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Wednesday, December 21, 2011

New HSW Free Online Games - HowStuffWorks

New HSW Games

HowStuffWorks "Cannon Challenge"

This is a fun little Online Cannon Game that I happened across on the HowStuffWorks Site. I played it one time and from the looks of it... I didn't do near as well, at a score of 91400 (see Screen Shot Pics) as the One's Who Came Before me... But, then again, those scores could all be Big Bunch of "Fish Stories" too!;) The Bike Build Game, is really just a simple little Puzzle. The Pic of the finished Bike is pretty nice. But, that's all there is to it. Storm Tracker, is an actual Storm Tracker. It's pretty nice. Volcano Explorer, is really just an Educational Too. But, I liked it and it was fun to see what Type of Volcano you can come up with. The Crab Fishing Game, seems to be broken. Or it is for me. It just starts a Download of a ".swf" file. This could even mean that the HowStuffWorks Site has been Hacked and the Flash Game file has Ben Replaced with something Malicious!:) But, I see this from time to time with my Fedora 14 Linux running Firefox Web Browser and it is probably just a Flash Glitch. All in all, I thought it was both fun and informative...

Don

Go there and Play...
http://science.howstuffworks.com/cannon-challenge-game.htm

NIST Radio Station WWV broadcasts time and frequency information 24 hours per day, 7 days per week to millions of listeners worldwide.

Radio Station WWV

NIST radio station WWV broadcasts time and frequency information 24 hours per day, 7 days per week to millions of listeners worldwide. WWV is located in Fort Collins, Colorado, about 100 kilometers north of Denver. The broadcast information includes time announcements, standard time intervals, standard frequencies, UT1 time corrections, a BCD time code, geophysical alerts, marine storm warnings, and Global Positioning System (GPS) status reports.

Broadcast Frequencies

WWV operates in the high frequency (HF) portion of the radio spectrum. The station radiates 10,000 W on 5, 10, and 15 MHz; and 2500 W on 2.5 and 20 MHz. Each frequency is broadcast from a separate transmitter. Although each frequency carries the same information, multiple frequencies are used because the quality of HF reception depends on many factors such as location, time of year, time of day, the frequency being used, and atmospheric and ionospheric propagation conditions. The variety of frequencies makes it likely that at least one frequency will be usable at all times.

Antennas

The WWV antennas are half-wave vertical antennas that radiate omnidirectional patterns. There are actually five antennas at the station site, one for each frequency. Each antenna is connected to a single transmitter using a rigid coaxial line, and the site is designed so that no two coaxial lines cross. Each antenna is mounted on a tower that is approximately one half-wavelength tall. The tallest tower, for 2.5 MHz, is about 60 m tall. The shortest tower, for 20 MHz, is about 7.5 m tall. The top half of each antenna is a quarter-wavelength radiating element. The bottom half of each antenna consists of nine quarter-wavelength wires that connect to the center of the tower and slope downwards to the ground at a 45 degree angle. This sloping skirt functions as the lower half of the radiating system and also guys the antenna.

WWV Antenna Coordinates

Read More..
http://www.nist.gov/pml/div688/grp40/wwv.cfm

Fun with Software-Defined Radio - NBitWonder

Fun with Software-Defined Radio

by Ben on Dec.12, 2011, under Experiments, Projects, Software Defined Radio

As you may know, one of the projects in the pipeline here at NBitWonder is a software-defined radio receiver, loosely modeled after Jeri Ellsworth’s receiver published earlier this year. As of this past weekend, NBW-SDR (as we call the project) is operational!

The video features a live reception of WWV, one of the United States’ atomic clock stations (much more information here). The station is located near Fort Collins, Colorado, some 2000 miles from the receiver’s location in Virginia.

There is much more work to be done on the software, as you can tell from watching the video. For instance, only AM reception is implemented right now. The signal processing functions still need some work, and more appropriate gains should be chosen for the entire signal chain. Still, it is rewarding and reassuring to see the project working at some level.

Be sure to watch the github repository and the forum for much more information as project development proceeds.

:CPLD, defined, PIC32, radio, sdr, software

Go there...
http://nbitwonder.com/blog/2011/12/12/fun-with-software-defined-radio/

First Test: Software Defined Radio

Video Link...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=dWnyZbn06qw

Uploaded by NBitWonder on Dec 12, 2011

This video shows one of the first tests of NBitWonder's NBW-SDR software defined radio project.

As you can hear, there is a lot of work to do to finalize the software before this project can be deemed "done." Still, the fact that a microcontroller and some (relatively) inexpensive hardware can receive a signal from 2,000 miles away is quite impressive.

Be sure to follow further project development in the forum (http://nbitwonder.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=52) and through the github repository for this project (https://github.com/NBitWonder/SDR).

Thanks for watching!