SOTA Microwave Award

Gerald,
I’ve given up on hot µwave meals and gone cold turkey :rooster:

Well infra-red light is about 694THz ISTR. We don’t go that far on the database, stopping at 24GHz. Above that you’d log it as simply MICROWAVE. If you generated your own 694THz signal and used that it would count for SOTA but reflecting the Sun’s rays from a mirror to communicate (in Heliograph mode) and then using it to warm the pies, soup etc. would be akin to using a repeater!

I did think you could use some solid fuel to heat the pies and then use the smoke for smoke signalling and log that as VLF but again that fails because you cannot use fossil fuels to power the transmitter.

That’s all right Andy neither charcoal nor cremated barbecue fare could be classed as such :wink:

Oh goody. That means a SOTA SS Award is viable. The Smoke Signal(*) Award will be open to all barbeques apart from gas powered versions!

(*) Back in the day, late 1979, I had a Saturday job at one the first computer shops in the UK. I got paid real cash money and could play with the Nascoms, PETs, MK14s, Apples etc.all day long with the fun only occasionally interrupted by customers wanting to buy things. We used to drool over Byte magazine adverts for the real computing exotica such as Smoke Signal Broadcasting’s 6800 computers like this:

That was a 6800 based machine using the SS-50 bus that sold for $2600 with 32k RAM and twin drives in 1979 which is something like $9000 in today’s money. I’m not sure if that is real leather on the case or Nurgahyde :wink:

So how long before SOTABeams comes up with a bio-ethanol powered model…

(Richard, you know where to get hold of me if you want to discuss my licence fee for the concept :wink: )

[quote=“MM0FMF, post:64, topic:8995”]
Nascoms
[/quote]There’s the remains of one of them in my loft. I expect the logic PROMs have long expired…

Off topic… I’ve got a working 8K PET 2001 (built in cassette and calculator style keyboard) bought 1980 new…

I had a Nascom 2. I salvaged it from cruft in the workshop of that computer shop. It had the add on 32k DRAM board that was given free when there was a shortage of SRAM chips for the 8k of on board RAM. The DRAM board had Nascom memory plague and I had to add extra power bus-bars as the tracks on the PCB were too thin and a lot of extra .1uf and .01uF decoupling capacitors. It wouldn’t run at 4MHz 0 wait-states but was OK with 1 wait-state.

I had a board we made up in the workshop that was used to slow down Nascoms to see if they would work but were being clocked too fast, i.e. check for marginal timing etc. It consisted of a 10 turn pot on a 555 and that drove the BUSREQ pin on the Z80, maybe there was a bit more logic that ensured all the other *REQ pins were sequenced OK. The result was you could turned down the effective clock rate of the Z80 but keep the DRAM refresh rates correct. ISTR you could slow it down by a factor of 500 which was great for finding faults. Or cheating at Space Invaders.

It was binned when I moved to GM 15 years back. Typing about 32k RAM makes me smile… I have a new PC for work, an Ultrabook. Quad core i7 gen5, 8G RAM 256G SSD. No optical driver, 13in 1920x1080 LCD, 802.11ac Wifi all in a cute package weighing about 1.5kg. Fantastic what has happened in the 36 years since that Nascom was on sale.

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I don’t remember exactly how many cut-track-lift-leg-solder-flying-lead mods I made to my Nascom2. I did, however, get a 64k DRAM board and mess with switchable memory banks, which let me patch some of the worse bugs in Microsoft BASIC. I also had a home-brew sound board (wire-wrap, AY-3-8910 and simple voltage-controlled filters) which never really quite produced the kinds of sounds I wanted. My junk box still contains quite a number of bits that never quite got included…

I’ve got an original ZEAP 2.0 manual somewhere and a genuine NASCOM A4 ring binder. Are they worth anything? :wink:

Give them as a prize for the Microwave Award (remember that?)!

Brian

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Yeah but the new laptop I have is uWave… the CPU runs at 2.9GHz and the Wifi is 2.4GHz and 5GHz :smile:

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Yeah, cut my assembler teeth on ZEAP. Couldn’t begin to compete with friend Nick who wrote a space invaders game, the sales of which more than paid for his N2, and allowed him to add floppies to it…

Oops… Those were the days (again)… :wink:

…which reminds me I have a WRT54G subverted for BBHN that needs someone to talk to…

Andy
I think you have opened up a whole new award here. SOTA networking using wifi on 2.4 Ghz from summits. No repeaters/routers cisco gear allowed. Hmm. This has possibilities!

The SOTA/WIFI DX AWARD

Andrew
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