[Coco] serial ports and thingsRe: moving files on bootup... and more nonsense and OT stuff

[George Ramsower]

>>From: "Gene Heskett"
>>
>>> I was there from fall of 77 to the fall of 79.  And I can tell you a 
>>> story
>>> about walking up North Mountain in the middle of the night to put a new
>>> klystron in the icr transmitter there.
>>

I replaced an "engineer" that thought a 4CX5000 was a transistor because of 
the anode cap looked like a transistor. DOH!

>>Gene,
>>
>>  What is a icr transmitter. I thought I knew a little bit about
>>broadcasting and this is news to me.
>
> Inter City Relay, similar to an STL, which is a Studio Transmitter Link.

>
> We had generators in the shacks at the KOTA owned links from Denver to 
> Rapid
> City & back south to KDUH, but the only way we knew they were being used 
> was
> when they ran out of propane (or oil & locked up), the power had been out 
> for
> a week then.  Little 2 cylinder Onan's, stick a crowbar in the flywheel 
> after
> filling them up with oil and break them loose and they were as good as new
> usually.

 My 4KW Onan RV gen-set was full of water when I got it(free). Had to use a 
chisel to loosen the rust in the cylinders and keep bumping the flywheel 
until the rings managed to break through the rust. Then some sandpaper on 
the valve seats and a hammer on the valve heads to knock them back down when 
they would stick... until finally it would start. Ran it a few hours and now 
it's okay for a backup. It uses a little oil now, but who cares? It only 
gets used in emergencies.
 I suppose if I had to use it for days at a time, I could use a siphon to 
the crankcase to keep it in oil. HEHE!
 I'm reminded of a guy many years ago that had a Studebaker that used oil so 
bad, he ran a tube into the passenger compartment so he could pour oil into 
the engine while he was driving. Now THAT'S extreme. Along about then, I had 
a Mercury Meteor that the blowby was so bad, it got into the passenger area 
and I had to run a flex-tube from the crankcase ventilator into the air 
filter housing. Some of the oil would blow back into the engine and the rest 
went up in smoke onto drivers behind me.
 Ah... those were the days.

>
> More than you wanted to know. :)

 Prolly not!

 My first experience with an  STL was a Marti. or was Marty.. I think it was 
Marti. Transistors? Not.
 Tubes will live after a nuclear attack. If you can find one.

 Don't forget, folks.... transistors and integrated circuits are only a fad. 
We'll go back to tubes soon. :-)


 I still have a six foot PTP dish I used to use as a BUD to pick up 
satellite broadcasting.with an old Luxor receiver. I used a home-made 
circuit to control the dish mover(gate opener). It used the old push button 
VCR buttons with the pots on each button to select the sats/position. Dual 
comparators and a couple of relays. I was told it wouldn't work, even after 
I was using it for a couple of years until most of the good channels got 
scrambled. I used a pot on the axis of the dish to go to the comparators. It 
was fun to watch the dish fight the wind.

 As I learned to use a coco, I used it to record(just a database) the 
schedules of the different satellites and where those satellites were. I 
never did take the effort to use the coco to move the dish, but I did think 
about it... does "thinking about it" count?

George