Seen on the street in Kyiv.

Words of Advice:

"If Something Seems To Be Too Good To Be True, It's Best To Shoot It, Just In Case." -- Fiona Glenanne

“The Mob takes the Fifth. If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” -- The TOFF *

"Foreign Relations Boil Down to Two Things: Talking With People or Killing Them." -- Unknown

“Speed is a poor substitute for accuracy.” -- Real, no-shit, fortune from a fortune cookie

"If you believe that you are talking to G-d, you can justify anything.” — my Dad

"Colt .45s; putting bad guys in the ground since 1873." -- Unknown

"Stay Strapped or Get Clapped." -- probably not Mr. Rogers

"The Dildo of Karma rarely comes lubed." -- Unknown

"Eck!" -- George the Cat

* "TOFF" = Treasonous Orange Fat Fuck, A/K/A Dolt-45,
A/K/A Commandante (or Cadet) Bone Spurs,
A/K/A El Caudillo de Mar-a-Lago, A/K/A the Asset., A/K/A P01135809

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Flying the Old Way

When airplanes were made of wood and fabric and the pilots were made of tobacco juice and whiskey.



The range in the video is supposedly audible on 28.210 MHz and they'd like to do a full-up recreation at 529 kHz.

Or if you want to read about it: My writeup and Wickipedia's.

5 comments:

bob said...

The last time I flew a 4 course range was in Alaska in the mid 60's. I flew a Cessna 170B from San Antono Tx to Eagle Alaska , with a LF receiver and a Narco MK 2 Ominigator. When I would check in with the various tower and approach controls you could hear the gears slip when I would contact them that I was transmitting on an alternate frequency and listen on the VOR. That is just not taught any more.

Not in the training manual is what we would call an Alaska Instrument approach, you are on top of the cloud deck, the ceiling at the airfield is reported to be 500 feet or greater, and the field has a NDB located on the field. You would fly a clover leaf pattern to identify the cone of silence that existed on top of the antenna, and when you where sure you were on top of the antenna you would put the aircraft into a spin, spin down through the clouds and stop the spin as you came out of the clouds and then circle the field to land. You hoped that you did not pick up too much ice. What the hell we were young and dumb.

LRod said...

28.210, huh? I wonder how they got authority to use that frequency. That belongs to us hams.

LRod
K4QG
ZJX, ORD, ZAU retired

Eck! said...

28.110 beacon is managed by hams, so they can do that. I checked my log and I've even worked those guys on 10M.

Oddly this is one area where hams are still actively researching. Doing it at HF instead of LF makes it easier to build the antennas and trnasmitters. Back then anything over a few MHZ was way up there, nearly beyond what the tubes of the day could do and deemed useless. Now of course its trivial they are also finding there are fewer propagation caused errors at the higher frequency, also less static and noise. The advantage is there are cheap portable radios that can pick that signal up even on 10M.

That and if all things go SHTF it's
tech that can be built out of junk laying around like old computer monitors, a few AM CB rigs and some knowledge of how it was done.

Eck!

Nangleator said...

Very cool and very clever.

Great find!

Bob, how did passengers feel about an instrument approach that required spinning down through an undercast?

bob said...

For Nangleator;

We mainly hauled cargo, mail and locals. The locals had no problems, and if we were hauling oustlanders (typically hunters) we would brief them on what we might have to do in order to arrive, the description would not come close to the actual event. Usually the hunters had buck fever so bad that you could tell them that would have sit naked on hot coals for the flight out they would do it. Sometimes there would be a group, and one or two of them would be a cherry, and his buddies were setting him up for the experience.

There were times when we would get out to the village only to have to divert to Tok, or Talkeetna, Fairbanks, or Yellow Knife, God then you would get an ear full.