Monumental science

It’s not commonly known that the Monument in London was constructed not only to commemorate the great fire, but also as a scientific laboratory. Two of the great scientists of the day, Hooke and Newton performed experiments in basic physics and materials science.
Yesterday evening, some physicists, myself included from Queen Mary University visited with the intention of performing the first experiment at the monument in several hundred years.

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We were successful!
The real science will start once we’ve made the equipment modifications needed for easier operation in the basement lab of the monument.
More to follow as it happens.

VHF Radio Coverage

I’ve just discovered a nice tool for plotting radio transmission coverage. Here’s where I can expect to get a signal too from my home location.

Where 100 watts of 145 MHz RF will get, from my home QTH
Where 100 watts of 145 MHz RF will get from my home QTH

Yellow shows 0.50 μV signal level, Green is the 1.58 μV signal level

This seems to match up quite well with contacts I’ve had on the two-meter band, but with less power actually used. I’ll have to play a bit more and see how it says my station will perform on other bands.

Time lapse with a GoPro

I’ve a long standing interested both in experimental photography and time lapse photography. Back in October I picked up a new GoPro camera in the hope of using it for astrophotography, but it tuns out to be rather unsuited to that. The GoPro Hero 3, does have a time lapse mode though, so I’ve been playing with this recently.

Taking one frame every 5 seconds, a fully charged GoPro battery only lasts around 3 hours, it also drains the battery even if you’ve connected external power via the USB charge socket, once the battery is drained, the camera shuts down. The trick for longer recording is to remove the battery from the camera, and just run from power supplied to the USB charging socket.

I’ve had good results with a Samsung branded in-car (cigar lighter) phone charger connected to a 10 Ah sealed lead-acid battery. With this I’ve been able to record for over six hours.

The next project is to get the GoPro powered when in its waterproof case. Then I can leave it recording in all sorts of conditions. This will either mean drilling a hole in the case to feed a wire, of making up some kind of flat ribbon cable that can pass though the seals.

For now, here’s an eight hour time lapse, taken a few days ago. It’s just a shot from the upstairs window, if you look carefully in the first few minutes, you can see frost evaporating from roofs in the sun and the moon crossing the sky in the right corner.

Nine Years

So, nine years of affable-lurking. That’s a lot longer than I thought I’d keep this up. Not that sporadically updating a website is particularly hard work.

The domain started as a laugh, a feeble ‘joke / pun’ for those in the know, then having paid for the domain for two years, putting some content here seemed like the thing to do. Nine years ago, blogging was all the rage, so let’s install some software and start writing. Well, I got the software installed, then kind of stalled at the second part. Most of what I’m interested in interests few other people, and what of that I do document goes on another site.

Perhaps I’ll make the tenth year of this site worth reading?