[BC] it's tough out there

[Jeff Welton]

On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 3:50 PM, Timothy West <n3drb at comcast.net> wrote:

>The magic of receiving signals "on the air" is slowly but surely
>fading away. :(

Now I might have agreed with that statement until last night just before suppertime.  Our 8-yr old got a set of walkie talkies for Christmas a year or so ago; one of those single frequency PTT types that have on/off/vol control and the PTT switch.  They had been sitting in his room under various piles of debris until mother laid down the law this week... "clean your room or you're grounded from video games" (works every time!).

Fast forward to last night - I'm plugging away on the laptop and he comes down and says, "hey Dad, listen!".  He holds up one of the talkies and I'm hearing to cartoons... he taped the PTT switch down on the other unit and put it in front of the TV - he was so proud that he could walk anywhere in the house and listen to the TV (I said, "boy, you just invented radio" - automated radio, but the concept was good).  Then he asked if he could take the unit he was listening on to school tomorrow.  I told him it wouldn't work that far and we got into a discussion of power levels, legal limits for different frequencies and why Industry Canada wouldn't approve of him connecting 2500 walkie talkies together in the living room so he could listen to the TV at school.

He thinks for a bit and said, "well, if I got the 2500 walkie talkies anyway, then put one here and went until just before it wouldn't reach and put the other part down, and put another walkie talkie there with the button taped down, then went until just before it wouldn't reach and did it again, and kept doing it until I got to school, would that work? (that's as close as word to word as I can remember).  I don't recall ever having any discussions about translators, relays or anything of that sort previously, but he's close to describing the perfect arrangement (except for the keeping the mic keyed, broadcasting commercial content part and continuously degrading audio quality, but we didn't get into that!).  Then I told him he was close to figuring out the system that cell phones used - and when he wanted to know why sometimes the cell phones work in our living room and sometimes they don't (we're just on the edge of the only two towers we can see from the house), we got into a lecture on signal strength and the various things that affect it... all told we spent close to an hour on the topic, which if you'd ever met this boy, you would consider pretty miraculous (he doesn't sit still very well!).

So, the magic is still there, in some areas, it just needs to be fostered whenever it can fight its way through the distractions of TV, video games and computers... Incidentally, after we got into the discussion about cell towers, he came up with a way to maintain cell service by putting a small tower between primary sites with a cell phone tied to it... whenever the phone got down to two bars of strength, he said his laptop that was tied to the cell phone (didn't get into the specifics), would send a command to the other two sites to increase power - and just provide enough power to maintain at least two bars of strength at the furthest distance from each tower... I told him if he was still thinking like that in 10 years, we'd want to talk to him about a job!

Best,

Jeff

--
Jeff Welton
Regional Sales Manager - Central U.S.
Nautel
Toll Free: 877-662-8835, ext. 5127
Direct: 902-823-5127
Cell: 902-489-1635

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