Radio ham neighbour
- by lizzielou
- 2012-03-30 09:03:49
- Interferences
- 2072 views
- 12 comments
Hi everyone. just wondering if my neighbours aerials could interfere with my pacemaker. He says not, but I can't be sure. Thanks
12 Comments
Don's right
by ElectricFrank - 2012-03-31 01:03:45
Ham radio is allowed to operate on a wide range of frequencies and power so it is hard to know what the risk is. You might ask him to give you a list of the bands he operates on and the power level. My call letters are W6DZG. Tell him that I have a pacer and offered to reassure you about it. I have stood right next to ham antenna's on cars with no problems You can send me a Private Message if you like.
By the way driving by the tower of a high powered AM radio station has much more energy than the ham does.
frank
Fun
by ElectricFrank - 2012-03-31 02:03:04
The W6 was Calif in those days. I got my Class B in 1949 and Class A around 1951. The numbers designated the area of the country. Then people started moving around and it slowly lost any meaning. I wasn't active during my time at WSMR. To0 busy driving back and forth from Alamogordo and flying missiles. The 2 letter calls were the early ones.
The 1KW limit changed when SSB moved in. I think there is a 4KW limit of peak radiated power now which even takes into effect antenna gain. What I remember doing in those days was adjusting the final by watching the how red (or white) the plates were and then loading the antenna to a point just short of white when I whistled in the mic..
Was that communal studying academic or experiential (or should I ask?).
I was involved in a lot of the personal growth workshops in the 60-70's. That's why I'm so weird!
frank
Frank, remember...
by donr - 2012-03-31 05:03:39
...from your days at WSMR the Radio Club at New Mexico State Univ in Las Cruces? I think their call letters were W6GB - not sure of the 6 - but the GB they always called "Grizzly Bears," & I seem to recall that the W was unusual because of their geographical location so far west of the MS River. Apparently they had that call sign from way back in antiquity, hence only 2 letters following the numeral. They were pretty proud of that call sign.
I note that yours starts out W6... so perhaps I'm correct.
I fell in w/ that motley crew, not as an operator, but as a grad student, since a goodly number of them were also grad students. We did a lot of communal studying.
Anyway, pls correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to recall that the max output power from the rig was limited to 1 KW - they always joked about some operators having water-cooled plates on the final amp & driving them beyond the magic KW - called it a "Calif KW."
I was a grad student during the Cuban Missile Crisis. What a bunch of practical survivalists that gang was. First thing they did was study the weather patterns & decided that in the event of nuclear war we were in one of the safest places around for fallout, based on our best guess on US targets.
Ah, those were the days, my friend, we thought they'd never end - but they did.
Don
Communal Studying in NM
by donr - 2012-03-31 09:03:17
Frank - Hey - that was 1961 - 63. Cow College, NM. A bunch of EE grad students, all poor as dirt; living in their univ offices, studying 7 days a week, eating the equiv of ramen to survive. And, you ask what the communal studying was - EM theory; circuits that would drive you insane; quantum mechanics, complex numbers & functions of complex variables. We even had the local contingent of Chinese students working w/ us. I felt like that chicken Winston Churchill talked about w/ the wrung neck.
Hippies came on campus one ROTC drill day to harass the cadets & had to be protected from physical violence threatened by the cowboys.. We had engineering classes in rooms where we followed an Ag or animal husbandry class & had to kick the cow flops outa the way to get in. The professor of EE was the last of a dying breed - he did not have a PhD! He earned his MSEE sometime before WW-II & worked at the MIT Radiation Lab during the war. He actually Knew the big names in radio from the 20's & 30's, & all the guys who invented the tubes we were using back then. A class in tube ckt design w/ Prof Brown was the most exhilerating history lesson I ever had. I actually had FUN in their labs & worked at night on them. A significant number of undergrads were working their way through on a Co-op program in conjunction w/ the Physical Science Lab that did a lot of contract work for WSMR labs.
Based on my EE background as an undergrad, I was surprised that they tolerated me. I was educationally disadvantaged in electronics, but the other students helped me out a lot & a lot of midnight oil earning my spurs in their undergrad courses to fill in holes got me through.
We were an eclectic bunch. Me, going through for Uncle Sam's Army; a Mexican kid named Jesus Barney from Juarez; a guy from Cuba, NM; a couple who'd worked their way up in the copper mines; a guy whose father was an associate of Werner von Braun at Peenemuende - he watched V-2 launches & hid from bombs as a subteenager; etc. That gang personified Gen Eisenhower's maxim that "...It's not the size of the dog in the fight that matters, it's the size of the fight in the dog..." And those guys were hungry! I'd sure like to find out what ever happened to all of them.
Don
Jobs & Gates & Edison, Oh, My!!!
by donr - 2012-04-01 10:04:34
Frank: well, you belong to a very special club. According to family lore, a cousin of my father went to work for Lockheed as an "Engineer w/o degree," & is reportedly the inventor of the "Click to latch" seat belt buckle used everywhere today. After WW-II, he kept trying to get back to the school grind, but the pressures of raising a family never allowed it. (Neither he nor my father served - both were 4F - & worked for Curtiss Wright as engine reps at Aircraft factories.)
The guys I went to school with at NMSU all fell into your category - they were already superb practical engineers; and, they had the time & age advantage to get the piece of paper. I earned the piece of paper, but never have had the experience & knowledge to be half the engineer any of them were. Our Dept head was one of them, also, & actually taught several senior level classes that I took to fill in prerequisites. I learned very quickly when he was in over his head on some technical subjects, so learned not to place him in that corner w/ stupid student questions.
