On 5/30/2008 Roger (K8RI) wrote:
> According to the NWS literature a strike a mile away can induce voltages
> as high as a 1000 volts per meter in a piece of wire.
One interesting item of note, and this article is making me "think" (a bad
thing)
This weekend I got a tour of a USCG Cutter (The Katherine Walker WLM 552), and
something I noticed when we walked past the LAN room - they are NOT using
100BaseT LANs, but everything is fibre optics
I wonder if fibre (which, interestingly is mostly "the past" in LAN design, as
gigabit baseT is around) would be the/A future way to deal with our gear.
Think - no ground loop potential, no voltage surge potential etc. Not cheap,
by a long shot, but...
I mean, we HAVE to switch to USB in the near future, be interesting if we could
jump to fibre
and RE Serial Ports. Back when I used to work in electronics for a living,
computers were still VERY expensive items, and I designed a few ISA cards for
custom work (did you know that IBM sold a tech manual with all the
voltages/pinouts and timings of all the busses?) Anyway, one of my managers
insisted that EVERY signal in and out of those cards go through an
optoisolator. The ones I was using only had a few hundred volt rating, but I
will tell you - sometimes nasty stuff happened to the units I was connected to,
and we lost an optoisolator, but we NEVER lost a PC. Guess that's how you
build things when you are used to building things "Mil Spec" - you should have
seen some of the specs for "out of tolerance" voltage inputs on some of the
units we worked on. TTL level input - hit it with 1000 volts, make sure
things still worked
--
73 de KG2V
For the Children - RKBA!
Ox2B | ~0x2B
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