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EEE for Field Day 2009


I started prepping the EEE laptop for Field Day.



Here is a picture of the desktop with Writelog running on XP.






I still need to test the K2 interface along with the K1EL keyer. It looks pretty promising
so far.



The last major item is determining how I am going to power the laptop. it is a 12
volt laptop so I need to see if I can run it directly from a deep cycle battery or
if I am going to need a regulated power supply. I need to plug it into a DVM and see
what the numbers show.



OK.... it is time for me to get back into the VHF contest again. (I typed this while
eating lunch.)


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Geocaching class research


Some of the links that I am looking at as part of research for the Middle School
class. 



Before the GPS:

http://www.nasm.si.edu/gps/before.html



How does GPS work:

http://www.pocketgpsworld.com/howgpsworks.php



How does GPS work:

http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/travel/gps.htm



Triangulating from Satellites:

http://www.trimble.com/gps/howgps-triangulating.shtml



Hows does GPS work:

http://www.tomtom.com/howdoesitwork/



The fourth satellite:

http://www.tomtom.com/howdoesitwork/page.php?ID=21&CID=6&Language=1



The distance of the satellites:

http://www.tomtom.com/howdoesitwork/page.php?ID=20&CID=6&Language=1



The location of the satellites:

http://www.tomtom.com/howdoesitwork/page.php?ID=19&CID=6&Language=1



How does GPS work:

http://www.tomtom.com/howdoesitwork/page.php?ID=8&CID=2&Language=1



Alternative satellite systems:

http://www.tomtom.com/howdoesitwork/page.php?ID=9&CID=2&Language=1



Heavens Above - What is above us:

http://www.heavens-above.com/



NASA - J-Track 3D:

http://science.nasa.gov/Realtime/jtrack/3d/JTrack3d.html



How does GPS "triangulation" work:

http://www.how-gps-works.com/faq/q0110.shtml



GPS - Wiki

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System



The almanac consists of coarse orbit and status information for each satellite in
the constellation, an ionospheric model, and information to relate GPS derived time
to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Words 3 through 10 of subframes 4 and 5 contain
a new part of the almanac. Each frame contains 1/25th of the almanac, so 12.5 minutes
are required to receive the entire almanac from a single satellite.



GPS satellite info:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_satellite


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LTSpice - Even better


My friend Craig AA0ZZ was able to give me some valuable insight. I need to zoom into
quite a bit in the time domain to be able to see the sine wave otherwise it just looks
like blurred noise. Once you zoom into the time domain a bit you can see a nice oscillator
as you might expect.






Then I was able to right click and select the waveform (source data) to show
in the FFT display






I have to say that this looks pretty cool. There is a lot of magic in this application.



I have some other examples that I want to build to see how they look/work. I am such
an electronics newbie that this is all uncharted territory for me.