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Showing posts from January 26, 2020

Road Trip

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I am back from my most recent roadtrip. I loaded up the Tesla and started letting the hands-off Full Self Drive (FSD) supervised take me to points North. First stopping in a campground in Tennesee and up to Pittsburgh for the CIDM Convex Conference (which was the best conference in years). There was a celebration of the 20 years of DITA XML. I was an earlier adopter. My presentation went well and I semi-stealth launched wisdomino. I demo'd some extra cool software we developed and will be selling in weeks to come. It's truely game changing. Of course, there will be much more than that to come. After that it was on to Franklin, PA. to meet with some colleagues in the mining division and onto the farm stopping in Olean NY for the night. I am pretty sure it was the first time I had driven across the entire Allegany National Forest. I ended up driving through the very dark forest expanse during a night time thunderstorm. Although I normally trust the Tesla FSD on the Interstat...
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I guess I cant stop buying radio equipment. I found a good deal on a few pieces of test equipment I didn't have. I had to buy them. I bought an IFR FM/AM-1200S service monitor. It is a classic. It is mostly pre digital. I consider this unit to be an "argument breaker" as far as determining what exactly is happening on frequency. It is very good at determining sources of interference and it has practically every bit of test equipment in one package. And it is battery powered. I also bought a Rigol DG1022 Function/arbitrary waveform generator, a BIRD watt meter/dummy load and a variable transformer. The only regret is that the Variable transformer is not the isolating type. I will have to figure out if I can make it isolated. It is an important piece of test equipment for old vacuum tube radios.