A Crummy Commercial

Sometimes the Youtube overlord serves up something new that is actually funny: source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXww7x1wO3g Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm

Although I still haven't ordered the correct crystals I thought I would try the PA2OHH marker generator circuit but sub an AND gate for the diodes: Here it is on the breadboard:   While this doubles the chip count it does yield a cleaner looking output (pin 12 of the 74HC4060): . a zoom into the center blip, about 25 nS wide I used a 74HC00 NAND gate because I didn't have an AND gate on hand.  The second gate inverts the output from the first 2 input NAND to an AND.  The other two gates have their inputs tied high to minimize power consumption.  R3, the 10k resistor was added for when neither of the upper 2 jumpers is used and provides a logic 1 to provide inversion through the gate. Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm

I did finally try out the PA2OHH circuit previously blogged on here: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2024/07/a-closer-look-at-pa2ohh-marker.html Here again is the circuit: I looked through the crystals I have on hand and ended up using a 5.12 MHz crystal Here it is on the breadboard: There is a mistake in the top diode polarity in that picture so only the pin 6 output is being looked at - the frequency is nominally 80 kHz (no trimmer was used to get the output more accurate).  See scope captures here: zoom in on the center spike to see the pulse width correcting the polarity of the second diode on pin 13 the frequency drops to nominally 16 kHz - that's a division of 5 rather than a binary division of 4.  Unfortunately as can be seen on the photos, the output is not a pure spike, the positive blip is from the pin 6 output being ANDed together with pin 13 using diodes - if a gate had been used the waveform might be cleaner but also the circuit would be more complex.  Here are the scope c

This is a really cool article: https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/07/were-building-thermonuclear-spaceships-again-this-time-for-real/ DRACO from NASA/DARPA source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_thermal_rocket Atomic spaceships cruising the solar system !  Just like in the Heinlein stories - I recently listened to The Green Hills of Earth: https://archive.org/details/xminusoneotr/X_Minus_One-The_Green_Hills_of_Earth.mp3 where the hero is blinded by radiation from an atomic rocket motor. Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm  

I was looking at the book:  Run to Daylight   again since the Packers start training camp today: first blog mention:  https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2022/10/some-thoughts-on-run-to-daylight.html One thing with the Archive books, OCR gets done automagically during the upload process - this makes it easy to search, for example, how to go: quoted 15 times in the book.  I suppose it's something like a shortening of:  "That's how to go about it"   Maybe not :)  Is it an east coast thing that blew in with Vince ?  Or maybe something from the 1950s ?  Internet searches are worthless for  finding more info on this kind of thing.    "Way to go" is what we said when I was a kid in Wisconsin, usually in a mocking tone:  "way to go, Chuck, way to drop your lunch tray"   Way to go is quoted only 4 times: Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm

I was looking at this photo: The only ones I recognize are Bergen and McCarthy source:  https://www.facebook.com/groups/1064589890390475/ and at first I thought that everyone was wearing clothes with pinstripes - but then I realized that the narrow white stripes were all over the picture and must be some artifact of either scanning or transmission.  The only person wearing striped clothing is the woman to the right of Charlie McCarthy (the ventriloquists dummy). So I tried doing a visual search with the picture but found nothing better online.  However I came upon this photo: name your musical group: Heine and the Grenadiers ?  Yes, it is Milwaukee source:  http://theradiohistorian.org/wtmjgallery/images/wtmjgrenadiers.jpg from this interesting page: http://theradiohistorian.org/wtmjgallery/wtmjgallery1.html I hadn't thought of Radio City for a long time.  Radio City had studios and the headquarters of WTMJ in Milwaukee.  It was located on the west side of the Milwaukee river on Ca

I saw this video: source: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5XcIY3ui0EQ a 1956 Chevy !  We had one like that when I was a kid.  No fender skirts in the back though but two-tone red and white.  But I remember heat in relation to the Chevy: the Naugahyde seats which would become insanely hot in the summer - also the tube radio which took forever to warm up.  But unlike the Pike's Peak climber in that ad. our 56 Chevy was a 6 cylinder  which had a hard time maintaining speed on trips to the Kettle Moraine area of Wisconsin :)  Also, as I recall there weren't any liners in the wheel wells below the fins in the back or the headlights in the front so the sand and gravel and salt from the roads would pack in and eventually rust those four areas first.  It was a nice looking car but the '56 is the middle child of those classic Chevrolets of the 50s with the 1957 being the one that everyone likes. But remembering that car from the 1950s reminded me of this video: source:  https://www.y