I agree it's 99% ridiculous, but to play the devil's advocate: modifications could require re-certifying the transmitter due to regulations, which might make them not financially worth it after the remaining correct tubes die. Especially since regulations governing something so boutique and relatively obscure haven't probably been updated much to make stuff like this easier. (I confess high ignorance to UK law.)
I've been through the certifying process for broadcast transmitters from scratch, albeit in Australia. I can tell you it's damn easy to overwhelm the petty certifying bureaucrats, especially so when you can prove your engineering mods give better performance specs (less harmonic interference, etc.) than beforehand. In fact, our bespoke broadcast TXs gave better performance than any commonly-available commercial equipment.
Bureaucrats want a quite life, and when threatened with their actual names and positions being published in the press for being obstructive over nothing then they'll cave in. Remember, troublemakers in the public sector aren't usually rewarded with promotions.
Transmitters need only be re-certified if they are to be sold in quantity.
Once-off Broadcast Transmitters need only demonstrate that they meet the relevant standards.
Many of the existing LF and MF BC transmitters were effectively custom built to meet the requirements of their transmit license (for example, the radiation pattern of the antenna were often unique for each station).
I sincerely hope that if the remaining stations shut down, the band will become an amateur band. Existing 2200m and 630m are narrow, so allocating this entire range is something of a pipe dream, but it would be the best outcome.
(Not sure how 1750m LowFER would be handled; maybe just keep it on as an unlicensed exception?)
I recently began delving into radio bands like SW, MW, and LW again after decades of abstinence. Here in Europe, there's a shocking amount of propaganda on these bands, most of it Chinese in various languages. You will barely find anything in English, German or French that is not leaning towards China or Russia, except for that American christian radio station talking about Jesus.
It appears that the west has decided to leave those air bands to foreign influences. Those propaganda stations also do not appear to care much wether a band is deemed an amateur band in your country or not.
"sincerely hope that if the remaining stations shut down, the band will become an amateur band."
I would sincerely hope so too. Moreover, if or when the BBC closes its longwave service it'll bring serious pressure on the few remaining countries to close their LW services.
With the abandonment of the LW Service the Band will be up for grabs and there will be pressure on WRC/ITU to reallocate the spectrum. My guess is that's likely happening already but these days I'm not close enough to the ground to know. So I'd strongly urge Amateurs everywhere to start campaigning before it's too late.
I'm an ex-amateur but I still strongly believe in the movement and its objectives, and I think that if or when—more likely when—the LW service officially closes (by WRC-set deadline) then the Amateurs should be ready to immediately step in.
No doubt there will be pressure from others (possibility stockbrokers wanting to take advantage of the ionosphere beating fibre in transmission speed around the globe for their ultrafast stock trading), so I'd expect there to be a real bun-fight for this valuable LF spectrum.
Personally, if or when reallocated I'd like this Band to go to scientific research and this is where amateurs could step in to help, here they'd share the Band with scientific researchers. One such example which I've raised on HN before is earthquake prediction. It's already known that in many instances that before earthquakes ocurr the crystalline rock structure is under such pressure that it can generate piezoelectric fields and these can affect the height of ionosphere and in turn the distance it reflects RF transmissions will change. This effect is most noticeable at very low frequencies and can be detected.
A network of stations would be needed around the world to monitor these frequencies constantly and the Amateur Service could provide this.
There are other options too. Even though I'm no longer involved in Amateur Radio I'm concernd with its flagging numbers (I suppose once a member of the Amateur fraternity always a member). As an alternative to the BBC's closure, I even see ways for the Amateur Service to make money, perhaps Amateurs could not only mod the BBC's transmitters but do so a at vastly reduced cost then actually run the stations at reduced cost (see my other post to this story). The BBC could justify this unorthodox approach on both maintenance and running costs and that the LW Service is now less important given the low number of listeners (maintaining the uptime percentage would be less important, etc.).
Marconi T or L antennas with capacitance hats and loading coils are well within amateur practice on 630m[1] and 2200m, and common from 40m/7MHz on down.
Not very efficient still; an ERP of 1W, as demanded by the 2200m band, can still take a lot of power on a less-than-ideal antenna. Similar story for 630m. (160m and up is usually not so bad, just that even a good Marconi on longwave is still too big for most people.)
But the current LowFER[3] regs limit the transmitter to 1W final stage input power, and a COMBINED feedline and antenna length of 15m. At least allowing amateurs to operate more here would allow more than just extremely low SNR modes like WSPR to be used at any real distance.
Yes, unreinforced masonry building walls as describe on the link is an absolutely bad idea on earthquake prone areas.
But reinforced concrete structures are a different story. Concrete and masonry itself is brittle, but the steel rebar reinforcement adds flexibility and and tensile strength to the concrete. With an adequate design it is as safe or even safer than lighter wood structures, considering that it's inherently more fire safe, which is a big safety concern post quake.
Taiwan homes nowadays are mostly built with reinforced concrete structures and those modern buildings behaved very well in the 7.4 quake earlier this year.
Japan is probably the most earthquake-prone country in the world, and houses here are generally made with timber framing, for smaller buildings. For large apartment buildings and housing towers and such, they're made of concrete-reinforced steel of course, but timber is far more economical for individual houses.
