Walking

Walking around the carport this morning.

NOAA-19

NOAA-19 flew over today at about 1:40 PM.  It is broadcasting on 137.100 MHz (it switched frequencies with NOAA-18 in 2009) and I recorded the audio as it flew over and converted it to the image above.  It is still full of noise, but an improvement over my last catch from NOAA-15.

 
NOAA-19 is infamous because an engineer removed several bolts from the base of a rotating cart during construction, later a different set of engineers started to turn it on its side using the cart when the satellite came loose and fell to the ground.  The crash cost Lockheed-Martin all profits from the project and summed to $135 million to repair.  Still, it was able to launch in 2009.

If you play the video below you can hear the signal. 

Solar, one small step

After my earlier post about energy production in Hawai'i.  The cover story on the March 21-27 Honolulu Weekly was "Will HECO Break Us?: Conflicts with HECO, our electric bills and renewable energy" (HECO is the Hawaiian Electric Company).  In that article it discussed the 15% cap per neighborhood on home solar electricity production.  Also, the article confirmed that 49 out of 465, over 10%, of O'ahu's circuits are at that capacity, blocking solar additions.  It also said that there was a process that can be enacted to do a study to allow additional solar, but it did not say if this has actually been done for any of the circuit neighborhoods.  The article has some great statements, the title of the actual article is "Energy Vampire" and says "The PUC has had a very cozy relationship with the utility for 99 years." 

In O'ahu electricity is 34.6 cents per kilowatt hour; triple the mainland US average. We pay over $180/month for electricity.  This is without a clothes dryer, dish washer, microwave, TV, or air conditioning.  To top it off the power has gone out about once per month after moving here.  Yesterday, it went off in the middle of the day and didn't come back until long after dark.  We broke out the candles, which can be fun, if we were not paying so much for electricity to begin with. 

I have had it.  We can't really afford solar panels but we went out and bought some anyway.  We got three Coleman panels that generate 18 watts each (54 watts total) and they were just over $200 for all three--they were on sale--which isn't that much more than what we pay for electricity in a month anyway.  We also can't legally connect them into the grid, because of the moratorium on solar, etc., so I am planning to set them up completely off the grid as an independent "emergency" power supply. Also, we are renting our house, so I am not really making any permanent fixtures, these will remain portable so we can take them with us when we move.  Also, I have been wanting to do something like this with photovoltaic solar for a long time... 

The three panels came with a frame, which initially we set up on the roof of our garage.

However, after looking at it and thinking, it is too easy for someone to steal the panels and the angle is too steep.  In Hawai'i the sun is directly overhead in the summer.  This frame angle is designed for farther north in the mainland US. 

So I decided to lay the panels flat on the back of the roof of the house.  Here V is handing them up to me.

Below a tarp over our back porch is pulled back and the cables from the panels are hanging down. 

Below you can see the three panels on the back of our roof. 

I reattached the tarp and wired the cables together (with twist-ties) then drilled a small hole to feed them inside.   (Later I can caulk and paint the hole if needed.) 

Inside I just needed to strip some wire and connect with them with wire nuts to a charge controller that is hooked up to a 12 volt battery.  In the picture the panels are charging the battery.  This is just a temporary setup without everything "packaged" yet.  I picked a battery that is the same as the type used by our van, so we can just change it out if we need to. 

Next I need to hook up a power inverter to run a night light, or anything, to make a small dent in our oil electricity dependence.

Gas Prices

On the front page of this mornings Star Advertiser it had an article about gas prices in Hawai'i.  We lead the nation in the highest prices.  The average price of gasoline crossed the $4.50 mark on Friday and was $4.515 for a gallon of regular in the state.  This is an interesting point to help put gas prices in the US into perspective.  Back in Germany, at its height, when you converted liters to gallons and euros to dollars at one point we paid $9 per gallon of regular, twice the price here in Hawai'i.  In Europe we were never able to get gas as cheap as it is here in the US.  The high gas prices has obvious negative effects in the short run, but I think there is also a long run positive effect.  It will discourage people from commuting, with one person in the vehicle, in those ridiculous gas guzzling hummers, etc.  Our van uses a lot of gas also (although its mileage has improved since we changed out the filter, plugs and ignition coils) but we had no choice but to get it because of the money (a single vehicle to move up to five people plus at a time).  I would love to get a small energy efficient vehicle to commute to work in.  Hopefully, gas efficient, hybrid or electric cars will become more affordable.

Signals from Space!

Here is a recent thing I have been playing around with.  NOAA has a series of weather satellites that broadcast images as they orbit.  We have all seen them as the jumpy cloud maps in the weather segment of the news.  You can tune them in if you go off the top of the FM radio range to ~137 MHz.  They orbit the earth every 101 minutes or so in a near polar orbit, but not in a fixed circle, so their orbital loops slowly pass around the planet.  Currently NOAA-15 is passing close to Hawai'i each day, so I have been tracking it online and trying to catch the signal for the past few days. 

NOAA-15 was launched almost 14 years ago in 1998 (link).  It is showing its age, parts of the satellite are not fully operational (link). 

