Substrate Cooling

[Takka]

Yummy! I especially like the splices. Looks like what's inside the dashboard of my car. How many times did you revamp that little jewel? How many times did you revamp that little jewel? PoE was still a wet dream when I was active in the trade.

Thanks! That was my second full iteration - it has replaceable sockets on the bottom to support running off of various power tool batteries, has a voltage/current readout for POE loads, supports 24 & 48v POE at fairly high current, and can issue factory reset commands to certain microwave radios, which just involves injecting power on some of the data pairs for 10s ...which it also has a timer board for so that you don't have to hold the button down.



I am planning to replace the fuse with an externally-accessible breaker, because I recently powered a radio that turned out to have a bad port and so popped my fuse, which isn't conveniently accessible...

To give you a clue of my antiquity, when I first got in on communications one of my jobs was an in house phone system upgrade to DTMF.

Oh man, you are crusty! What do you do now? My day job is in wireless telecom.

 

[The Snark]

My day job is in wireless telecom.

An ultimate blast from the past. We were the cutting edge and test bed of the industry you work in and upon reflection I was involved in much of the near experimental first baby steps. -Tube type Plectron radios to which I and others were adding DTMF circuits to tone out individual emergency responders.
-The county wide dispatch control with the new notification system. I was in a VFD where every night the dispatchers doing the evening tests would have a long hesitation before toning us out. Low high notified the FFs on their receivers, high low triggered the makeshift relay circuits that activated the siren on top of the fire station. The two weren't labeled. Get a tone out or race to the station to shut off the false alarm.
-Massive tube type radios in the trunks of vehicles with control heads attached to dashboards and primitive analogue circuits cobbed on for individual call ups in fire and police vehicles.
-My first in house telemetry patient monitor system. Overcoming the maximum 50 foot reliability range of the cardio monitors. Transmitter antennas sticking out of the suspended ceilings all over the hospital.
-Invited to inspect an installation on the Coit tower. 500 feet in the air, intermod the order of the day with techs working around the clock to chase down the errant signals. A tech proudly showed me a new digital system in a cramped service box replacing a circuit board with over 200 analogue relays neatly wired to it.
-Backing up the days data from hospitals via telephone wires into our heavily modified HP 3000 computer with room warming 100 MB hard drive cabinets and streaming tape backup backups. Seven OS's native to the 3000. Beat that, MS.
Quite a walk down memory lane. And now you can buy a micro controller that can handle a few million instructions per second for under $100 that can fit in your shirt pocket.
And let's not forget my first internet connect. The server running a 300 baud kermit protocol, text appearing on the screen one letter at a time. Downloading Nethack, 256,000 bytes, took three days of hit and miss disconnects.

I'm comfortably retired, now observing from on high as Thailand finishes ironing out the bugs of their fiberoptic system. The first several thousand miles of cable ran now removed from service sitting in huge piles in the local relay yards, obsolete before entering service, unable to handle the newest transmission rates. My net connect here recently died, a splice providing signal 7 db below acceptable threshold it took them nearly a week to chase down. I observed the initial test fail as the tech was busy thumbing through facebook and not watching the meter data.

 

[Takka]

...

Back when everything was improvisation... That's awesome.

I specifically work in fixed wireless, which is probably the largest improvisational field left in telco, which is what drew me to it. Still doesn't hold a candle of course to the eras you were involved with.

 

[The Snark]

Still doesn't hold a candle of course to the eras you were involved with.

From the earliest primitive distance communications using Morse code to the present day where several billion people carry around electronic devices that connect them around the world in milliseconds, the evolution is beyond mind boggling.
One significant event during that time I always wonder about. Back when IBM owned computing and was the absolute tyrant. If you wanted an affordable computer in your home or business it was called the IBM PC. For a few thousand dollars more you could get the ultimate state of the art, the IBM XT, with a 286 microprocessor and a 16 color display!
One day a meeting was scheduled to discuss a more universal operating system. An executive from IBM scheduled to be at that meeting but was, many say arrogantly busy, flying overhead in his private plane and couldn't be bothered to attend the meeting. A young computer programmer with significant marketing skills by the name of Bill Gates stepped up and introduced an operating system he had been working on. Shortly after, IBM plummeted from on high and the rest is history. It was rather sad that Gates only serious competitor, Steve Jobs with his better architecture Apple, was not near as good a salesman.
Recalling working as an electronic tech I was un-enjoying installing the Windows operating system day after day which came on 52 floppy disks and thinking to myself, Bill, you suck.

 

[BiggerBugz]

This is a really great setup! I have no use for it currently, but the caudata guys would love this!