Al's Blog-o-Sphere

No, I didn’t misspell that title.

Now that I have two TVs and a converter box and have had time to play around with them, now that two of our local TV stations have dropped their analog signals, I think I have a pretty good idea how well digital TV is going to work and it’s not a pretty picture. Continue Reading…

Here’s the latest article on the Warlocks Robotics team’s success at Atlanta:

Lockport Union-Sun & Journal Online – SCHOOLS: LHS robotics team finishes 3rd in world championships.

As I write this, I’m in a hotel room in Knoxville TN. We’re driving to Atlanta for the National FIRST Robotics competition. It’s a long drive and a long weekend once we get into the competition, so I insisted on taking it easy on the drive down. Continue Reading…

What’s EME? E-Me? And who is Eve? And where is Adam in all this?

Ham Radio operators in Germany have announced that they have successfully bounced a radio signal off of the planet Venus and received the echo back on Earth. The round-trip that the radio waves made took about 5 minutes, which would make it hard to carry on a casual conversation!

Most people not familiar with Ham Radio don’t realize that Hams have been communicating by bouncing their signals off the moon since the 60’s. Recent contributions by computer software and digital signal processing techniques have made this even easier.
Continue Reading…