Doesn't Japan also have a different cultural attitude towards houses? IIRC, a property sells mostly for the value of the land with the expectation that the house will be a tear down and that there isn't much restoration and rehab (aside from some gaijin Youtubers). With shorter life expectancies for homes, it seems like they aren't built with permanence in mind. There must be some interplay with code requirements for earthquakes vs. modern energy efficiency. Japanese houses I've been in have been ice boxes with little insulation and a large dependence on portable heaters. But maybe that is an artifact of location based on the severity and length of winter and houses farther north are more well insulated... maybe.
>IIRC, a property sells mostly for the value of the land with the expectation that the house will be a tear down and that there isn't much restoration and rehab
This is somewhat outdated. People buy used properties all the time; it's not the 80s any more, and people don't have money to waste tearing down houses after 10 years, and people move around from time to time because of work etc. It is true that used houses depreciate, though, over a 40+ year time span, but the land in desirable areas (e.g. Tokyo) generally appreciates.
>it seems like they aren't built with permanence in mind.
That's exactly the same as in America, worse actually. Have you been in an American house built in the last 50 years? They're poorly made, by unskilled labor after being designed by people with no formal education. Japanese houses by contrast are designed by architects and engineers and made to withstand extremely strong earthquakes (required by strict building codes). They generally aren't made to look luxurious, however, so you won't find granite countertops and other stuff like that that American houses tend to add to try to look like mansions (i.e. McMansions), and tend to use a lot of pre-fab materials that are quick to assemble.
>Japanese houses I've been in have been ice boxes with little insulation and a large dependence on portable heaters.
It sounds like you only visited houses built in the last millennium. Mold is a big, big problem in many parts of the country so ventilation tends to be prioritized over insulation, and energy efficiency hasn't been much of a concern until more recent years.
Part of that high margin is because emissions and fuel economy laws are looser for truck-like vehicles, so they make everything a truck-like vehicle to avoid having to comply.
The difference in gas mileage between SUVs and sedans is pretty negligible these days. They're mostly just cars with a different body style. And for the most part they're just flat better which is why they've mostly supplanted cars in the market.
It's really trucks that have gotten stupidly big these days.
Most of the stats come from media outlets reporting on singular cases, and most of the articles on the subject are op-eds rather than scientific studies. It does seem to be more common, but overall data is unfortunately very hard to come by.
The plural of op-ed anecdotes is not objective data, but I can give you some jumping-off points:
I hope not to seem combative, but I'll weigh against your view.
Life hasn't "adopted" anything. It's like when people say evolution "chose" an advantageous trait, when in reality it's just a consequence of dead stuff not passing on traits and specimens with those traits having more success at living, and neutral traits surviving just by not immediately killing or ahem rooster-blocking.
Old-age death is merely a mechanical limitation of biological processes (and possibly matter in general if you subscribe to the heat death of the universe.) It enabled rapid evolution, which allowed MUCH more complex life to come about after billions of years, but the fact that life retains death is merely a consequence of how it came about. Probably life that never died would only evolve in response to environmental disasters or predation, slowing changes significantly.
Don't take this to mean there aren't problems with humanity's search for extending life well past our natural biology. There are. But all those problems revolve around society needing death to not stagnate to hell due to evolutionary circumstances shaping our mentality, not the universe demanding it for some grand philosophical reason.
If you see death as something the universe "wants", great! I merely see death as a limitation and a mechanical process for exacting change.
To posit another philosophical quandry: if life can reproduce, can it ever really "die" of old age? We're one branch on a massive chain of reproduction stretching over literally billions of years, so are we really a "different" life-form from the first one? One enormous organism, split up into quintillions of different parts. If you have a child, where do you stop and they begin? Where do your parents stop and you begin? They/you literally came in part from their/your own cells!
And if you're looking for more like it, IMO the best derivative album would be "All The Grand Memories Of All The Lovely Years"[0] at over 11 hours long. I haven't listened to it all, but some sections do some interesting things ([1] as an example of a newly-formed memory in late-stage disease).
Every program I've run under Wine has read/write access to any directory you own. AFAIK the only way to containerize Wine is via OS-level LXC/Jails/etc, but under X11 that still leaves the GUI wide open unless you have your own X11 stack in the container and run remote desktop or something (which is possible! You can even use VirGL for 3D accel.) Not sure about Wayland, probably still a good idea to have an isolated stack.
It'd be cool if they made that easier to do via Wine itself, but that's probably a bit out of scope.
Case is from a ~2008 era Acer Aspire M5640 with newer guts, which happens to have a door slide mechanism that covers the two external 3.5" bays with semi-transparent plastic, and an array of top-mounted USB 2.0 ports.
It's probably one of the nicer tool-free OEM mATX cases out there - no nonstandard parts, edges aren't sharp, and generally easy to route cables in.
Not sure what you are thinking of, but if the case have big enough mesh/holes on the side of the case, there won't be much air suction through the floppy port.
> Is this needed because motherboards no longer include any floppy drive channels?
Yes, partially.
> I'm not yet grasping why Greaseweazle is better than a standard cheapy USB floppy drive.
1.) Support for non-standard formats.
2.) Ability to capture raw flux images, bypassing the limitations of actual floppy controllers, and allowing for weird formats to be preserved and written (ex. of flux images bypassing rare hardware restrictions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCU4xbHFb58&t=1538s)
It's sort of "raw flux" but it's still in the digital domain. The drive's pre-amp, gain control, and ADC are still in the loop. Tapping the direct output of the heads would really be raw flux (and would allow creating a completely software-defined "floppy drive").
