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 The American Radio Relay League (ARRL) runs
an annual home video contest through their QST magazine. Members vote on the submissions
and then QST staff announce first, second, and third place winners in the amateur
production category. There is also a single winner for a professional production.
2012 QST Video Contest.
For some reason, the FLV video file format used by the QST page does not always
load properly in Internet Explorer, so you might need to use Firefox or Chrome.
The FLV player is a lousy choice because it does not even allow you to back up or
advance the video; it will only play from beginning to end - surprisingly low-tech
for the ARRL guys. First place in the Amateur category went to Erin King, AK4JG,
for her work in the successful launching of a helium balloon that lifted a wireless
video camera to an altitude of 91,000 feet. It used an amateur radio transmitter
to report GPS position data that allowed the launch team consisting of members of
the Columbus Georgia Amateur Radio Club to retrieve the payload after it parachuted
down into a pine tree miles from the launch point. The Automatic Packet Reporting
System (APRS) was employed for tracking. A search on balloon-borne video flights
turns up a lot of results from all over the world...
5/7/2012
 When I saw the headline this weekend about
students dropping a piano from a dormitory roof, I figured it was yet another installment
of the annual Piano Drop orchestrated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) engineering class; it was. The Piano Drop is held on the same day as the last
day that a class can be dropped. In 1972, notorious trickster Charlie Bruno decided
it would be a good idea to take a piano to the roof of the Baker House dorm ("Year
after year, Baker is the top choice in the housing lottery") and, with great fanfare
by assembled students below, send it to its undignified musical death. According
to witnesses, though, rather than go out with a cacophony of nonharmonic percussional
tones and semitones, the ceremony ended with a single, short-lived loud thud. Still,
for guys, just watching something fall from great heights and crash to the ground
is worth the trouble. Don't doubt me. This year's event marks two important benchmarks,
one of which helped boost the story to the national level. 2012 is the 40th anniversary
of the piano drop tradition, and, the reason for increased coverage, it is the first
time that dropped classes can be expunged from a student's records. As a side note,
in honor of Charlie's efforts, a new unit of measure was named after him: the Bruno.
One Bruno is "A unit of volume equal to the size...
4/30/2012
 When a worker assembling cellphones in a plant
in China hurls him/herself out of a window, it makes headlines. Like the human cost
of extracting the minerals that go into making cellphone components, people yawn
and write it off as the cost of progress. Among the many other dimensions of that
cost is one that, until recently, received little attention - cell tower worker
falls. According to a joint investigation by Frontline and ProPublica
that was aired in May 2012, there is a well-established record of ill-equipped and
ill-trained climbers who fall victim to low budget operations... and, to be honest,
their own stupidity. Cell tower climbers experience 10x more on-the-job deaths
as the average construction worker. That might seem logical and even expected given
that you normally think of a construction worker as the guy banging nails in that
new housing development down the road. However, many construction projects are multi-story
commercial and industrial buildings with heavy equipment and mammoth components
being installed in often precarious situations. We have seen the vertigo-inducing
photos of guys nonchalantly walking across steel beams suspended hundreds or even
thousands of feet in the air. The difference with the cell tower crews is apparently
lack of supervision, accountability, and most importantly, lack of self discipline...
6/11/2012
 I ran across this full-length video of the
documentary titled, "Nikola Tesla - Master of Lightning," which was aired by PBS
in 2000. It is the most extensive visual resource of information on Tesla that I
have seen. Most people, if they have ever even heard of Nikola Tesla, associate
him with gigantic high voltage generators making his hair stand on end, but his
contributions to the world of electricity go far beyond that. Aside from the lightning
machines, he also developed almost single-handedly the basic concept of alternating
current (AC) power generation, distribution, and motors. The battle, both personally
and corporately, with Thomas Edison and his proposed direct current (DC) system
is epic and tragic. Documentaries like this one tend to flourish the tale a bit
with exaggerations that build sympathy for the featured good guy du jour, so keep
that in mind when viewing. A similar documentary on Edison likely conflicts a bit
when relating who tried to hose whom in the AC-DC battle. One of the most interesting
aspects of the long-running contest - "The War of the Currents" - Tesla had with
Edison was how down and dirty the fight got. If you think mud slinging in business
and politics is something new, wait until you see how public demonstrations were
conducted to "prove" how dangerous one form of voltage was compared to the other.
Actual footage is presented where Edison's camp electrocuted an elephant...
5/7/2012
 This is a hilarious spoof that
Saturday Night
Live came up with for addressing the well-known issues with the new iPhone 5.
