Jump to content

dave and jaime

Members
  • Posts

    546
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by dave and jaime

  1. bottom line is the flight crew have tha last say. flight crew members do not include the stewards and support crew. if you have any doubts or question ask the pilot or co-pilot and they have the last say, infact ive seen pilots contradict the compaines policies. most of the filght crews ive been in contact with understand the difference between guidlines and safety regulations. as for the gps opening the car doors, id suspect that it was a fluke but it is possible. all electroninc devices emit rf noise, but having a certification (ie fcc, csa, crtc, or otherwise) means that the manufacturer has managed to get a percentage of its units to pass is random testing, not that all units conform to the standards. id be interested in seeing if you could get repeatalbe results.
  2. depending on how cold you may be out of luck. most gps can only operate down to about -10°C-20°C.
  3. i heard that term used in that fashion long before harry potter. i agree though its use is alot more prevalant now.
  4. Nope. That's why I included the words "I think..." at the beginning of my post. I don't use the same GPSr and I'm not familiar with the feature that mastifflover described. I gave what I thought to be a plausible answer. Do you have a better explanation? Please share! I am, however, pretty sure about my compass advice. as for the compass i have a mag315 but i think the design is similar in that there is a outer ring that rotates to give cardinal directions an arrow head at the center to indicate your current direction and an arrow inside the ring that rotates to indicate the direction to the point your are heading to . ok, i never gave any consideration to the question but i hoped you were right. as for the declination, i thought about it and to find your declination is simple---simply record your bearing to any point some distance away change the north reference and record your bearing again. the difference in the 2 'bearings' is your declination.
  5. check the com ports and theri configuration in the control panel. its been said that active sync programs can hijack the port. failing this i would try the cable on someone elses pc to verify that the gps and cable actaully work, its unlikely that that is the problem but it would be worth a try if the com port works.
  6. im interested to see the battery usage. they claim up to 30 hours on 2aa's. is this realy attainable?
  7. personally i never rely on my gps for navigation. i allow it to tell me where it thinks i should go but as the manufacturers say it is not a replacement for good judgement. to me good judgement means having a fail safe method of navigation as a backup. personally i carry a basic silva compass and have hands on my wristwatch so that if ithe gps craps out and i lose the compass i still know north and coupled with the research that i do before entering the wilderness (which i always assume ill be there for a week or so) i study the local maps so i know the topography/geography.
  8. could you post a pic so we could see the trouble?
  9. i need some links or some info on manually converting utms to lat/long. there are several programs that i have seen and if someone was willing to send me a copy of the code they used i would guarentee that they get credit for contributing to this acdemic project.
  10. not sure if the garmins are like the magellans but i find the 'trackroute feature' pretty useless. problem is that if you come off the track then the gps refuses to skip track points and gets caught looking for the last point you did not arrive at. the 'backtrack' feature is ok. it allows me to make a 30 point route from the track. i find that if im doing gis work that i save many routes while recording one track. i do this because i may have 1000 trackpoints which means 30 route of 30 backwaypoints. not sure how the garmins handle converting a track into a route but you should try it as an experiment before you need the data to avoid risking lost points.
  11. DOH! Oh boy do I feel stupid. Seems I read a similar post months back with someone stating that Duracell seemed to fit more snugly than Energizer. Unfortunately with my Energizer-sized brain it didn't click. Now I can't wait to go out and try the rechargeables again. Thanks for all the input from you fine folks. I might have learned something positive here. If it works, I'll post and let you know. Thanks again. ive noticed this with 'regular' batteries and alkalines but never noticed any difference between the alkaline brands. to be fair though i only buy energizer or kodak so maybe thay are the same. maybe we could post the size of batteries when measured accurately. ill go first: rayovac industrial plus 14.00mm diameter and 50.25mm length energizer 14.10mm diameter and 50.55mm length for comparision some cheap mercury based batteries: chateau 13.55mm diameter and 50.00mm length superdeer (appears to be duracell clone) 13.50mm diameter and 50.10mm length anyway my verniers calipers are metalic, so be sure to insulate them from the battery poles when measuring (i used the same piece of paper). also my wife works at lasenza (similar to victoria secrets) and she brought home several boxes of feminine supplies. so now i keep my batteries in a plastic tampoon case. these cases hold either 3 or 6 batteries depending on the type (ob or tampax if anyone really wanted to know) and fit quite nicely into a pocket for extra long trips afield.