I tracked it using this website.

On the first day it was to come overhead early in the morning, just before sunrise, so I got up to listen for the signal but the batteries in my radio receiver were dead...

On the second day, it was due to rise above the horizon at 5:38 AM.  This time I was fully charged and ready to go.  I caught the signal at 5:41 (there are mountains toward the north which likely blocked the early part of the signal).  Beep, beep, beep, ...  It lasted for almost 10 minutes before dropping below the horizon again.

This morning, the third day, it was due to rise at 5:13 AM.  The night before I bought an audio cable and adapter to connect the radio to my laptop and record the signal.  Here it is coming in from the north.

I used Audacity to record the APT format signal and WXtoIMG to decode it. 
The best part of the recording was when it was directly overhead at 5:20 AM. 



This was before sunrise, so you don't expect to be able to see any features in the actual image.  And, this was done with the bare minimum of equipment, with a lot of noise and static.  But, you can just make out, in the center of the image, the telemetry bar of the broadcast.  There are many steps I can take to work toward improving the reception.  Below is an image of 4 minutes of reception including the part in the video above.

One year old!

F is one year old!  We had an extended birthday party for her.

Above you can see several gifts including a butterfly balloon (she loves balloons) and her first bed!  (The first bed in the family in Hawai'i.)

    

Valley of the Temples

Last weekend we went to Valley of the Temples.  It is a memorial park for Buddhists, Shintos, Catholics and Protestants.  The picture above is the Byodo-In Temple. 

You have to take your shoes/sandals off to go inside. 

The temple has a five foot, three ton, brass bell cast in Osaka, Japan. 

It was really loud when T rang it! 

UNESCO and Palestine

The US has cut its funding to UNESCO.  Why?  Because UNESCO has included Palestine as a member.  The US has a law that any UN organization that recognizes Palestine can not be funded by the US.  Israel is recognized by the UN, why can't Palestine also be recognized?  Forget about fairness for a moment, cutting UNESCO funding hurts our own interests.  Countries like Gabon, who has pledged 2 million, have stepped up to try to fill the gap so that humanitarian missions can continue.  If you think the US should cut down in funding international programs in general, how about starting with the 3 billion annually to Israel?  Or at least equalize the support between Israel and Palestine?  The Daily Show, the counter weight to moronic "news" shows, has a special segment on this.  I recommend skipping the intro and going straight to John Oliver's interview (below are direct links to the segments).

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-march-15-2012/march-15--2012---pt--3

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-march-15-2012/march-15--2012---pt--4

Energy Production in Hawai'i

Hawai'i is in an amazing position to take advantage of renewable energy.  There is great potential for wave, wind, solar, and geothermal here.  Despite this, 90% of energy production comes from oil imported to Hawai'i, which makes this one of the highest rates for electricity in the nation (link and link).  This is crazy.  In response people have started putting up solar panels on their homes and now Hawai'i is the second in the nation, per capita, for solar power use.  Companies have sprung up that will install panels on your house for free, and you pay your (lower) electric bill to them to recoup the cost.  This allows homeowners to get into solar without an upfront money barrier (besides owning the home of course).  However, there is an attempt here to stop solar.  I heard it on the radio driving home from work and couldn't believe it.  Recall that electricity is run as a monopoly that is coordinated through government regulations, and does not operate as a free capitalist market.  The Hawaii Public Utilities Commission has set a limit of 15% of energy that can come from renewable sources, the rest has to come from oil!  On the radio I heard that several areas are at this limit and there is effectively a moratorium on adding solar in some neighborhoods (but I have not been able to verify this last point independently).  This is being fought by several solar and renewable energy organizations that are managing to get some amendments made to the ruling (link).

To Kaneohe on the H3

Today we drove over the mountains to Kaneohe.  I tried making a time lapse video again.  It rained on us along the way.  So I will try to get a clear video later on.  The bikes in front of us were "Sons of Hawaii, Motorcycle Club, Oahu."  Our route is in red/orange in the map below.  It is a spur off the last route on the H1. 

Transmutation

I was reading Oliphant et al. (1934) paper, which is freely available online, on transmutation with heavy hydrogen (deuterium), or normal hydrogen with an extra neutron.  They used a discharge tube with 400,000 volts and a brick wall to screen themselves from X-rays.  They used an ammonium chloride solution with heavy water deposited on an iron target and shot deuterium ions at it.  They seemed to be interested in deuterium's effect on other atoms and almost missed the important result, deuterium-deuterium interactions.  At first they just assumed it was a side effect due to X-rays being produced by the high voltage bombardment.  But when they turned the power down the effect was still there and they realized there was a large number of protons being emitted.  They looked around with a Geiger counter and found out a huge amount of radiation was being produced.  It penetrated 20 cm of lead without any reduction in intensity and they realized it was neutrons being emitted and deducted helium was being generated from the hydrogen nuclei and releasing large amounts of energy. 

It is fun to read about how honest they were that they stumbled onto this effect (hydrogen fusion) without expecting it, but they were smart enough to deduce what was actually going on.