Christina Applegate plays the host to a panel of tech industry gurus and a "trap"
panel of Chinese iPhone 5 factory workers. "Tech Talk" faux representatives
from real-life entities CNET, Wired Magazine, and Gizmodo gripe about the funky
maps, "purple haze" from the camera, and how easily scratched the case is (these
are the top 3 complaints by users). After smarmily registering their complaints,
the hostess then presents employees from the iPhone 5 factory (Foxconn is never
mentioned by name) who proceed to sarcastically address each topic with responses
demonstrating how petty the whining is compared to their life's woes in China under
Communist rule. I won't give any more away; you'll have to watch it to get the full
effect of its humor.
10/15/2012
 Australian photographer Chris Tangey caught
this rarely seen "fire devil" on video. Just as a water spout is formed when a tornado
touches down on a body of water and sucks water up into itself and a dust devil
sucks up dust from the desert surface, this tornado landed on a brush fire and sucked
the flame up into a 100-foot high towering inferno. Hence the name fire devil. I
wonder why water spouts aren't called water devils?
9/19/2012
 Employees of Wonderful Motherboard
took to the streets of Brooklyn, NY, to ask people what they know about the Higgs
Boson. The responses are about what you might expect. One of my sisters asked me
yesterday what the Higgs Boson is. My answer was that it is basically the "equals"
sign in Einstein's famous e=mc2 equation. You can quote me on that one.
 Only recently has the importance of the role
played by of the town of Chatham (pronounced "kat'-um"), Massachusetts, in the success
of World War II been recognized to the degree it deserves. Thanks to the effort
of Chatham Marconi Maritime Center's Ed Fouhy, the extent of strategic radio operations
performed there is made available both online and, to a much greater degree, to
visitors at the physical location. The entire campus was totally renovated in
the 2009-2010 timeframe Foughy and his team produced a video that crams the story
of years of intense activities and accomplishments into a seven-minute video. About
a third of it can be viewed below, but if you want to see its entirety, you will
need to visit the Center. A separate video, also shown here, is an interview with
Mr. Foughy by the
Cape Cod Chronicle where he talks about the research and some
of the surprising discoveries that went along with his project. The U.S. Navy used
the site primarily to intercept and monitor German U-boat activities in the Atlantic
Ocean. In the early days of WWII, U-boats wreaked havoc on both military and merchant
ships crossing the northern Atlantic. They operated with near impunity because of
the genius of German commanders and submarine crews. They maneuvered stealthily
underwater and surfaced during the night in order to exchange mission intelligence
and to receive...
5/21/2012
 As you might expect, the BlendTec blender
guy couldn't resist an opportunity to see how Apple's new iPhone 5 would fare when
put up against his company's Total Blender. But wait, this time the
"Will It Blend"
contest isn't limited to just the Total Blender and a single challenger. Adding
to the excitement is a third contender - the Samsung Galaxy S3. The question before
Tom the blender guy is which phone will succumb to the ravages of the blender's
mighty cutters the soonest? I was not surprised at the outcome when considering,
present company excluded of course, the typical Apple product user versus the rest
of us. Let's just say Siri lost her soothing voice early in the game. I hope that
last comment didn't spoil the suspense.
11/8/2012
 "Today we made science fiction science fact."
"We hit every target we wanted to. We prosecuted every one." So says a very happy
Keith Coleman, Boeing's program manager for the CHAMP project. Counter-electronics
High-powered Microwave Advanced Missile
Project is the culmination of decades of work to develop a non-lethal weapon
that defeats targets without collateral damage, sort of like a neutron bomb for
electronics. From the Boeing website, "On Oct. 16th at 10:32 a.m. MST a Boeing Phantom
Works team along with members from the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL)
Directed Energy Directorate team, and Raytheon Ktech, suppliers of the High Power
Microwave source, huddled in a conference room at Hill Air Force Base and watched
the history making test...
10/24/2012
 New video documentaries about Nikola Tesla
pop up on the Internet fairly often. I, for one, welcome the flood of information
being made available on all the pioneers of electrical and electronic inventions.
For that matter, the media on pioneers of all forms of invention in the physical
word are a welcome resource be it on mechanics, chemistry, energy production, space
exploration, physics, transportation, or related topics. A lot of the material has
been in archives waiting to be digitized. Prior to that, these films were shown
in classrooms, museums, seminars, etc., where only a few people were able to see
them. Some bumbling, fat-fingered projector operator would eventually tear or burn
them, relegating the reels to the trash bins of history, thereby removing the opportunity
for others to witness the contents. If you take the time to watch the videos, some
interesting information can be learned that has not been generally known. For instance,
were you aware that Mr. Tesla's intelligence was obvious because he had very long
thumbs? Apes, it was argued, being distant evolutionary relatives, were not as intelligent
as humans and had short thumbs. Ergo, the longer the thumbs, the more intelligence
a person possessed. I kid you not. A narrator who looks like a dieting Santa Claus
takes us through a series of experiments and demonstrations thought up by Tesla
during his discoveries, and then takes us through equally ingenuous ways...
5/28/2012
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This archive links to the many video and audio
files that have been featured on RF Cafe.