy and have not been vaccinated.
When educated people believe this, despite the global statistics staring them in the face, I'm not surprised that there's so many dis-believers.
This minority who have chosen not to get vaccinated, are putting the rest of us risk for their own mis-guided beliefs and have the gall to believe that they're the victims.
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This minority who have chosen not to get vaccinated, are putting the rest of us risk for their own mis-guided beliefs and have the gall to believe that they're the victims.
I would love to flame on the absurdity of this post, but then I remember that this is not one of the political threads. It is the random picture thread, so I will post a pic instead.
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