Author: efricha@dimensional.com (Eric F. Richards)
Date: Wed Aug 6 11:08:17 2003
Mini-circuits makes such splitters at reasonable prices. If you find the mini-circuits catalog hard to digest (I do), you can buy the same devices, repackaged, from Stridsberg. (www.stridsberg.com).
Author: efricha@dimensional.com (Eric F. Richards)
Date: Wed Aug 6 15:24:59 2003
Both the mini-circuits and stridsberg splitters (which are made with mini-circuits component splitters) provide over 20dB isolation between the radios and just over 3dB loss of signal. I know from wh
Author: efricha@dimensional.com (Eric F. Richards)
Date: Mon Aug 11 15:17:55 2003
Yes, for two reasons: 1) It prevents a ground differential from destroying equipment at either end 2) It is in the NEC. Only two weeks ago a friend of my brother lost $2000 in data comm gear at a tow
Author: efricha@dimensional.com (Eric F. Richards)
Date: Tue Aug 12 15:36:09 2003
Well, it *is* an important topic... Actually that's a common myth. You can make something "lightning proof" for most *direct* strikes, but it is extraordinarily tedius. Think commercial broadcast sta
Author: efricha@dimensional.com (Eric F. Richards)
Date: Tue Aug 12 17:02:27 2003
Close enuff... It's a charge differential that attracts lightning. The stepped leader builds the ionized channel for the initial visible lightning discharges in approximately 150 foot steps. Think on
Author: efricha@dimensional.com (Eric F. Richards)
Date: Tue Aug 12 18:47:04 2003
Nice flame bait. You *could* learn about it. I'm certainly no expert, and there are short white-papers on Polyphaser's web site about the subject. They aren't written in jargon. If you have mains con
Author: efricha@dimensional.com (Eric F. Richards)
Date: Wed Aug 13 14:35:49 2003
Polyphaser (and presumably others) sells clamps specifically made to address this problem. You can also use an exothermic weld (a thermite weld) to melt the two metals into each other. -- Eric F. Ric
Author: efricha@dimensional.com (Eric F. Richards)
Date: Thu Aug 21 00:16:41 2003
I don't know if you can call it a "top-of-the-line" rig, but the R-8500 from ICOM, a DC-to-daylight receiver, is astoundingly stable and accurate. One of my two was dead-on at 15 MHz. The other one w
Author: efricha@dimensional.com (Eric F. Richards)
Date: Wed Jul 30 17:56:44 2003
Yeah, you were! We all have our issues... the ones that get under my skin are people who use baud and bits per second interchangably, and the ARRL's horrific "bauds," people who call the power delive
Author: efricha@dimensional.com (Eric F. Richards)
Date: Tue Jun 3 22:14:24 2003
I use one of these with my RX-340, where it literally is a plug-n-play solution. This receiver seems to be a single oven but is highly accurate and has low phase noise. Software beyond the basic SCPI
Author: efricha@dimensional.com (Eric F. Richards)
Date: Wed Jun 4 09:40:12 2003
Well, beyond being incredibly picky, none -- *yet*. I'm not doing interferometry or diversity reception, *yet*, but I may want to play with it in the future. For me it was a combination of a couple t
Author: efricha@dimensional.com (Eric F. Richards)
Date: Wed Jun 4 09:44:34 2003
Indeed. I actually bought *two* of the standards; the second one will be used at a site with two 60 foot dishes at it as a reference for the LNB up at the focal point *and* the receiver down below. H
Author: efricha@dimensional.com (Eric F. Richards)
Date: Wed Jun 4 15:18:29 2003
That certainly qualifies as an interesting idea, *but*: You might want to put a pair of 1v zener diodes (or any diode that'll conduct at approx 1 v) across the input, and you want to put a pair of tu
Author: efricha@dimensional.com (Eric F. Richards)
Date: Wed Jun 4 16:35:08 2003
I still think it would've made an interesting "parlor trick" to try the WWVH standard... along the lines of an antenna-powered regen receiver: not very useful but interesting nonetheless. (I live jus
Author: efricha@dimensional.com (Eric F. Richards)
Date: Wed Jun 4 19:00:10 2003
Well, T-T assumes you know what you are doing (and read the manual) before connecting a frequency standard to the ext. standard input. The antenna input, on the other hand, should be more robust give
Author: efricha@dimensional.com (Eric F. Richards)
Date: Wed Jun 4 21:51:10 2003
Hi, Jim, I took a look at the online manual for it and it will probably do the job. However, you aren't out of the woods just yet because on the Z3801 side you'll have to block all signals but TxD, R
Author: efricha@dimensional.com (Eric F. Richards)
Date: Thu Jun 5 09:41:55 2003
Hi, Jim, Well, on the back of the Z3801A there is a 25 pin connector. In RS232 or RS422, those pins have specific assignments, some of which are useful for communicating to a modem, some of them are
Author: efricha@dimensional.com (Eric F. Richards)
Date: Sat Jun 7 16:51:49 2003
I think the interface levels are different, and the proper way of dealing with RS422 is with separate grounds for each datapath. I don't know if it is necessary, however. RS232 is very forgiving, so
Author: efricha@dimensional.com (Eric F. Richards)
Date: Sat Jun 7 19:38:57 2003
Depends if that differential pair is tied to ground anywhere. And, IIRC, a plus voltage wrt ground on RS232 is low and minus is high... and to confuse things even further, the data lines are inverted
Author: efricha@dimensional.com (Eric F. Richards)
Date: Mon Jun 9 21:06:42 2003
This part looks good. Nope. This is probably your problem. A null-modem cable connects two DTEs together. So, you want the switch set to DTE. Now on the Z3801A side, you still have to worry about jus