A Crummy Commercial

I've mentioned battery level testing before: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2026/05/low-power-battery-level-circuit.html https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2025/01/good-old-sears.html On a recent morning the smoke detector in the basement started beeping.  The Nimh battery was down below 7.5 volts - this corresponded to just entering the BAD region of the Sears VOM: just a picture of the VOM, no test being done So I think that's a good sign, two independent tests coming to the same conclusion, the battery is just going bad.  Although maybe it's just coincidence ?  The Craftsman 82411 VOM puts an 18 mA load on the 9V battery or about 500 ohms.  The voltage level at the top of the BAD range was measured at 6.75 volts so the droop down from 7.5 volts is from the load current across the internal resistance of the battery. There is a W1FB article on a homebrew battery tester / VOM in the December 1992 issue of Monitoring Times: for the 9V: 820 ohms versus 500 ohms (11 mA versus 18 ...

not quite Bonestell quality from the US Army I mentioned the 1961 article by Arthur C. Clarke: The Uses Of The Moon  before: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2024/04/bonestell.html Here's the article: https://archive.org/details/sim_harpers-magazine_1961-12_223_1339/page/56/mode/2up But not sure if old Art knew about Project Horizon before writing the article.  He did mention that the military uses of the Moon were probably not that worthwhile - the  Project Horizon document seems to lay out winning a competition with the Russians as the main reason: Curious Droid published this video on Project Horizon:    source:  source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4t59a3y-Ww I thought the Curious Droid video was quite interesting, however others HATED the AI usage !  Now that I look at the artwork it kinda looks a little like those Chesley Bonestell paintings from the 1950s !  So I guess I'm kinda ambivalent about the AI usage.  Curious Droid is prob...

Pupin source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRUsfIW1aYM     Some internet links on Pupin and the loading coil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loading_coil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihajlo_Pupin   Michael Pupin, from Immigrant to Inventor htm:  https://www.gutenberg.org/files/66886/66886-h/66886-h.htm pdf:  https://www.eserbia.org/images/books/Michael-I-Pupin-From-Immigrant-to-Inventor-1924.pdf Note that the video doesn't mention him but apparently this guy: Campbell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Ashley_Campbell   had also patented the idea (at AT&T) so AT&T bought Pupin's patent to prevent any legal wrangling ?  We know that these patent and IP tussles (such as Armstrong versus RCA or Edison versus Tesla) are exhausting, expensive and time consuming. But still, I had never heard of Pupin before - and I used to work for a telephone company :) Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm  

C'mon AI, you can do better than this: source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLD29BMGu48 This is what Mike Kovak would have used, even in the late 1950s early 1960s, a 4 x 5 Speed Graphic (or equivalent), here is Charles Bronson as Mike Kovac holding one: I actually have two Kodak Duaflexes (the camera in the thumbnail) around here somewhere.  One I bought, the other was a gift from a nice lady in Whitefish Bay when I was a kid.  It took decent pictures but no, it wasn't capable of newspaper quality ! Here's a nice page on the Kodak Duaflex, with this photo of Vivian Vance: The Duaflex suits Vivian Vance better than Charles Bronson source:  https://www.jeremymuddphoto.com/blog/2023/8/27/kodak-duaflex-iv The focusing was strictly by guess, the finder was only for framing the shot.  With a camera like a Rollei the photographer would compose and focus the picture using the top lens.  The Duaflex exposure could be varied but only slightly.  It used 620 ...

The black Moscow skies later resulted in oily rain I was watching Ukraine: The Latest on Youtube: source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Scnurany_C8 I used to listen to this podcast a lot but you know how it is, you get tired of stuff - also the original host of the show, David Knowles, died while on vacation in Gibraltar in 2024, that kinda cast a shadow over the podcast for me. Anyway, the footage of the drone attack was amazing, Little Brother has been busy.  Was this what the V-1 attacks were like on London during World War II ? The trouble with shooting drones down is that the stuff in the air still comes down to earth (the people in Honolulu found this out during the attack on Pearl Harbor): A crane tower functioned as an anti-drone fortification: The lid of this oil tank was blown off: Take that Red Baron ! Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm 

Continued from yesterday: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2026/06/morsemaster-ii-shaped-code.html   I did try the MorseMaster II sidetone on the solderless breadboard.  It actually works pretty well.  Here is an short pulse from the LM380 output with the RC filtering: It seems to me that I tried this circuit before but found it thumpy.  This time the thumping is minimal.  The two high pass RC pairs may account for this - I may have not used the spec'd parts before.  The only problem, noticed with headphones, is backwave.  There is a low level audio signal coming from the 555 chip which is running all the time - think of it as an on frequency QRP audio station which is key down all the time ! The backwave can be reduced by adding a series resistor to the headphones, I tried 180 ohms but more experimentation might help. Update, 2026-6-18:  I tried a 1000 ohm resistor in place of the 180 ohm, really seems to knock down the backwave, of course the  v...

How many zillions of 555 based code practice oscillators are there beeping away ?  Probably quite a few - I remembered that my MorseMaster II project has one, previously mentioned here: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2026/02/bad-cap.html     But the original MorseMaster II design by Mike, KJ4LN cleverly upgraded the 555, adding shaping to the waveform and RC filtering: So I thought about adding those circuits to my MorseMaster.  One interesting note: the 555 in the Morsemaster II runs continuously so really the circuits add keying, shaping and filtering.  The steady 555 current doesn't matter that much considering the power used by the microcontroller is fairly high. First, using a solderless breadboard, here are the full pulse and the zoom in on ramp up / down waveforms all at the the collector of Q4: . 4 ms rise time 8 ms fall time Next, here is the shaped square wave, with rise and fall zooms: That's about as far as I gotten so far, I'll add the filter and LM380...