  12. check out my webpage for the details you need and an example that i made. i havent updated the page in a while but the info you need for a mount and a cable in there.
  13. I've never looked for silver, other than the processed kind in the form of coins. Found a few nice pieces this weekend. Not really that old (1964), but they look nearly mint for being down in the dirt close to 40 years. Terrestrial iron is by defintion of the earth, as opposed to metorites which are from non-earth sources. I'm not sure which is more common, other than to say many people seem to prefer collect the iron meteorites. Terrestrial iron just doesn't seem to have that romantic "impact". Are you sure you're not thinking of the alkaline/alkali metals rather than the transitions? Those are metals so reactive they they are rarely found free in nature. George by calling it native terrestrial iron im probably stretching it, many geophysicists dont accept the theory that native iron can infact be truly terrestrial in origin and as you mentioned come from meteors. as for silver one of the few productive deposits known to man that are suspected to contain native silver is located in the lower canadian sheild (the others are found in chile and germany), but still so rare that mining for it is almost nonexistant. when looking for colour etc. you normally look for oxides that are silver rich, as you would for copper, iron pyrite etc. the coins youve seen are probably not 100% silver, rather they probably are alloys containing 1-5% zinc, tin, nickel etc to help prevent oxidation. the alkali metals are a different story completely. these metals (lithium. potassium, cesium etc never occur in native form as they are very reactive, infact cesium would react violently with the moisture in the air we breath. the alkali metals are generally found in salts. the alkali metals are those which would have been used in high school chemistry class for demonstration by dropping a small samll in water for a smoke/fire show (usually sodium and potassium). the transition metals in general form reactive ions that oxidize readily with the air and other acids in the earth. most of the ores we mine are oxides that must be processed to free the desired element.
  14. ???????? Gold, silver, and iron can't exist in the earth's crust? Those are transition metals. And what's "maganese"? George ok, ill give you gold, but isnt native silver so rare that it not mined as a mineral source and native terrestrial iron cosidered so rare that it is often considered a product of meteorite hits? and that is manganese nodes formed by under water volcanoes, which are infact awesome specimens and due to the depth that they are usually found not harvested on a large scale.
  15. Um, excuse me? That's just not true. Ni, Pb, and Mn all occur naturally in elemental form, although metallic Pb is pretty rare. Mn is incredibly common, though; ever hear of the manganese nodules on the floor of the ocean? And the Hg in alkalines isn't elemental in any case. Nor, as I recall, is the Li in Li-ion batteries. The pollution problem has a lot more to do with moving the elements from their original locations to new ones close to (for example) water supplies for cities than it does with some especially harmful chemical form. Alkaline batteries are, on the whole, pretty environmentally benign. Especially when compared to fluorescent light bulbs, which, though heavily promoted by those who claim to care for the environment, present a serious toxic waste problem. wrong on all accounts. most native elements, and all transition metals, cannot exist in their native state in the earths crust due to their atomic structure, though native nickel is thought to exist in the earths core. the maganese nodes you speak of are at best 35% maganese, the rest as with other metals are varying sulfides, oxides etc. you misquoted me in saying that i infered that the problem was in moving the ores, its the processing that causes the issue. infact the naturally occuring ores of any heavy metal wouldnt cause any more harm in location a than location b---its the inconvience that it causes to humans that makes it appear to be enviromentally hazardous. as for alkalines being enviromentally begin, thats mostly true. problem arises when the deads are disposed of in household waste destined for incinerators or the waste cells are ruptured. however the physicial rupturing of a dead cell is relatively safe and the chemicals could be handled by the enviroment over time, but when these heavy metals become airborne we have real trouble. as for florescent bulbs, they as you say are chemically less friendly than incandescant bulbs but if one considers that florescant bulbs last 50-100 times longer and are 98% efficient when producing light as opposed to about 5% efficiency for incandescant bulbs one has to wonder what is 'enviromentally friendly' actually means. having reread my initial post, '...naturally in the elemental form...' may have been worded poorly, i should have said '...in their native form...', while both are correct the later is 'more' correct.
