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April 21, 2001

 

Work continues on cleaning up and converting old pages to the new look. The entire history series, both wireless and wireline, have been checked and redone. I will probably be finished with the entire site in two weeks. At first I worried people would stop coming to the site as I tended to the old pages, however, that has not happened, rather, my return visitor count is going steadily up. My best guess is that people appreciate content without dead links and crazy formatting, so although I am doing no new writing, I am making my older writing more useful and that is why more and more people are coming back. Have a great weekend, I may not update this page until Monday.

Why is AC used to power the Local Loop and Not DC?: Some Ramblings

Ken Solomon relates, "As far as I know DC was used to prevent hum, and to allow service to continue in the event of a power outage and because people were afraid of AC. It is used, after all, in the electric chair. Also, Bell used wet cells and probably would have killed himself using an AC generator. And, even though AC would have induced hum the interference and cross talk using DC was terrible anyway until a two-wire loops were introduced."

"In the early days iron wires were used and they were strung from roof top to roof top (this is pre poles). Since iron is a fairly poor conductor it picked all kinds of squawks, screeches, buzzing, parts of conversations (from adjacent lines) and other noises. Also, a single strand grounded wire will act as an antenna picking up atmospheric noises as well. Later, pure copper was used but it proved too soft so they used iron coated with copper which worked much better since it had many times the conductivity of iron alone. Of course if you hook up two modern phones in your house with modern conductors and a solid power supply you shouldn't have any interference. But plug in some cheap intercoms and you'll pick up (or induce) noise. BTW, did you know that the best place to ground the phones was in the soft earth surrounding the outhouse?"

"You're right about Edison who was a strange bird. He hires Tesla to improve his AC generation and products and then dumps him (without given him credit) when he accomplished all he was asked and more. I think Edison's problem was that he didn't understand AC as well as DC and was more comfortable with DC circuits."

Thursday, April 19, 2001

A new hit record yesterday for the site: 4,260 hits in one day. Finally, over 4,000 hits in one day. Thank you all so much. Every hit or page view makes the site more valuable to a potential sponsor. Speaking of hits, do you know what the latest scam is with websites? Those irritating pop up banners can count as a hit. So the more you put up at a site, the more hits you get. Every time you click one away the web site totals up a new page view. Double your traffic today! Sigh. This inflates site traffic for trash sites and puts legitimate sites such as mine at a disadvantage, a potential sponsor now does not know, and in most cases is unaware of what a high traffic site is doing, that is, to fairly compare numbers a sponsor now has to visit every site to judge how hits are arrived at. I've even seen exit pop up ads, so that when you leave a site in disgust you must click the offensive message away and thus give the site another page view. True, not many people will return to such a site, but Netscape.com and AOL.com both use them on their home pages to market products, figuring correctly that people will return. Arrgh.

 

Didn't mean to ramble, I am continuing to update the pages here as quickly as I can. Bought a new web page program, Adobe's Go Live, to replace my aging PageMill, which is now no longer produced and is incompatible with the current operating system for Macintosh. I actually prefer Macromedia's Dreamweaver program but cannot afford it. And so it goes. . .

Thursday, April 12, 2001

I took a walk yesterday afternoon to the top of 2,819 feet tall Mount Vaca, located about 60 miles east of San Francisco. On a clear day from the top you can see the Pacific Ocean on one side and the Sierra Nevada mountain range on the other. Total elevation gain for the ten mile walk is around 2,500 feet. Spring is in full bloom in the coastal hills of California and I wanted to make sure I saw some of the beautiful wildflowers that always grace the sides and the surrounding countryside of the remote Mix Canyon Road, my path to the top. I saw at least two dozen wildflower species in bloom, in colors from orange to white to red to sky blue. Vines and trees and herbaceous plants all contributed in a tribute to spring. Spotted my first Calochortus of season, the lovely and nodding Calochortus amabilis, a close relative shown here:

 

 

The most beautiful of California's wildflowers, Calochortus "come[s] in three main designs: Fairy lanterns (globe lilies) with nodding flowers and petals that enclose and hide their private parts; Mariposa lilies with upright flowers that are open and vase-shaped; and Star tulips with upright flowers that are bowl or tulip-shaped. Although the distinction between the latter two groups is somewhat blurred there is no mistaking a member of the genus Calochortus." For a look at this spectacular genus, check out these two pages, you will instantly turn into a plant lover, if the links are still working:

http://www.cnps.org/gallery/fristrom/Calochortus.htm 

http://www.rareplants.co.uk/gallery2.htm

 

At least twenty to thirty different antennas dot the top of the ridge on Mount Vaca. Amateur radio groups, the United States government, and many, many commercial communications companies all maintain equipment on this high ground. The locals call the ridge "Top of The World" and while it is not, is a grand place to be. The following pictures are from this site:

 

http://www.armymars.org/norcal/vaca.html

(No longer working!)

 

The hazy photograph immediately below is looking east toward the great central valley of

California. And West Sacramento, where I live. On a clear day the Sierra Nevada would be visible beyond.

   

Misc. Notes

 

Does anyone have a good photograph or image of Almon Strowger? I have an e-mail request for a decent sized photograph of the of step by step pioneer and I am unable to find anything on the internet except for two very small images, not really big enough for the work they are doing. If you do have something, please let me know.

