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AM phasor has no setting for 'stun'
Today on Geerling Engineering, my Dad and I toured the tower site for WSDZ-AM, located in Belleville, IL. It's a 20kW AM radio station broadcasting with an array of eight individual towers:
How does one get a single coherent signal out of an eight-tower array? Enter the phasor:
That's phasor with an o, not phaser with an e, so Trekkies need not fret about a misspelling.
…Photographing the 2024 Total Solar Eclipse (results)
The path of totality for the 2017 Total Solar Eclipse ran right through my backyard, and it was my first experience photographing totality. Total solar eclipses, when the moon completely covers the sun, are rare. After this year's eclipse, the lower 48 United States will see a brief bit of totality up around Montana in 2044, and a major event across the US in 2045—and I'll be near retirement!
See the full-size image of the eclipse composite on Flickr.
Radxa's SATA HAT makes compact Pi 5 NAS
Radxa's latest iteration of its Penta SATA HAT has been retooled to work with the Raspberry Pi 5.
The Pi 5 includes a PCIe connector, which allows the SATA hat to interface directly via a JMB585 SATA to PCIe bridge, rather than relying on the older Dual/Quad SATA HAT's SATA-to-USB-to-PCIe setup.
Does the direct PCIe connection help? Yes.
Is the Pi 5 noticeably faster than the Pi 4 for NAS applications? Yes.
…macOS Finder is still bad at network file copies
In what is becoming a kind of hobby for me, I've just finished testing another tiny NAS—more on that tomorrow.
But as I was testing, I started getting frustrated with the fact I've never been able to get a Raspberry Pi—regardless of internal storage speeds, even with 800+ MB/sec PCIe-based storage—to consistently write more than around 100 MB/sec write speeds over the network, with either Samba or NFS.
NFS would be more consistent... but it ran around 82 MB/sec:
…Sipeed's new handheld RISC-V Cyberdeck
tl;dr: Sipeed sent a Lichee Console 4A to test. It has a T-Head TH1520 4-core RISC-V CPU that's on par with 2-3 generations-old Arm SBC CPUs, and is in a fun but impractical netbook/cyberdeck form factor. Here's my video on the Lichee Console 4A, and here's all my test data on GitHub.
Last year I tested the StarFive VisionFive 2 and Milk-V Mars CM—both machines ran the JH7110, a 4-core RISC-V SoC that was slower than a Pi 3.
…Talking Hot Dog gives new meaning to 'Ham radio'
...except it was a beef frank. Make your wurst jokes in the comments.
What you see above is the remains of a hot dog after it has been applied to an AM radio tower operating in its daytime pattern, at around 6 kW.
A couple months ago, soon after we posted our If I touch this tower, I die video, a few commenters mentioned you likely wouldn't die after touching a high-power AM tower—rather, you'd have serious RF burns.
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