We are often told that speed cameras are a tool to improve road safety. However, the method of implementation does not fit that requirement. To do speed cameras correctly and use them as a tool to improve road safety, there are a few prerequisites. The locations that are high-risk need to be correctly identified, ideally to within a 50m stretch of road. This would allow camera monitoring to happen at very specific areas that are known to be accident blackspots. This does not refer to 20km lengths of road – as currently used for criteria of camera location selection. The …

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One of the definitions of timezone being correct for a location, is that the average Sun is due south at local noon on the clock. This means that there’s about the same length of time from sunrise to 12:00, as there is the length of time between 12:00 and sunset. In historical times, the local church would ring the bells based on the local time, such that at 12:00 the Sun would due south. Of course, due to different places being at different longitudes, the Sun would be due south at different absolute times. There’s 4 minutes difference for each …

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I hear Zurich is lovely this time of the year.. Also it’s apparently a lovely drive from Ireland via ferry to Fishguard and using the Eurotunnel onwards to the continent. I also hear that parking is fun in that city.. More to follow depending on updates.

Read this link first – https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/09/14000-words-of-blame-the-pilots-that-whitewash-boeing-of-737-max-failure.html It’s a sane critique of a recent NY Times article that appears to be from Boeing PR by proxy: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-crashes.html . To be honest, I would have expected better from the likes of the New York Times. And Boeing wonder why the European flight authorities will not be certifying the 737 MAX until the Europeans have tested and certified under European testing – any FAA certification understandably won’t be transferred given the debacle.

A few weeks ago, I set up an ADS-B listener, started uploading to FlightRadar24 with the ID T-EINN18 , and I’ve watched my ranking go up and up.. As of this morning (August 20th I have the 43rd highest ranking of 130 in Ireland, 3rd highest Shannon uploader, and worldwide ranking of 6204 of 23,000, and going up by ~2000 positions a day at the moment. I’m using a RaspberriPi 2b, an RTL-SDR dongle, and RTL-SDR 22dB LNA, and the antenna is a self-built colinear coaxial cable antenna with 8 116mm segments taped to the inside of an upstairs window. …

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So, I got myself a KiwiSDR. This is now connected to the random longwire I’ve strung across the rear lawn. It’s available on http://kiwisdr.swibble.com:8073 The KiwiSDR is a completely self-contained device, that consists of a Beaglebone Green micro computer, with an attached ‘cape’ that provides 30mhz of HF bandwidth to ~8 tuners. This means that (in one configuration) there are four tuners each with a waterfall available for use. Because the device is self-contained and accessible across networks without the use of a PC to host the tuning, there’s great flexibility in the device that can play and display the …

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I’ve had a bit of time to try out a few different antenna ideas, and it’s been a very interesting learning curve so far. Self-build antenna fun: The first antenna attempt was a simple short randomwire of a few meters whiule sitting on the lawn with one of the laptops and the RTL-SDR dongle. I was able to get some SW stations from Saudi and Eastern Europe with that. Second antenna build attempt was that I set up about 20m of insulated copper wire across the lawn, and fed a coax cable to the receivers directly from the centre point. …

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It’s been an interesting time recently, properly nerding out with the dabbling back into Software Defined Radio. Using a USB device, getting radio signals from around the world into the laptop, and doing interesting things from there. It’s pretty cool to be able, with the same device and hardware and antenna, to tune in the time signal on 60kHz, through getting shortwave radio stations from Botswana tuned in, to deciphering digital radio stations, to decoding the RTTY weather forecasts from the German weather service, to picking up faint FM radio stations from around the south of Ireland, to hearing Marine …

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My lovely new 20″ scope appears to need glasses. Seems as though Skywatcher didn’t make the mirror as well as they should have, and there is somewhere around one to two waves of spherical aberration present on the mirror. This is ruining the fine contrast on planets and making the scope a little frustrating to use. Currently working with the vendor to get a replacement mirror. There is also another issue with the scope, where the primary mirror support structure has enough movement present under the change in altitude, to ensure that the scope cannot maintain collimation. My investigations so …

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