Month: July 2010

Pandora and me

I finally broke down and purchased a smartphone.  Instead of the ubiquitous iPhone however, I opted for a HTC Incredible Android phone.  Not that I have any distaste for Apple, Inc.  Rather, it is more because of the lack of ATT coverage in areas where I travel and the new data plans from ATT.

The phone is great, I enjoy the functions, the GPS navigation tool, Gmail, news, and all the other apps.  It fills many roles while I am out gallivanting around earning a living.

HTC incredible Android phone with Pandora App

I have tried Pandora in the past on my computer.  I found it to be okay, not great.  I guess my main issue was it seemed a little boring just listening to music.  It was good music, and when I interacted with the programming, voting a song up or down, the music selections got better.  But it was distracting to interact while I was trying to work on the computer and in the end, I turned the volume down and it became background noise.

In the car, I figured, things would be different.  I could listen to Pandora the same way I listened to my car radio.  Lots of music would be great and not distracting at all.

Except…  I found it to be… boring.  The music was great but the whole thing lacks personality.  I suppose we are blessed around here with several radio stations that play new music.  With Pandora, there was almost no new music, even if I created a new music radio station.  Further, it seemed like something was missing:  human interaction.  I enjoy hearing the deeeejay talking about some band factoid or some such.  Just listening to music endlessly left me wanting something more.  Perhaps that is just me.

Whilst on the road to various places, I like to listen to WEQX in Manchester, VT; WDST, Woodstock, NY; WKZE, Salisbury, CT; WXPK, White Plains, NY.  All of those stations have personalities and play great music.  They also stream audio, which means I can listen to them on my phone.

So Pandora gets a meh, and the phone gets a thumbs up.

Ready for CAP? (AKA Common Alert Protocol)

Like any good government agency, the FCC in conjunction with FEMA is working on upgrading the acronym-heavy EAS system with CAP, which stands for Common Alert Protocol. CAP includes something that  FEMA has been working on something called IPAWS, which stands for Integrated Public Alert Warning System.

The FCC is still in the comment/response process (FCC Docket 04-296) which can get long and drawn out.  I would not expect to see any NPRM until late fall 2010 with any changes taking effect in early 2011 or so.

Basically, CAP looks like this:

An EAS to CAP converter monitors a CAP source (think e-mail server) and when a CAP message is received, it converts it to EAS protocol and sends it to an input source of an EAS encoder/decoder.  The EAS encoder/decoder then passes that information through and broadcasts it.   Of course, the EAS encoder/decoder can still be programmed to pass through specific types of messages for specific areas and ignore all others.

Thus far, several manufacturers have designed CAP converters for use with existing EAS units:

Implementation would look something like this:

EAS CAP converter diagram

For a TFT-2008 system.  Others such as SAGE and Trilithic are integrated into the EAS encoder/decoder units.  Basically, the CAP part of the EAS system needs an ethernet port with access to an IP gateway to receive messages from the CAP server located off site.  That is the weak link in the system, as far as I am concerned.

It is not like some of our so-called trading partners have been trying to tinker with the inner tubes or anything.  It is also not like that same trading partner makes most of the cheap ethernet switches and routers found in many radio stations, hardware that can be easily configured remotely.  Configured to redirect certain IP addresses to new, exciting, and exotic locations such as Iran or Pakistan.

Perhaps I am paranoid, or not.  It falls back to my time in the military when somebody said “It’s good to be a little paranoid if everyone is out to get you.”

The history of Carborundum

There is a very good blog called Arcane Radio Trivia which publishes interesting tidbits of radio trivia, and a lot of stuff that a reader might not have heard before, hence the name.  A post put up last week, when I was out of town, deals with carborundum (Silicon carbide) which is one of the first semiconductors used to produce diodes, and thus detectors for radio.

Certain naturally-occurring minerals can be used to detect radio signals, including galena, zincite, silicon,bornite and others. Carborundum was unique among the early crystals because it was synthetic. It was durable, and at 9 mohs much harder than most available crystals. More here. Also interestingly it requires it requires a negative potential of 1 volt to be used as a diode. Carborundum was not created with this purpose in mind. It was created in the early search for artificial diamonds

Like many things in early radio, there are several plot twists in this story and if one is interested in radio history, it is work a click to read.  While you are there, check out “It’s 105 degrees and rising“

RF is killing bees!

I found this article and video interesting:  Study links bee decline to cell phones.

The article goes on about CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder) where entire bee colonies die off for unknown reasons.  Some speculate that increased use of pesticides might be to blame (which makes perfect sense to me).  Still, others think that cell phone towers are the culprits.  Noting:

“Animals, including insects, use cryptochrome for navigation,” Goldsworthy told CNN.

“They use it to sense the direction of the earth’s magnetic field and their ability to do this is compromised by radiation from [cell] phones and their base stations. So basically bees do not find their way back to the hive.”

One study in India involved attaching a cell phone to the side of a bee hive and powering it on for two fifteen-minute periods each day. These researchers found that the honey production in the hive dropped off and the hive queen’s egg-laying was cut in half.

All of that is indeed interesting, but somehow I think that a lot of information is lacking.  First of all, any first-year physics student can tell you, the RF field around a cellphone antenna decreases logarithmically as a function of distance.  In other words,  for each unit of distance away from the antenna, the power density decreases by 10 times.  Therefore, placing even a mobile phone directly on a bee hive will likely generate much higher RF fields than would otherwise be encountered, unless there was a bee hive in one of the cell tower antennas.

Secondly, there is no mention of power levels, although the frequency appears to be in the 900 MHz range, if this is the study (.pdf) being referred to in the article.

Finally, the compound referred to, as cryptochrome, is also interesting.  Breaking the word down, one finds “Crypto” which means hidden, and “Chrome” which means color.  According to the Wikipedia article, which most often can be believed when it comes to such subjects, it is indeed used by some animals to detect magnetic fields.  However, RF used by cell phones has long been in use by other technologies such as two-way radio, pagers, cordless phones, baby monitors, TV, early radar, and other high-power emitters.  It would be most unusual that RF-induced CCD would just now be showing up.

In short, there is very very thin evidence that cell phones are causing CCD and it is a shame on CNN for propagating such nonsense without doing research.