Advanced Hobbyist Wanted for Casual Design Work

You might get more replies if you had left _your_ contact info such that those not directly in the trade could contact you privately. So that we don't get slammed by the "pros" along with you...;)

I'll fall on my sword for this one. The rest of you not-pros owe me

And to anybody who fits that description, don't charge less per hour than your auto mechanic.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

_I'm_ my auto mechanic!

Careful, you might collapse into an event horizon.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Geomagnetic monitoring! What do you use? (how much $ do you have?) I could sell bits of our optical pumping apparatus.

Flux gates are cheap and get down to nanoTeslas or something.

NMR works at earth's field levels, literally just a few KHz. 4 KHz per gauss for the hydrogen resonance, something like that.

I was optomistic that anyone who has spare time to read this newsgroup might want to turn it into a few dollars instead.

But then maybe no one is game to admit in public they are not a $200 per hour pro.

Paul Nielsen

No, it is just that not everyone checks for new posts all that frequently. I am happy to be on your list of potential contractors. Send me an example of the kind of problem you want solving.

piglet

Yeah NMR is using the proton nuclear magnetic moment. The signals are weak 'cause you have to polarize the moments with a strong B field first.

With Rubidium you are using electron spin resonance. (Electron magnetic moment is ~ 1000 times bigger than the proton so the frequencies are up near 1 MHz.) And the system becomes polarized optically with some significant fraction of the electrons polarized... (~1-5% or so.. depending) The detection is also optical... big gains all around.

I'm not sure how it compares to a flux gate.

George H.

(Lots of hits on goolge if you search for Rubidium magnetometer.)

I don't know about that. I do know that a lot of young folks undervalue their labour. (And if your mechanic makes $200 per hour, you must drive a Tesla.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

You can buy a PCB flux gate sensor for something silly like $20, tons of resolution for the local earth field. Watch elevators and busses push the field around. picoT per root Hz stuff.

Yeah we bought one from "Fat quarters"? But now it looks like they only sell kits.

The sensor was from the UK... here.

George H.

here some independent guy in a garage mights be $50/hour, but an autorised VW dealer is closer to $150

-Lasse

I don't know that I'm exactly your desired person, but being located in north-west my current rate is only a buck a minute, when I have time. I'm without a doubt better at prototyping than design.

Nah, you're cheap and you're stating so up front, and you seem to know what you need. What pisses off the "pros" (or at least _this_ professional) is when someone comes on who doesn't have a clue, asks for something that's going to take an expert half a man-year to do correctly, and then gets all bent out of shape because the experts want to be paid for half an expert-year to do the job.

I'm out of your price and expertise range, but I wish you the best of luck.

I do not know if this would work or not. But you might look at some issues of " Nuts and Volts " magazine. And see if any of the authors seem to hav e the skills to help you. Some money from you, and letting them publish an article on geomagnetic monitoring and the monitor built, might be sufficie nt motivation.

Or doing some searches on " Geomagnetic monitoring diy " might find someon e you could collaborate with.

For example

Dan

I was a pro until I got too old. E-mail me at snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org . I may be able to do the sort of stuff you want. Mixed signal I can manage. PIC pr ogramming I can probably manage - MACRO-8 for a PDP-8 is rather different, but if you can do one assembly language, others aren't all that difficult ( or at least not the ones I've looked at).

Yikes! Most dealers are in the $65/hr range. I knew there was a reason to not even look at buying a VW.

Umm, ASE certified mechanics, well auto techs, make more than that.

If they got a good job that is. In fact they used to be paid book time whic h means if they can get a job done ion half the time they make twice the mo ney per hour. From what I was told, the unions came in and f***ed that all up.

You can do an Ecotec timing chain and intake valves in about three hours if you hacve all the right tools and are familiar with the job, and you cna c harge about $1,000 for it. You will have about $150 into the timing set and about $100 into new intake valves.

That is $250 per hour.

I have doen jobs so fast on bigscreens that I told them DO NOT call the cus tomer. Why ? Because the thing has only been here an hour and the bill is $