On 16/04/14 23:20, Gene Heskett wrote:
On Wednesday 16 April 2014 09:09:06 Simon Wise did opine:
I was shown a rather nice artwork that used high resolution radar (resolutions around 1 centimetre I think) to get positions (it was made in a university robotics department that had such things!). The way those work is very interesting ... the frequencies are way to high to digitise, so the electronics has to be all analogue ... the 'circuitry' is basically plumbing ... gold lined tubes and chambers using resonances and such to measure delays and phase differences. At those frequencies the speed of light becomes a dominant consideration.
We have a gismo thats basically much simpler than all that plumbing, to use when checking a cable for damage, called a Time Domain Reflectometer. The pro versions using a tunnel diode switch as a pulse generator, can tell you theres a bullethole in the line 883.6' out from where you are hooked up. I've made homemade versions using a pulse generator and a fast oscilloscope to measure the echo delay, punched some buttons on a good calculator and then told the tower crew where to open it up and replace a burned up connector bullet and/or the teflon disk holding it centered in the line. It got the job done so I figured it was good enough for the girls I go with. :)
not at all convinced that a fast oscilloscope, a good calculator and the wet-ware connecting them are simpler than a bit of machined metal with gold plating, but certainly re-using existing gadgets beats making new ones.
Simon _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