Ah, 1953 - I remember it well. Big, glass bottles & lotsa waste heat to be gotten rid of. Sorta like the Nike control system w/ its hundreds (I vaguely recall 1200 as the number) of 6L6's (or whatever). Even in the dead of winter we needed to A/C the trailers to keep it from turning into a sauna. OSHA would have had a cow at the practices the techs used to subvert some safety devices to speed up repair time during exercises. No towers to climb, but a lot of multi-hundred Volt plate supplies - especially in the radar power sections.
Cheers.
Don
What happened to all of them
by ElectricFrank - 2012-04-01 12:04:07
Probably have afib, taking thinners, AV block, and pacers.
I know the educationally disadvantaged thing. I was a couple of steps below you. I quit school after 3 semesters at a community college. Despite that I was in charge of the entire instrumentation system in our block house with tons of vacuum tubes under my leadership. No one realized my lack of credentials until my going away party. We had a couple of civil service techs assigned to the project. I would design circuits and they would wire and test them. Made for fast learning especially with a missile test at our heals.
It seemed like every time I had an opportunity to go back to school or take workshops in some electronic area I found it wasn't worth the time. I could always seek out some PhD in the company and sit down for a chat if I needed to know something new.
I did go through Microwave School at Ft Monmouth, NJ while in the army (1953). The instructor was so tired of me that he once gave me a load of test equipment and sent me up a 60' tower to repair a problem. That would have been normal except I was only 2 weeks into the course. Not only that but I hadn't gone through the "tower climbing" course. No OSHA in those days. All vacuum tubes with 300V power supply. No safety straps either.
good old days!
frank
Solar Flares
by ElectricFrank - 2012-04-02 01:04:04
I doubt they will cause any problem with our pacers. My concern is that they will knock out a bunch of communication satellites, which we depend on for everything. No phones, internet, or pacemaker forum.
Don
by ElectricFrank - 2012-04-02 01:04:28
I'll go ya one better. In the early 60's I ran a 2 KW X-band CW illuminator. The power supply to the klystron was 10KV at 1 amp. One night while burning in a new tube it arced over. Sounded like a stick of dynamite and the flash left a black hole in my vision for 15 minutes or so. This all happened in the van lashed down on the deck of a ship off the Calif coast.
Maybe that's what started my AV bundle problems.
frank
Talking Klystrons
by donr - 2012-04-02 02:04:41
Remember the AN/FPS-16's at WSMR? They all had big Klystron output tubes. Water cooled, no less. Cannot recall the pwr output, but it was not something you'd want to absorb at the output aperature.
One day, the guys found a humongous puddle on the floor, where all the water had leaked out & the tub had shut down - as opposed to died. Open the sucker up & find a small hole corroded in the wall of the water jacket, down near the bottom.
Now the system used triple distilled water for cooling.& no one could figure out what had happened. They pored over all the manuals & schematics & line drawings - all to no avail.
It got so puzzling that they even let ME look w/ them. Having just come across the mtns between Las Cruces & WSMR, I had fought a leaky water heater just before arriving. So I started looking for a sacrificial anode somewhere. Sho' nuff, there it was, right at the top of the water chamber - all sacrificed away, w/ just the screw that held it remaining. Weird part was that it did not show up on ANY document. RCA was more than just a little embarrassed at their small omission. Nowhere in any maintenance document was there any requirement to ever check it.
Needless to say - all of them were immediately checked & a bunch found deteriorated. For want of a nail...
Don
That's a good one
by ElectricFrank - 2012-04-02 05:04:38
You would think they would have some type of measuring system to warn when the anode was gone. The other thing that is strange is using triple distilled water when the dissolving anode would contaminate it rapidly.
frank
You know you're wired when...
You run like the bionic woman.
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Why can't you be sure?
by donr - 2012-03-30 10:03:36
Have you had a problem you attribute to his antennas? You don't say how long you've had a PM, either. Granted, you would NOT have asked the question were you NOT having something unexplainable happen to you.
He would have to be running a whole bunch of kilowatts of power out of them to affect your PM. When he is NOT broadcasting - absolutely NOT. Electric Frank is a Ham operator & he'll probably chime in & second what I've said.
Here's what you do: Go next door & tell him that you think you are having a problem. You want to be sure, however, because you really don't think it's happening - because someone here (an electrical engineer who hosts a PM) told you it was highly unlikely. That the next time whatever it is occurs, you want to check w/ him to see if he was broadcasting at the same time you have the problem. You definitely do not want to cast yourself as a trouble maker or a miserable neighbor. Only as someone seeking information.
Now - if he was broadcasting at the time you feel it - you have a problem, especially if he is legal in his operation as far as local zoning on antennas & limits on power radiated is concerned. I vaguely recall from my days associating w/ Hams that 1 KW is max allowable radiated power. Also, he probably has directional antennas, so if he just happens to be transmitting right over your house there is a slightly greater chance that he could be affecting your PM.
NO matter what, this is going to take a whole bunch of tact, diplomacy & friendliness on your part to root out the cause of any problems you have. Betcha if you walk next door & talk w/ him in a curious manner, he'll be only too glad to help you root out your problems. Hams are pretty nice people in general & especially when ASKED about their rig & what it does.
Don