I got an e-mail suggesting that the new home page looks cold. I agree and I am pondering how to put a human face on the logo, such as A.G. Bell or Marconi or both. I also need to put a link on all pages to the e-mail form that some people now use to communicate with me. Working on it! Continue to send suggestions in.

I continue to make good progress redoing the digital wireless basics series (internal link).

90% of the external links I put in, those meant to help people go further with their learning, are dead. Any link more than a year and a half old seems certain to die. It makes me sad that so many sites with so much valuable information have chosen to remove good files from their servers without telling anyone. In the future I will archive those pages at this site so that our technological history and useful facts won't go away.

I'm thinking about an off line subscription service to TelecomWriting.com, where you would pay $100 each year and in return get the entire contents of the website on a C.D. ROM., a new CD every quarter. There are many neat illustrations and documents I have off line that I have not yet posted due to time and server space. Let me know if you are interested in this so I can gauge interest.

My cat Montel (internal link) did not suffer a cut above his left eye on Saturday. Turns out he has runny eyes, both eyes, in fact. Perhaps clogged tear ducts. Yuch. Springtime allergies perhaps. I still have the Big Guy on antibiotics and now a veterinarian appointment for him on Thursday. It's kind of tough watching him walk around with one eye closed, but it adds to his mystique: a rough, tough dude, now toothless, now having vision problems, maybe an eye patch would be cool, but still fourteen pounds of solid, fighting gato. Check back.

Click here for the full sized photograph

The gallant and doomed Amelia Earhart, "[W]earing her Western Electric headphones, keeps in touch with ground stations as she manipulates the instrument-board controls on her 'flying laboratory.' The radio equipment was developed by Bell Laboratories, manufactured and installed by Western Electric."

Communications v. Telecommunications

While working on the new site, I've been considering the differences between the word communications and telecommunications or telecom. Since voice and data are converging communications might seem the best choice to describe traffic and activity in our new, networked world. The prefix 'tele' suggests telephony, traditionally a voice and not information dominated medium. But 'tele', from the Greek for far off, is the only way to suggest communications from a distance.

Among dozens of other words with the same prefix, teleconferencing, telemetry, teletype, telemarketer, and even telekinesis, it is automatically implied that parties or equipment are distant from each other, the critical difference between local and distant communications. The words conferencing or marketer without 'tele' make it seem these folks are standing next to us, and not at the end of a telephone line. So telecommunications still has its place, indeed, it might seem preferable since telecom can never be confused with the much broader field of communications, which includes courses in the humanities. You've probably heard of a communications major, a liberal arts pursuit which deals with oral, written, and visual communication. But not electrical communications, there's the difference. Rather than being outdated, I think telecom still serves and serves well.

Time to move on . . .

I am moving this website's content to a new domain: telecomwriting.com. The new domain name accurately reflects what I and other writers at this site do. While privateline has a telecom association, a non-switched, fixed, nailed up connection between two points, few people outside the trade understand the term, and there is no relation between its name and how I try to make a living. And although private line used to be my magazine's title, it has now been five years since it was published and very few people remember me by it; I am now known chiefly by my web work. Many months ago tomfarley.com was available but I passed on getting it. Again, there was no connection to my livelihood.

The new site will still be free. More pages may be converted to .pdf files for sale if there is interest. I might also sell the site's content on CD ROM by subscription, say four CDs each year for a total of $60. Each new CD would reflect current changes to the site. Many people ask why I don't charge a site membership, I could not bear to do that. The vast majority of people view three pages or less, they are, like the rest of us, looking for a quick answer to a specific question and then it's time to move on. That's not the audience to sell memberships to. 15% of privateline.com's visitors come back over and over again, this core market might be willing to pay for content but I doubt that many would sign up and I would disappoint the 85% who come here looking only for a tibit of information.

Site sponsorship by a company looking to build name recognition is what I am really searching for. Although you'd have to view ads those banners would support the site. I can't promise click throughs, only a way to reach everybody from the school kid on AOL who is writing a telephone report to different people from Motorola, Lucent, Nortel, Ericsson, Alcatel, and so on who visit here every day. I think many new, good telecom companies can't find a way to get through the clutter of regular advertising to reach people really interested in communications. I think privateline.com and now telecomwriting.com might be a creative way to do so. The problem? The people who like my site aren't the advertising and marketing executives I need to reach. These people don't visit the site, only people interested in technology do. So I get lots of hits but not from the people who control the ad budget for their company. I do not know how to find these folks or interest them in a site they weren't going to visit in the first place.

At their request, I did spend many months last year in on and off again talks with a major telecom book publisher. McGraw Hill. They at first were interested in sponsoring privateline.com and then talks turned to myself helping them with the site they were building. I spent much time and wrote a great deal, suggesting different ways to make their site less corporate and more friendly. Work was promised to me for this year. That hasn't happened and my e-mails to them now go unanswered. This was extremely disappointing because I really wanted to align myself with an education oriented company. All for naught :-( I ramble and am becoming self indulgent; work this week will focus on a dozen different things as all 150+ pages become converted to the same look and feel. Stay tuned. . .

Japan Inc. gets ready to roll

I have always liked this AT&T ad from 1969. Looking back, it tells us much about what was to come:

"Could you tell us, Mr. Isomura, what you like best about the States?"

'The inventiveness of your people, instant coffee, and your telephone system.'

"We asked Mr. K. Isomura, president of Panasonic, Matsushita Electric Corporation of America, about his first impressions of this country . . . continues here with a much larger picture --->

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