Watch antenna

Nano-crystaline amorphous metals are notoriously brittle, particularly if thickness is small enough to operate with low loss at higher frequencies.

RL

The industry uses the term amorphous with no rigour.

By definition it describes only a 'mixture' of materials. These could have magnetic or other properies.

Most compressed dust cores meet this definition, as they depend on chemical binders and fillers to establish magnetic density and mechanical integrity.

It has also been used to describe bonded magnetic particles in flexible media, treated during the curing process for particle polar alignment or other useful characteristics.

The term has recently been used to describe alloyed metal strips, for no apparent reason, other than to describe a mixture of components in the alloy - something that has always been taken for granted.

RL

It's hands-free, quicker and doesn't suggest to the boss that you're dog-f****ng on the job.

RL

Yes, brittle they are. Nevertheless, they're flexible enough to wind them into small toroids. I've used thousands of those, so I'm somewhat familiar with the stuff.

Jeroen Belleman

In industry, _amorphous_ has a precise meaning when speaking of metallic alloys, that there is no crystalline structure, that it has the (lack of) structure of a glass. So it's brittle but quite flexible if thin. So if a piece of such strip is bedded in something soft and flexible, the strip can be quite resistant to shock and vibration.

Joe

Right. In electronics, an amorphous magnetic material is a non-crystalline metal thing that typically has a very high mu. It's usually in the form of a thin tape that is wound onto a bobbin to form a torroidal core or supplied as cut cores.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

I can usually find someone nearby who is willing to loan me their phone to make a call.

I also have two identical smartphones (Moto G Power 2020). I also have several blank SIM's. If I misplace the phone I usually use, I turn on the other phone, call customer service and have them transfer my phone number to the backup phone. However, there have been problems with SIM swapping, so I do the transfer online. In the past

I might need to buy a watch if the cellular providers decided to monetize time keeping and require a subscription to have the smartphone display the time.

It's not the watch. The fashion statement is the cost. Surely nobody buys one of these just to display the time?

For those who can't afford overpriced fashion watches, sundial watches are also available:

I currently average 5 voice calls per day. Most are incoming calls. The calls tend to be rather long (about 15 to 30 mins) because the involve walking someone through a computer related problem. For voice calls, I could easily survive without owning a voice phone because most of my calls involve an exchange of data. If someone would make a "Wi-Fi data only" phone, I might consider buying one. My most used program on my smartphone is Solitaire+. So far, I haven't found a wristwatch that plays Solitaire.

Same here. The convenience of having everything I do concentrated in one device is convenient, efficient, economical and compelling. I have some film and digital cameras, but I rarely use them. I have an HP41CX calculator and HP41 emulators for my smartphones, desktops and laptops. Oddly, I reach for the actual calculator instead of the emulators, even when the various emulators are available. I tend to use whatever I learned to use first. I don't use the stopwatch, but do use the alarm and timer functions daily. With AI, the smartphone could probably be usable without the keyboard and display, and replace them with speech input and output.

I have a number of smart devices that use the smartphone as a display and control device. However, the various devices all have very different display and control software. Compared to what is available today, they're all old and obsolete. For example, my Amazon Echo is the first generation model. I've been thinking about assembling a home server, mostly to avoid mandatory cloud services and the monthly subscription fees. Home Assistant seems to be usable:

Agreed. However, I usually print the required maps on my home computer before leaving. I don't want to be looking at the small screen while driving. Printed maps are larger and easier to read. However, when traffic comes to standstill, I check Google Maps for the traffic situation. Unfortunately, I demonstrated to friends and customers how Google Maps is used to predict traffic. I've also shown them how check for fire and construction related traffic problems. However, instead of using their smartphones and my cheat sheets to obtain the information, they call me on the phone at home and ask me to look it up on my computer for them. Instead of upgrading my smartphone, perhaps I should upgrade my choice of friends?

Yes. I still have a box of such road maps buried somewhere in my mess. When I was very young, I became the designated navigator for family road trips. I would track where we were on the maps and provide turn by turn instructions. Tracking our location was easy enough, but providing the proper turning instructions were quite difficult for someone who was too young to drive a car. I did badly, but survived.

I live in a forest where most of the roads were originally logging trails. At various times, the county had plans to build new roads. These were documented and for reasons unknown, were entered into the official county maps. When MapQuest, various GPS maps and Google Maps arrived, I attempted to have the non-existent roads removed from their maps. I failed and eventually gave up. Today, I edit the maps, print color copies, and distribute them as needed.

Everyone seems to be polarized on the use and value of text messaging. I have to deal with both extremes. One person does everything by text messaging, avoids voice calls and hates email. Another is the opposite. I tell my customers "Use whatever you want. If you don't get an answer, try another method or phone number".