Fastening Freestanding Shelves to the Wall

This is something of a boring post.  We mostly stayed home and cleaned today.  However, F is walking around now and pulling herself up on things.  The stand that we have M & V's reptile and cricket rearing aquariums on has been bothering me.  So I picked up some hooks to fasten in the wall and drilled holes for them.  Then tied the stand to the wall with some jute cordage so she can't pull it over. 

Also, last weekend, or was it the weekend before, we went out for a drive around the island, for the first time.  It had been very windy and there were some impressive waves crashing into shore.  Unfortunately I left my camera at home.  We also saw a monk seal for the first time floating nonchalantly out in the waves.   You can't actually drive around the entire island, the NW point doesn't have a road connecting around it, but we made the biggest loop possible.

Kapolei to Honolulu on the H1

I used packing tape to fix a camera to the van's dashboard and set it on a 1 second delay between shots.  Then I made a video out of the photos using virtualdub to stitch the images together at 10 frames per second (10x speed), with 50% compression (Microsoft Video 1), and windows live movie maker to further compress the video (for "windows phone large").  Then uploaded it to youtube.  You can get an idea of what driving along the "main street" of O'ahu (H1 and H201) is like at 8am on a weekday. There was some rain and traffic congestion (but traffic wasn't backed up too bad), which is normal.

The blue line in the map above shows the route.

A more powerful battery

Earlier we tried to make a copper-aluminum battery out of pennies, foil, and old film canisters.  Long story short it didn't work.  So we quit fooling around and made a more robust setup. 

First we cut 7" sections of 3/4" PVC pipe and cemented endcaps on.

The we cut 7 1/2 " sections of 1/2" copper pipe and drilled a few small holes along the length.

Then 1/4" aluminum shafts were cut to 8" lengths.

The idea is the copper tube will extend out of the PVC pipe and the aluminum will extend slightly beyond that.

It's critical that the copper and aluminum do not come into direct contact in the cell.  So we used rubber bands to provide a spacing along the length of the tubes. 

Here is an assembled unit.

The cells need to be upright so when we add vinegar it doesn't spill out.  So we put together a wood frame to hold the battery.  (M did a lot of sanding on this.) 

We used cider vinegar poured in with a funnel. 

One cell gave almost half a volt, 0.473 V.

With the first one working we quickly set up the rest of the cells. 

There we go.  2.85 volts across a battery of six cells.  Now, can we light up an LED?

Success!  The LED on the left is bright pink from the battery voltage.  The dark red one on the right is identical but not hooked up for comparison. 

How does it work?  (I am a bit rusty, no pun intended, with my chemistry so lets see if I can get this right and not mix up the directions.)   The copper is oxidized ("rusted") as it enters the solution.

Cu -> Cu[+2] + 2e[-] 

Each atom of copper that enters the solution frees up two electrons that can flow through the circuit. 

An excess of hydrogen ions (H[+]) are present in the acidic vinegar solution.  At the aluminum end electrons flow in and react with the hydrogen ions to produce hydrogen gas (hydrogen is reduced). 

2H[+] + 2e[-] -> H2

The cells are well vented with open tops so the hydrogen does not accumulate to dangerous levels that could ignite. 

The resulting redox reaction (reduction-oxidation) drives electrons through the circuit connection.

The expected voltage can be estimated from the metal's anodic index, this is a measure of the voltage between various metals and gold as a reference.  Copper has an index of -0.35 V, aluminum has an index of -0.9 V.  The difference between them is 0.55 V, more or less the half volt we got with cider vinegar as the electrolyte (ion solution).

Solar Maximum

The sun is approaching its 9-14 year (approximately 11 year) solar maximum.  There will be an increase in sunspots and large solar flares.  Sunspots are areas where the sun's plasma gets caught in strong magnetic fields and stops circulating, so it cools and gets darker (relatively speaking) on the surface.  The flares affect the earth's ionosphere and can cause radio signals to reflect and travel further around the earth than normal. 

We made a first pass at a sunspot viewer.  Here there is a pin hole in a sheet of aluminum foil with a tiny image of the sun falling on the sheet of paper below.  Effectively a simple pinhole camera.  The sun's image is there, but is too small and faint to see any details.

Anyway, this is just a first pass.  We will see what else we can come up with.

The solar activity effect on radio is supposed to be especially strong in the 10 meter wavelength.  To look into this I made a half-wave dipole antenna under our back porch roof.  It just fits if I angle it diagonally.  It is made of two 16 gauge bare copper wires cut to the right length, soldered to a coaxial cable, and suspended with jute fiber.  The length, 1/2 a wavelength, should make it more sensitive to the 10 meter band because of resonance.  Along a full wavelength the wave travels from its "highest" to its "lowest" in the middle and back to its "highest" point at the other end.  A half-wavelength reaches from the lowest to highest part of the wave.  This antenna has two 1/4 wavelength sections.  When one side is at its lowest the input from the other side should be at the highest, maximizing the difference detected in an signal from 10 meter wavelengths when the coaxial cable is plugged in.