XPost: rec.radio.amateur.moderated

amateur radio - Hackaday

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Hackaday Links: September 12, 2021

Posted: 12 Sep 2021 04:00 PM PDT https://hackaday.com/2021/09/12/hackaday-links-september-12-2021/


The last thing an astronaut or cosmonaut on the International Space
Stations wants to hear from one of their crewmates is, Do you smell plastic burning? But thats apparently what happened this week aboard the
increasingly problematic spacecraft, as the burning smell and visible smoke spread from the Russian Zvezda module to the American side of town. The
reports say it occurred while charging the stations batteries, and we all
know how dicey that can get. But apparently, the situation resolved itself somehow, as normal operations continued soon after the event. Between
reports of cracks, air leaks, problems with attitude control, and even accusations of sabotage, the ISS is really starting to show its age.

Speaking of burning and batteries, normally a story about burning Tesla batteries wouldnt raise our eyebrows much. But this story out of California introduces a potential failure mode for Tesla batteries that we hadnt considered before. It seems a semi-truck with a load of Tesla batteries
lost its brakes on Interstate 80 in the Sierra Nevada mountains and ended
up flipping across the highway. Video from the scene shows the cargo, which looks like replacement batteries or perhaps batteries salvaged from wrecked cars, scattered across the highway on their shipping pallets. A fire was reported, but its not clear whether it was one of the batteries which had gotten compromised in the crash, or if it was something other than the batteries. Still, we hadnt considered the potential for disaster while
shipping batteries like that.

Attention all GNURadio fans GRCon21 is rapidly approaching. Unlike most of
the conferences over the last year and half, GRCon21 will actually be both
live and online. We always love the post-conference dump of talks, which
cover such a wide range of topics and really dive deeply into so many cool areas. Were especially looking forward to the SETI talks, and were pleased
to see our friend Hash, who was on the Hack Chat a while back, scheduled to talk about his smart-meter hacking efforts. The conference starts on
September 20 and is being held in Charlotte, North Carolina, and virtually
of course. If you attend, make sure to drop tips to your favorite talks in
the tips line so we can share them with everyone.

We got a tip this week on a video about how 1/4-wave tuning stubs work. Its
a simple demonstration using a length of coax, a signal generator, and an oscilloscope to show how an unterminated feedline can reflect RF back to
the transmitter, and how that can be used to build super-simple notch
filters and impedance transformers. We love demos that make the mysteries
of RF a little simpler W2AEWs videos come to mind, like this one on
standing waves.

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