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Cake day: March 31st, 2025

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  • transformers are not the only way to do this, and some other circuits can be used instead. if you take a transformer with 1:2 winding ratio, then if on one side current is 1 and voltage is 1, then on the other current will be 0.5 and voltage 2, which means that impedance increases 4x. in EFHW, it’s 1:7 winding ratio and impedance ratio is 49x, which works for end-feeding a half-wave dipole, just as expected (from 50 ohm to ~2500 ohm). that transformer is a limitation on power usable in this antenna and main reason to use this type of antenna is mechanical

    most importantly, transformers work nicely only if you have real impedances, so your antenna has to be resonant anyway. l- or pi-network tuner will also handle complex impedances so doublet or random wire will work nicely with it, as long as you can accept weight and losses in tuner



  • it depends on whether you want to transmit or not. if not, you can just use random wire antenna

    random wire antenna is exactly what it says on the tin - length of random wire strung up as high as you can, as long as you can make it work. the other part is ground, where you might want to lay some lengths of wire and connect them in a single point, to act as radio ground. it won’t have right impedance (probably 50 ohm) but for receive, this is ok - it’ll be probably usable, and you can amplify signal without penalty because amplifier noise will be much smaller than atmospheric noise already present. the amount of power bouncing around is tiny and can’t damage anything

    if you want to transmit, you’ll need more elaborate antenna. what you can use depends on whether do you have a tuner like neidu3 describes or not. if you do, common choice is doublet which is a specific length of wire connected to tuner with a 400-ohm parallel line. if you don’t, common choice is halfwave dipole which is halfwave long, and put as high as you can get, either vertical or horizontal, but for practical reasons mostly horizontal, or monopole, that is quarterwave long, but requires lots of wire on ground to act as radio ground. you can make them shorter using coils, but this makes bandwidth narrower. in any case, it’ll be need to be tuned to your band in question, for which you need a tool like nanoVNA. tuner also narrows your bandwidth, but you can retune it so it doesn’t matter that much. (it’c called instantaneous bandwidth)











  • Manufacturers, knowingly or unknowingly, use commercial-grade PG when making cough syrups to cut costs.

    i’d note that there’s zero technical reason why DEG would end up in PG. reaction of water with ethylene oxide gives you ethylene glycol, diethylene glycol and higher analogues and these are then separated by distillation. propylene glycol is made from propylene oxide instead, and it’s more expensive than ethylene oxide. diethylene glycol has little use on its own, at least compared to other glycols

    however,

    The physical properties of diethylene glycol make it an excellent counterfeit for pharmaceutical-grade glycerine (also called glycerol) or propylene glycol




  • so the way i understand it, at first refinery strikes had little impact because other refineries still had slack capacity. but even before that slack capacity was gone, it had a further effect that now fuel was not prepared in places it used to be, so it had to be hauled longer distances. meaning logistics is strained and some fuel is used to haul it, and also now fuel production is more concentrated

    at some point that slack capacity was gone and fuel went from not where you need it to not existing at all. there already were shortages in some regions. that and still large demand for fuel for farming caused decrease in exports. there was a refinery that only produces products for export, and its output wouldn’t be directly usable as fuel (they only distilled crude into fractions, still high in sulfur etc) but it was also hit so exports from it don’t matter because these are none

    at any rate these developments are on borrowed time because it only takes maybe half year to repair more advanced parts of refinery, so under certain droning intensity they can just roll on. everyone involved knows that, and looks like situation will get worse for russians




  • …and that means retirees will literally starve and live on the streets? I don’t think it will. It will just be less luxurious.

    you might think that japanese boomers have generational wealth in form of real estate. this is not really the case, especially for rural population. houses aren’t built to last, lose value like motherfucker and are commonly demolished after 20-30 years, in part because people don’t like second hand, in part because there’s no point of building anything sturdier if typhoon or earthquake takes it. there is some newer construction that is intended to last longer, but it’s not a very common thing. so a reverse mortgage type thing won’t exist there, and yeah lots of people will get shafted by these conditions