So I do a lot of bicycling, and I work the larger events from my bike (typically chase vehicle for marathons or triathlons. The guys at the back are usually not too fast for me. Finding the LOST folks is more challenging). This usually means two handhelds, one for my voice comms, and one dedicated to APRS.

Unfortunately, I can only get one mobile antenna on the bike, so the other is a rubber duck (one with more gain than what comes with the radio). This means that we have times when either my voice comms are questionable, or we lose the APRS telemetry. To fix this, I came up with a plan to put TWO mobile antennas on my bike.

I’m using an SBB-5, which is 1/2 wave on two meters. This eliminates the need for a ground plane or counterpoise, but means I really shouldn’t be on high power on 440. I have it on a UHF mount, which is stuffed into an old water bottle. For the event, I place it in the bottle holder on the back of my good bike pack, slide it all on the rack, and secure the co-ax.

Slide it on the rack? Yep. The pack in question is a Topeak MTX system. The bottom of the pack has a widget that slides into the rack (which is made to handle it). It clips on the front to remain secure. Easy on, easy off. Great for my morning commute! so what I plan to do is make (or rather, have my metalworking brother make) an aluminum piece shaped like the widget, so I can mount the antennas directly on that.

My big question is whether to just make it an antenna mount and use a regular pack (which is smaller, but I would worry less about having it damaged), or try to replace the plastic widget with the new one on the main pack. The latter isn’t as easy as it seems, since everything would need to be counter-sunk somehow, and I’m not sure the old one comes off in a manner that won’t just break it.

At any rate, when done, I would be able to have TWO UHF mounts, both firmly secured to the bike, so I could get good performance from both radios. Sadly, these things would be ridiculously close together, and it might be that this just won’t work well. But the only way to find out is to try it.

Some of the more radio-savvy among you are saying, “Listen, you idjit, the Kenwood D72 does both!” Yes, it does. But my bike rig includes the Pryme Blu — a Bluetooth PTT switch. This allows me to use the radio without taking my hands off the handlebars, and without being wired to the bike in case I have to get off the bike in a hurry. Unfortunately, the unit I have doesn’t work with the D72. Once pressed, the PPT doesn’t release, and the radio transmits until the timeout is reached. It works quite well with my F6A and my Wouxun (bought used because it rained for 7 hours at the last marathon, and I needed a cheap spare).

At any rate, some pictures below before we start the project!

I live along an abandoned railroad right-of-way that currently serves triple duty as a paved trail, a major drainage culvert, and an easement for my local electric utility. This combination gets interesting — the culvert can go from one inch to six feet deep in less than ten minutes in a heavy storm, thus covering the trail; the easement carries a 34 kV line, right along the trees in our back yards, so the utility comes out and just slices off the backs of the trees once in a while; and at least once, they’ve gotten a truck stuck in the mud left by the first scenario.

Those lines have been there for decades…probably put most of them up when the railroad went in. They sit on two sets of poles — a series of double-pole units to carry the 34 kV, and a line of single poles that help carry the 240 V house lines, cable TV, etc.

Until this month, anyway. The utility updated the substation at the end of our block, and are now putting in all new poles and streamlining the entire operation. I used to work in the power distribution industry as an engineer, so I’m interested in the entire process.  It’s hard to tell sometimes what they’ve done in a day (other than utterly ruin the grass on either side of the trail, but that can’t be helped), but they’re getting a lot done.

The primary push right now is to replace the line of double poles with a line of much taller singles. The doubles held the big line up between 40 and 50 feet. The singles are much taller (closer to 70 or 80), which may get them far enough from the trees that they won’t have to trim them off anymore. (They maintain 15 feet from the 34 kV line.) Looks as if they are trying to reduce the total cabling as well — pole has a static wire along the top, three lines for the three-phase under that, and every pole has a line to ground.

The cables at the bottom are for the 240, still attached to what’s left of the double pole.

It’s hard to see the ground line here…it is behind the pole, held out from the side to avoid shorting the live lines, then comes back to the pole and straight to the ground. Very nicely done, actually. It’s inspired me to re-do the grounding for my antennas (which, sadly, seems to be under poison ivy at the moment).