I replaced my electric water heater after the earthquake in 1989. That would be 37 years old. It's still running today possibly because I've pre-emptively replaced the (aluminum) anode rod 2 or 3 times and have randomly drained the tank to prevent calcium carbonate build up. I don't know how long a recently manufactured tank will last, but I suspect it will be much less.

|---------------------------------------------| |"There aren't any public pay phones any more"| |---------------------------------------------|

False, but there are few public pay phones. (S.

Rumors, announcing the demise of public pay phones, have been greatly exaggerated:

California pay phones:

For a time, I was the self-appointed maintainer of the local pay telephone list:

Airports appear to have a good supply of pay phones:

There are still businesses that still supply pay telephones:

FYI: I'm in the process of acquiring a Network Attached Server in my home network, which is largely wired (enet, with some WiFi for iPad and MacOS laptop), precisely to sidestep cloud storage. Will also implement a Network Print Server.

The NAS will be a Synology DS223 with 12 TB disks powered via an APC BE600M1 UPS linked via a USB cable.

Joe

Thanks. Synology makes good equipment. However, their attempts to create a captive market by restricting their NAS servers to only function with disk drives provided by Synology, convinced me to look elsewhere. This is from 11 months ago:

I'm slowly building my NAS from available Linux software and whatever hardware I can find. It's currently running ZimaOS (formerly CasaOS), in a ProxMox VM, on my overloaded and underpowered desktop:

APC makes good UPS hardware, but if possible, I don't want to use a UPS. I select (or modify) my hardware to run on battery power from various DC voltages. At this time, most of my communications hardware (modem, router, ethernet switches, Roku, phones, weather station, ham radio, ADS/B receivers, battery recharge station, etc) are all running on DC power. The batteries are currently a mix of LiFePO4, lithium-ion and AGM batteries with a few buck/boost converters mixed in for odd voltages. However, the various computers are all running on UPS power supplies. Eventually, it will be all DC backup and no hopefully, no UPS's.

Good luck with your NAS project.

Look on Synology's Compatibility List page.

On Amazon there are lots of decoys, so ensure that the model number matches *exactly*. And Amazon oddly rates NAS units with disks as having the total capacity of both disks, ignoring that fact that this is a RAID system, so the capacity is that of one disk alone, not their sum.

Could not get 12 or 14 TB, so got 10 TB instead.

I ordered everything yesterday, with delivery today.

I would use your DC powered network equipment approach as well if I were at your scale. I'm fond of 48-Vdc for such things. The next higher scale is 300-Vdc. Then there is 1000-Vdc.

Thanks. Likely to be a learning experience.

Joe

While metals are usually associated with ductile properies, alloys are created to increase strength and rigidity - also brittleness.

In nanocrystaline alloys, the crystal structure of an alloy's particle is recognized, however: the manufacturing method attempts to distribute these particles in a disordered form - hence the improper use of the amorphous term (see the dictionary).

These brittle materials' magnetic properties suffer if deformed after mrf and so tend to be created in as close-to-end-use form as is possible. Machining, as with glass, is difficult.

Toroidal shapes formed by strip rolls can lose a half order of magnitude in permeability, simply due to later coil-winding pressure, or end-use mounting forces.

The simplest physical demonstration of the material's mechanical properties is to crush an 'amobead' with pliers. These depend on a thin epoxy coating for mechanical integrity. Larger parts will have a plastic or metal/fibre casing, with mechanical buffering properties.

RL

The difference between nanocrystalline and amorphous solids is very real. It shows up unambiguously in xray crystallography.

As I recall, in amorphous form the peaks due to second-nearest neighbors are smeared out and more distant ones basically go away.

In powdered amorphous form, even the nearest neighbor peaks can disappear.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

That's what the theory might say, and perhaps in practice too. However, My watch has shown the "wrong" time in the morning when I looked at it after being right when I've gone to bed. This is what the Junghans manual for the watch states:

"Junghans radio-controlled watches synchronise themselves with the DCF

It confirms that reading of the DCF time signal can be interfered with. What I am unsure about is whether or not the signal can not only be interfered with so it /cannot/ be read, but /could/ be read from a source other than DCF 77 and misinterpreted. At least twice I have been wearing the watch during the afternoon and it has shown the wrong time when I've looked at it (it was correct in the morning). If the watch is supposed to synchronise only between 02.00 and 03.00, why did it change to the incorrect time during the day?

What I usualy do is enable the watch to get the DCF77 time, check, and then disable 'auto update'. I do check from time to time, mine are about within 1 second (both my Casio) next day. My Xiron DCF77 clock is always running / updating, sitting on the table in the living room, have not seen an error in 10 years...my reference clock!

Sure you can interfere with DCF77, record the time signal and play it back high power ...

Junghans is an established and excellent brand. My guess is if you want reliable reception, you have to remove it from your wrist at night and place it in a location known to have good reception, just like you do with a tabletop model. Otherwise there's no telling how the internal ferrite rod lines up with transmission orientation. Its axis should be perpendicular to direction of the transmitting tower.