Copasetic Flow

While researching the Beverage antenna which was tested in part at Otter Cliffs Naval Station, I came across an interesting article in Popular Science from 1922 about the inventor of the crystal detector, George W. Pickard. It turns out that OM Pickard was at the Blue Hills Observatory in Milton Hills, MA working on the apparently age-old problem of global climate change when he heeded the call of the Smithsonian Institution to experiment with kites to determine the dependence of radio propagation on the height of the transmitting aerial. Incidentally, at the time, it was thought that gathering a sufficient amount of data to prove or disprove the hypothesis of global climate change would take the work of 'countless generations'. In the same issue, there are articles about the 'dwindling supply of gasoline' and charging batteries using windmills.

I saw an issue in the last two days with app engine that took me awhile to fix. I was saving pictures using the 'Snipping Tool' in Windows 7 as .png files and then uploading them to my Google app engine site. The pictures were subsequently not available on the site. I was never able to make the pictures available. However, after pasting pictures into Microsoft Pain on Windows 7 and then saving them as .png files and uploading to my Google app engine site, they became available online. I don't know what causes the issue, but it seems easy enough to avoid once it's known. Have fun!

First, congrats to KK4CDL! He passed his extra class exam with an FB 98%! A new help topic has been added to the extra class exam about the RLC resonance frequenc y. If you have any feed back, it would be greatly appreciated either here, or at hcarter333@gmail.com

A new help topic on gray-line propagation has been added to the extra class practice exam . Any feedback would be very appreciated. The ham radio practice exams have been updated again. There was a bug that was causing some tests to hang up on their last question. It's fixed! The figure E5-2 was missing, and has been added to the tests. If you spot anything else, please contact me at hcarter333@gmail.com

The restoration effort to save Tesla's last existing laboratory in Shoreham, NY got a mention in RASL #10. To learn more about what's going on and how you can help go to: http://teslasciencecenter.org/about.html There will be a conference at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Saturday November 5th to support and raise awareness for the effort. If you're interested, you can find out more at: Conference Call for Papers About the Tesla Science Center We're also working on setting up an amateur radio special event station to transmit from somewhere near Wardenclyffe that day. Any interest from the hams?

The Element 5 practice exam is ready to go at http://copaseticflows.appspot.com/hamtest . The grid below shows which elements are required for the different FCC Comercial Operator Licenses.

The flying rockmite that uses official Dash! dogbone antenna insulators is featured on Dashtoons.com this week! Jeff K1NSS also waxed poetic about wire antennas. Check out the awesome cartoon !