As they put up the new poles, they take down half of the double pole. I’m not sure what their goal is with the other half — it not only carried the big lines, but also the 240, with a single pole midway between the doubles to serve the homes. My new HF antenna came down about an hour after it went up due to a random tree branch, but I don’t want to put it back up if they are going to take those smaller poles out — they’d have to re-route the line to my house, and I do not want my antenna situated where one can fall on the other.

I’ve not caught them actually putting in a new pole, but they’ve left the old ones out for now. It looks like about five feet is embedded in the ground (which is enough, given that the wires themselves help stabilize things a bit).

Not sure how much of the new poles get buried, but it’s almost certainly more than five feet.

At the end of the street, the lines change direction, so they’ve also installed one of those metal monsters, because the wood poles can’t bear a uni-directional load like that without a lot of help. Thing is bloody huge, and has me wishing I could safely pop an antenna on the top of it.

They’ve made extensive use of pulleys on this project. As they’ve installed the poles, they’ve attached pulleys to the ends of the insulator arms, then run the cabling over that. This allows them to keep the line slack for the early work. When they have the run done, they pull the lines tight (well, tight enough. They do contract in the winter, pull them too tight and they’ll snap something when it’s 80 degrees colder than today) and put the cables properly on the arms.

From what I can tell, this will run for at least a mile after the end of the trail, but I’m not sure where it will terminate. I lived down there for a while, and there isn’t much to run it to.

Overall, fun to watch, and I’ve learned a bit about current state of the art.

You’ve doubtless heard the news of a Malaysian jet that disappeared not long after departure. It’s a Boeing 777, of which I’m rather fond, since the company for which I work (well, one of them) has equipment on board, and I was a part of the team that vetted it.

Unfortunately, there are seven billion people on this planet with roughly six billion axes to grind, and some of them get a lot of attention, through airplay or the internet. I generally ignore them — everybody is somebody else’s weirdo, and I don’t have time to chase them all down. But I came across an execrably stupid analysis that I just couldn’t pass by.

A web site I refuse to name so they don’t get “mad hits” posted “six important facts you’re not being told” about Flight 370. Written by someone who refers to himself as The Health Ranger. Sigh.

Actually, I shouldn’t knock him for that. My nicknames are not much better. “Antlers,” for instance.

Anyway, he manages to get pretty much everything wrong, and then leaps to the conclusion that there is entirely new, mysterious and powerful force is at work on our planet which can pluck airplanes out of the sky.” [emphasis in original.] Conspiracy theories are fun, aren’t they?

But as it happens, I have a degree in engineering, 25+ years of experience in aviation, and I do emergency response work in my Copious Free Time[tm], so let’s break this down.

“Fact #1: All Boeing 777 commercial jets are equipped with black box recorders that can survive any on-board explosion”

This is misleading at best. The black box recorders (which aren’t black, actually. Most of them are bright orange, so they’re easier to spot) are pretty damn tough. They take a lot of abuse in all kinds of crashes. But the issue with the missing aircraft did not necessarily originate from inside. There are all kinds of things that can damage the recorder, sometimes substantially. But we can afford to let this one go, since it’s nearly irrelevant to the rest of the piece.

“Fact #2: All black box recorders transmit locator signals for at least 30 days after falling into the ocean“

It’s true that many units do sent out a beacon, but “ocean” here is a problem. The author makes some bold claims about the fact that they can’t find the box means that it’s gone or (I love this) has “been obliterated by some powerful force beyond the worst fears of aircraft design engineers.” I know the worst fears of design engineers — the black box isn’t one of them.

He ignores two relevant facts here. The first is that the recorder isn’t going to keep a beacon going for thirty days (ocean or not) with pixie dust or unicorn farts. It needs a battery, and those store limited energy. The pings from the beacon are relatively low in power, and presume that the search area is fairly small. The beacon will be hard to detect and track when a large sector of the ocean is being searched…they’d consider themselves lucky if they found it first.

