Did anyone see the story about “Balloon Boy”? How about that for a Yacht Name? What else is interesting about Fort Collins, Colorado????

17. October 2009 by admin.

I would imagine that a lot of you saw the Fort Colins, Colorado “Balloon Boy” story all over TV and other Media. But anyway, “At the tone it will be TIME for that balloon to land and stop costing the taxpayers money”

I Twitter’ed that personally I would have put a WiFi Transmitter on the balloon and set the SSID (Wireless Network Name) to: Marinetelecom.net with no security, backed by a nice 3G card and a Cradlepoint Router. I wonder how high in altitude you can still get a 3G signal on USB type laptop card or such?

Anyway some of us checked and someone in Belgium already registered the Web Domain Name: balloonboy.com so we can’t grab that.

I thought it might make a cool yacht name - especially if the parents were to buy a yacht and name it that. If they wanted to go with a 3 word name (ala Zoom Zoom Zoom) they could go with something like “Falcon Balloon Boy”.

Also as a trivia … Fort Collins, Colorado is home to the oldest radio station in the U.S. which is the Time and Frequency Standard Station with the call letters: WWV.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWV_(radio_station)

Many Ham Radio Operators and others (older captains, or depending on your schooling for captain) may know of WWV and the other station WWVH. From my Navy days as well we used that station for a lot of things. For Radio Frequency Standards and Synchronizing things, including getting a “time tick” for “shooting stars” for Celestial Navigation. WWV, as you may know, operates on 2.5, 5, 10, 15, and 20 Mhz (Megahertz.) Yes those are Red Letter frequencies. Nice and even numbers. And also frequency standards for such uses as calibration of other radio transmitters and receivers.

What many people may not know is that there are 3 transmitters. WWV and WWVB are both on the site in Fort Collins, Colorado. The third is WWVH located on the Island of Kauai, Hawaii.

Reference:

http://tf.nist.gov/timefreq/index.html

What many people also don’t is…

NIST radio station WWVB is located on the same site as WWV near Fort Collins, Colorado. The WWVB broadcasts are used by millions of people throughout North America to synchronize consumer electronic products like wall clocks, clock radios, and wristwatches. In addition, WWVB is used for high level applications such as network time synchronization and frequency calibrations.

* In your computer, chances are, under “Adjust Date and Time” - chances are very good there is an “Internet Time” setting. That allows your computer to be synchronized with a very good “time standard” source. One of the stations that you might choose to synchronize with is “time.nist.gov”. Notice the similarity to the last Internet web site link that I just gave you above.

WWVB continuously broadcasts time and frequency signals at 60 kHz. (Compare that with 2.5, 5, 10, 15, and 20Mhz from WWV.) 1000 Khz = 1 Mhz. At 60 kHz, this becomes difficult. The wavelength is 5000 m - so some interesting things had to be done to build an antenna array (on towers) to work on that frequency.

The WWV frequencies are considered short wave. But short waves aren’t really short. Consider: 300/f(Mhz) = wavelength in meters. 300/5 (Mhz) = 60 meters wavelength. At 20 Mhz it’s still a 15 meter wavelength antenna. In cellular at 850 Mhz the wavelength becomes 0.35294117647058823529411764705882 meters, which is around 13.8952 inches.

Clocks of WWV. Several cesium atomic clocks provide the precise timing information broadcast by WWV.

View 1 Panorama

View 2 Panorama

View 3 Panorama

Transmitters. These transmitters amplify the time signal that is sent to the antenna.

2.5 MHz Panorama

5 MHz Panorama

15 MHz Panorama

20 MHz Panorama

Work areas. In the center of the station lies the office and the workshop where all general repairs are made.

Office Panorama

Workshop Panorama

Amateur Radio Operators we’re sent to the Pits (search for ”200 meters and down”) and those pits turned out to be everything … frequencies you use every day for anything wireless. Including WiFi, Cellular, Satellite, … 

Amateurs were relegated to 200 meters and down and shocked the world with making excellent use of these higher frequencies — see “200 Meters and Down” by Clinton B. DeSoto. 

Amateur radio operators are known as technical innovators, and have been responsible for important discoveries. For example, in the early part of the 20th century, government officials believed that all the frequencies having wavelengths shorter than 200 meters (1.5 MHz) were useless for radio communications, so they restricted radio amateurs to these frequencies. It was not long before ham radio operators discovered the truth, and were communicating on a worldwide scale using low-power transmitters. Thus the shortwave radio era began.

(Thanks to amateur radio operators, and others, rather than the government back then, radio communications and other things were able to be developed. A.M. Radio is basically 540 Khz to 1600 [or 1700 now?] Khz - which is 0.540 Mhz to 1.6 [or 1.7 now?] Mhz. So basically the government was saying that anything higher in frequency than that was worthless.)

—

Alan Spicer (Radio Amateur KA4UDX)

Alan Spicer Telecom / Alan Spicer Marine Telecom

http://www.marinetelecom.net and http://www.wifiyacht.net

+1 954-683-3426

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