  16. All of the substances you mentioned are naturally occuring elements in the environment. Agreed, you don't want to be consuming this stuff, but you make it sound as if we're creating this stuff from scratch and poisoning the planet. Most landfills are situated to minimize the chance of elements leaking into the groundwater table... not to say it doesn't happen, but we've got far greater threats out there IMO (such as MTBE, which is used in gasolines). Having said all that, I'm a proponent of rechargeables myself. Someday, with advances in recycling technologies, landfills are going to be the equivalent of goldmines. Assuming we all live that long. problem is though none of those elements occur naturally in the elemental form in the earths crust. these elements become harmful due to the chemicial reactions that we put them through so that they are useful----bottom line they are pollution due to post mining processing and generally are not naturally occuring. as for landfills, incinerators etc. there are unlined landfills and the old teepee incinerators in use in both canada and the states that cause enourmous enviromental damage that we are only discovering now. i agree though that there are greater enviromental concerns that can be addressed to make this continent livable for all of us.
  17. not quite ture. at one time when rechargables were 'new', the outer plastic casing was of cheap quality and there were a number of cases where batteries installed side by side would cause the plastic casing to breakdown (chaffing, heat etc.) and the batteries would short circuit. however, this was 15-20 years ago and im sure that the quality of construction has improved dramatically by now and the risk is non-existant.
  18. you could also add a serial port to your pc easily if it is a desktop. this may be the best way to go as you may want a serial port for something else also.
  19. for what you are looking for with the exception of the ability to upload maps most nearly any current gps would suffice. the basic magellan meridian (geeen or yellow) was available for $99 and it did accept maps for upload and came with its own data cable. i dont know if it is still available though. contacting garmin or magellan is a good idea though as they would likely have an incentive program.
  20. i made my own mount system. i change it from my b2600i, vw golf and snowmobile. you can check out the b2600i portion here
  21. keep in mind that it only takes about 1 year to conceptualize, design, build, and populate a subdivision. for a comparsion why not check out the data that the maps are based on that your local lands government branch has released (at least 5 years old i suspect). in another vien, think about the cenus info, how current is that?
  22. ive never had a problem with the cold while using my gps on the snowmobile. i rigged up a mount system to hold it under the windshield above where the vents for the engine bay are and that seems to be plenty warm enough. might want to consider a 12v power hook up to run it off though. another thing, if you do decide to mount the gps it may be better for visibility sake to buy one that recieve while stood on end, not lying flat as the etrex line does. finally make sure that you have resistor type plugs in the snowmoblie or you could gets interference. 'Get to the point---speak English!!!!'
  23. quote:Originally posted by ChiefPig: quote:CDGPS is a new nation-wide DGPS service developed for the Canadian market that provides unmatched accuracy and coverage for positioning applications across the country. Sounds like this is the Canadian equivalent to the existing DGPS in the states. Not really the equivalent of WAAS. I think DGPS has existed in the U.S for a while now and is being mainly used by ships and other water vessels. the canadian coast guard has had dgps for 10-12 years, this service was available to the public for a cost of about $1200/month. i thought that someone told me recently that by 2008 that most if not all of the existing dgps stations will be converted to the waas type signal corrections. 'Get to the point---speak English!!!!'
  24. check out this multi. it looks as if it could be a cache, orienteering marker or something of the sort. need more info! 'Get to the point---speak English!!!!'
×
×
  • Create New...