The second is that radio signals don’t travel well through good electrical conductors such as salt water. This is why submarines generally have to surface (or nearly surface) to get an antenna in the air first. It’s true that subs can communicate with Very Low Frequency (VLF) or Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) waves. But building the transmitters is bloody hard, because these are remarkably long wavelengths. The top end of VLF, for example is 30 kHz, which gives a wavelength of about 10 kilometers (six miles)! There’s no way something the size of a flight data recorder can manage that. So they use a more reasonable frequency, but if it’s more than 50 feet below the surface, it won’t be heard unless you’re right on top of it…which requires that you find it in the first place. Chicken, meet egg.

“Fact #3: Many parts of destroyed aircraft are naturally bouyant and will float in water“

We’ll disregard the spelling error here. It is true that many parts are naturally buoyant and will float, and he even points out that the seat bottoms can be used for flotation — but not well. They are just buoyant enough to help a human remain afloat. And we’re already fairly buoyant ourselves.

What he’s missing here is that the buoyant parts are attached to a lot of very distinctly non-buoyant parts. They’ll sink when everything else does, for the most part. There will be a few things on the surface at the point of impact, but not a lot…more on this in a moment.

“Fact #4: If a missile destroyed Flight 370, the missile would have left a radar signature“

Health Ranger talks here about the radar signature that missiles and their associated explosions present. I think he could stand to read up on the subject; there is an entire industry dedicated to stealth planes, missiles, boats, bobbleheads, what have you, and they are good at it. But his assessment presumes that a radar was pointed in the right direction at the right time…and there probably wasn’t one, because there is no radar tracking over the ocean.

This is a common misconception. We have GPS devices in nearly everything now. I have four in my house as I write. It’s hard for us to imagine not being able to find things, but the simple truth is that once the aircraft is more than 150 miles from shore, it’s out of range. I spent part of my career in aviation working with weather radar, and even the airborne units (with 30,000 feet of altitude to help get around Earth’s curvature) can only manage 300 miles, and that’s only for large storm systems.

Having said that, I don’t think this flight went down silently. I’ve read that it had ACARS, which transmits maintenance data to ground crews. This is NOT a real-time system, but it does send packets via satellite or what have you periodically. So there may be a clue in the ACARS data, if someone has it. (There are real-time systems available, but Boeing says it wasn’t installed on this aircraft.)

“Fact #5: The location of the aircraft when it vanished is not a mystery“

He needs to define “vanished.” We certainly know where it was when contact was lost — DUH! But that doesn’t tell us where it was when it crashed, or landed, or otherwise met its fate. That plane had enough fuel to remain airborne for hours — it could have gone well over 1000 miles before actually crashing. In fact, news reports tonight state there is some reason to think it actually crossed to the other side of India.

Long story short, we still have no idea where it crashed (if it did. Could easily have made a number of landing sites in poorly covered areas).

“Fact #6: If Flight 370 was hijacked, it would not have vanished from radar“

Complete load of horsepucky here. As stated above, more than 150 miles out, they fall off the screen. If it were hijacked and the hijackers understood it, they could actually have gotten closer to radar and still not be seen, by dropping below Earth’s curvature. (Mind you, this has other issues. Jets close enough to shoot with pistols tend to get attention in other ways.)

Sorry, but this is just not how it works.

This is the money shot:

If we never find the debris, it means some entirely new, mysterious and powerful force is at work on our planet which can pluck airplanes out of the sky without leaving behind even a shred of evidence.

Holy crap. He even says this immediately after admitting that they most likely haven’t found debris because it’s outside the search zone. (The one thing he says that makes sense.) But then, he says things like “inescapable conclusion,” too.

This all seems to stem from the belief that the debris field would be “massive.” But scale matters here. Yes, a 777 is big. It won’t fit in your garage (unless it has more than ten thousand square feet). But our planet is big…many orders of magnitude bigger than the jet. As in 5,508,532,127,000,000 square feet. Most of which is ocean. Get the picture?

The truth is, it’s very hard to spot things in the water unless you’re pretty much right over them. The search area is too large to expect to find anything quickly, if there is anything to find.