Ham Radio Scholarships and DeSTEMber

The Austin based organization girlstart.org has declared this month DeSTEMber and dedicated it to getting girls interested in entering the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, (STEM), fields. They're adding a cool new science project to their web site every day during the month. You can check them out on their website.

When I was a kid, I got interested in electronics when my dad turned up with two giant ham radio boat anchors. Ham radio is still a great way for kids to learn about electronics. In a nutshell for those who don't know, ham radio involves communicating across the country and the world using often homemade radio transmitters and receivers. In order to be able to do this, you have to get an amateur radio license from the FCC which means passing and exam involving radio regulations and the theory of how radios work. For way more about what ham radio is and what you can do with it, check out the American Radio Relay League's, (ARRL), website. A look at the facebook demographics of the free ham radio license practice exams I wrote indicated something a lot of us in ham radio probably already knew.

Participation in our STEM based hobby might be as much as 10 to 1 guys to girls and even though there's no age limit on getting your license, and it's a great way to learn electronics, there aren't nearly as many kids involved as there used to be.

So, I thought I'd write a few posts this month on reasons that it might be worth while to get into the hobby of ham radio. First reason: scholarships for college! The ARRL administers over $78,000 in college scholarships that are intended to further interest in ham radio. In most cases, all you need to apply is a ham radio license!

Comments

The Valentine's Day Magnetic Monopole

There's an assymetry to the form of the two Maxwell's equations shown in picture 1. While the divergence of the electric field is proportional to the electric charge density at a given point, the divergence of the magnetic field is equal to zero. This is typically explained in the following way. While we know that electrons, the fundamental electric charge carriers exist, evidence seems to indicate that magnetic monopoles, the particles that would carry magnetic 'charge', either don't exist, or, the energies required to create them are so high that they are exceedingly rare. That doesn't stop us from looking for them though! Keeping with the theme of Fairbank[1] and his academic progeny over the semester break, today's post is about the discovery of a magnetic monopole candidate event by one of the Fairbank's graduate students, Blas Cabrera[2]. Cabrera was utilizing a loop type of magnetic monopole detector. Its operation is in concept very sim

Cool Math Tricks: Deriving the Divergence, (Del or Nabla) into New (Cylindrical) Coordinate Systems

Now available as a Kindle ebook for 99 cents ! Get a spiffy ebook, and fund more physics The following is a pretty lengthy procedure, but converting the divergence, (nabla, del) operator between coordinate systems comes up pretty often. While there are tables for converting between common coordinate systems , there seem to be fewer explanations of the procedure for deriving the conversion, so here goes! What do we actually want? To convert the Cartesian nabla to the nabla for another coordinate system, say… cylindrical coordinates. What we’ll need: 1. The Cartesian Nabla: 2. A set of equations relating the Cartesian coordinates to cylindrical coordinates: 3. A set of equations relating the Cartesian basis vectors to the basis vectors of the new coordinate system: How to do it: Use the chain rule for differentiation to convert the derivatives with respect to the Cartesian variables to derivatives with respect to the cylindrical variables. The chain

More Cowbell! Record Production using Google Forms and Charts

First, the what : This article shows how to embed a new Google Form into any web page. To demonstrate ths, a chart and form that allow blog readers to control the recording levels of each instrument in Blue Oyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" is used. HTML code from the Google version of the form included on this page is shown and the parts that need to be modified are highlighted. Next, the why : Google recently released an e-mail form feature that allows users of Google Documents to create an e-mail a form that automatically places each user's input into an associated spreadsheet. As it turns out, with a little bit of work, the forms that are created by Google Docs can be embedded into any web page. Now, The Goods: Click on the instrument you want turned up, click the submit button and then refresh the page. Through the magic of Google Forms as soon as you click on submit and refresh this web page, the data chart will update immediately. Turn up the:

Copasetic Flow

Search This Blog