Tacos Digest, Vol 31, Issue 16

Tue Sep 20 23:51:09 CDT 2005

Michael, re: UFO series from the seventies, a.k.a. my 2nd sci-fi TV show
that I grew up on, after Star Trek: TOS. But really, on Saturday a.m., as a
little kid I remember seeing (but not remembering any of them): Captain
Scarlet, Thunderbirds etc on a BBC channel.

question re: series UFO - did the series finally come to any kind of
conclusion ? The only episode that I distinctly remember was that the alien
baddies had surreptiously disabled the communications transmitter aboard a
spy satellite which had tailed an alien space craft to their home world, and
when the Earth S.H.A.D.O. (for those unlucky folks who didn't see this
series: Supreme Headquarters Alien Defense Organisation) got it, they were
first very excited to see the images, and then they realised, the aliens had
played a nasty trick on them, they couldn't tell what they were looking at
because the scaling factors were "missing in action". The last scene is of
course a classic -- very complicated images are shown on the TV screen which
could be potential cities, roads, etc and all the "spooks" were going ga-ga
over it., and as the camera zoomed out, it turned to be nothing but a very
closeup shot of a attractive (70's groove) model's thighs. Any old-timers in
the surveillance sector that had this kind of experience in their trials of
orbiting cameras and SAR ?

The other thing about the series that I remember was the "flip-up mobile
weapons platform", which was some kind of advanced land rover/truck
half-track ? which had a missile and always hid away - I had a die-cast
corgi model of that vehicle for a long while, and the missiles actually
launched when a trigger was pressed :-)

73 de Samudra N3RDX/S21X

On 9/20/05, Michael Chisena <ka2zev at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Ian, Greetings from Kuwait City. As you know I got bouced out of Baghdad
> because of health. I was not able to deal with the heat of the place while
> working on armor. Managment felt I was about to be a 'heat casualty' and
> that would look bad on the forms. Life is fairly good here in Kuwait City.
> Nobody has tried to kill me in over a month. No mortars, no rockets, no car
> bombs. A plesant change of pace. Im working out of Camp Arifjan Kuwait. They
> have me fixing air conditioner motor controlers and Infra Red weapons
> sights. The AC controlers are fairly exotic. 18k BTU gizmos. They take in
> any kind of 220 power , and turn it into three phase 61 hz power to run all
> the electric motors in the air conditioner. There are three big 500 amp
> darlington dual transistors in this puppy. A boost regulator that takes the
> rectified 220 and kicks it up to 350 vdc, an analog card that runs the
> output transistors, and a digital card that runs the analog card. So far Ive
> gotten very good at fixing the analog cards. The digital cards are about as
> complex as a 1980's pin ball game. 8000 series micro's, and lots of glue
> chips. The booster uses two big power fets and some control electronics. A
> lot of power in these things. Been building a test fixture to work on the
> digital cards. Our usual test procedure was to open up a case, and have that
> 350 volt power supply humming right under an elbow! I don't like working
> like that, one error and flesh vaporizes is not the way I want to do things.
> This fixture is much quicker and in the end I will be able to check more
> functions. One of the checks is a current loop sensor we can't test right
> now. It measures the total DC amps delivered by the boost regulator and
> shuts down the inverter if that number goes too high. In pratice, the
> semiconductors sacrafice them selves in order to protect the fuse. Guess
> that's because transistors die in micro seconds and fuses die in
> miliseconds. Life in the fast lane. Did I mention the transistors cost
> between 145 and 300 bucks per. Ive found some odd things with these
> controlers. Like the gold Dale power resistors are not the greatest thing
> for high voltage. Had one sputter and short due to a flux carbon bridge.
> Found various parts of the analog card can't take a big transistor failure
> well. A huge scorch mark is left behind, and one burned a hole through the
> board. I have to fix everything, so time is not an issue. The box is a
> blivit. (Blivit = ten pounds in a five pound container) Enough said I hope.
> Kuwait is dead dull in many respects. No beer, can't date the local women,
> the usual things Islam frowns on are disalowed. Their idea of a strip club
> is when you get to see an ankel. 12 hour days don't leave much time for
> entertainment anyway. This bit with the manuals, will that cover the HP
> stuff? If so, you diden't post the web site. Been looking of a manual for my
> HP3456A mulit meter. It's a neat gizmo. 61/2 digit resoultion, four wire
> ohms, and an amazing AC true rms converter. What I don't have is an
> operators manual for the thing, and I don't remember all the 'math'
> functions. If you feel inclined, share this with the AMRAD team. Been
> exchanging signals with a travel agent in Wales. She has dangeled a three
> night stay at Portmiriron agan in front of us. I do like that place. Also
> thinking of trying to bring the dogs with us to Europe for the two weeks.
> Everything is on the table. Time will tell. Remember that old tv show called
> UFO, the Gary and Silvia Anderson one? Ordered it on DVD and have been
> watching it. Begining to see a trend, yesterdays old shows are todays tin
> foil hat paranoia. Keep it safe Mike in Kuwait
>
> *tacos-request at amrad.org* wrote:
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> Today's Topics:
>
> 1. Manuals wanted by Agilent (Iain McFadyen)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 13:44:27 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Iain McFadyen
> Subject: Manuals wanted by Agilent
> To: tacos at amrad.org
> Message-ID: <20050920204427.82173.qmail at web61115.mail.yahoo.com>
> Content-Ty! pe: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
>
> Some of you may know already that Agilent has done a recent about turn
> regarding making their manuals for boatanchors (and I mean that in the
> nicest
> possible way), available to the general public.
>
> Moreover, one person at Agilent (Dave Cunningham) is assigned to
> retrieving
> manuals for products for which Agilent themselves do not have copies.
> These
> manuals, mainly retrieved from enthusiasts such as ourselves, are then
> made
> available on a website operated by Agilent.
>
> Attached (in MS Excel format) is a list of the top 500. It appears that
> 200 of
> these top 500 have been collected so far. Now they are making a second
> request
> to see if they can obtain any of the remaining 300.
>
> If you have such manuals scanned already, Agilent would be very grateful
> for a
> copy. I believe that if no source of a scanned manual is found, Agilent
> will
> gladly borrow a manual, scan it professionally, return the original to the
> supplier, and then post the file to the web.
>
> If you have manuals for these items of test equipment and are willing to
> make
> them available to Agilent (and therefore to the general public) then
> please
> contact Agilent direct at dcunningham at agilent.com .
>
> 73
>
> Iain KI4HLV
>
>
>
> __________________________________
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> End of Tacos Digest, Vol 31, ! Issue 16
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>
>
> "You are, what you do, when it counts"
> The Masso
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--

-samudra
MSN Instant Messenger: pradeshtaspace at hotmail.com
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