Forum

Re-purposing an old Hull.

Hi Doug, thank you for your sympathy, it's all down to walking the dog in the fog. But on the mend now. The grandson doesn't have a phone, and I believe the school does not allow . But as soon as they have something they want to put into wood I will be able to photograph it. As for your generous offer of rc setup I know that they already have 27mhz and 2.4ghz systems donated by me and another child's parent. I am sure that it won't be long before I can get pictures of the progress. Cheers Colin.

4 years ago by Colin H

Forum

Re-purposing an old Hull.

Doug the Masai do actually have cell - one of a SA cellphone company's biggest customers is Kenya - they provide the towers etc and even in Mozambique you can buy a sim card at any old isolated store and connect quickly. Not sure the Mongols don't either.............. They ride motor bikes a lot nowadays instead of horses & camels too...........

4 years ago by redpmg

Response

Re: MORE SMOKER STUFF 2

No apologies necessary Martin, I think we have exported our fair share to other unfortunate countries ( especially Aust) trouble is Aust has arrested all the bad ones, put them in a low security prison and is forcibly sending them back (gang members etc) - even if they have been there 20yrs and lately been behaving themselves. We should do the same back but our PM's too p..s weak to do anything that might make her look bad to the UN (wants a job there like the previous commie wo-man PM- mentored by her as well!) Both of them living with partners but not married, (setting a good example for young people- no commitment shown!) both ex union lifers and no other jobs before joining the public trough and becoming PM (this one only because of MMP - otherwise had no show, acts like she was actually voted in by majority!) Geez, I'm getting grouchy in my old age, - mainly can't stand BS😠 - and it's getting worse by the shovel full every day! I'll send you a PM vid link (make sure the wife's out or the head are on😉😊 George Carlin on advertising-brilliant!) JB

5 years ago by jbkiwi

Forum

Fast attack craft

".....it seemed to generalise without mentioning the the decisive parameters involved, including cost difference!..." Um. Tricky to cover everything, in a 4 sentence comment! There seems to be a grave shortage of balanced advice in all aspects of modern life - though no shortage of advice per se at all! In a field where technological change is proceeding it is even harder to gather a useful view. Comparisons which were true one year are incorrect the next, and I suggest that it would be very useful to update any advice on the board which covers batteries.... Luckily there is one reasonably independent place we can go for a balanced view - the market. Although it is not perfectly unbiased, we can deduce that if some battery technologies are surviving in that marketplace there must be a demand for them, and hence that these technologies are likely to be the best available ones for some specific task. We only need to determine what that is. As a quick example, if you look at a major UK battery supplier to the model hobby - Component Shop - you will find available: NiMH - both standard and low self-discharge LiPo LiFe Lead Acid (sealed) Alkaline (probably Manganese) Silver Oxide All of these will be the 'best choice' for some application. Our interest is probably mainly with the first four. There are many battery features to take into account. The energy capacity that the battery contains is one common figure, usually measured in amp-hours, but most people do not realise that that is only correct for a particular delivery rate. To make a motor go fast you need a battery with a high current delivery rate - able to put out a lot of amps over a short time. Dry batteries, for instance, do not usually have a high delivery rate - hence the poor performance available to us in the 1960s! My top-of-my-head generalisations are below, though I am sure exceptions can be found in all cases! 'Robust' refers to a mix of physical strength and resistance to misuse, such as over-charging or excessive drain. I will try to use the words 'capacity' for the amount of energy stored in a battery, and 'delivery' for the maximum rate at which that energy can be released... SLA Very robust. Cheapest for high amp-hour capacity at 6 and 12V. Can do high delivery as well, Very heavy. Use for displacement boats, where the ballast weight is a positive benefit. Can do heavy discharge as well, but many small SLAs are designed for emergency equipment use, and expect to support a light discharge over 10-20 hours. NiMH Fairly robust. Quite cheap for medium amp-hour delivery, and reasonable capacity. Low self-discharge costs are dropping and that technology seems to be expanding in the market, though they tend to be low amp delivery types. Some types can compete with Lipos for high amp delivery in the 30-40A range. Fairly heavy. Make sure that you buy a high-delivery type if that's what you need for motors. Low self-discharge types are good for emergency flashlights and RC transmitter/receivers... LiPo - Less robust. Best current choice for high amp delivery with low weight. Only readily-available type offering current delivery in the 100+ Amps range. Light, and available in very small sizes. More expensive than NiMH, high capacity very much more, and you need a special charger, though these can be quite cheap nowadays. You should really be using a charger optimised to your battery type anyway. Remember that each LiPo cell is 3-4V, not 1.2V... LiFE - Similar to LiPo, but more robust. Slightly lower voltage, but very flat volt delivery. Typical current delivery in the 30A range rather than 100+. More expensive than LiPo at the moment, but may displace them eventually. LiPos are essential if you are using a very high consumption motor - perhaps a racing boat? But when using such currents you usually require cooling systems and quite a specialist drive train. Brushless motors can take high currents, so LiPos are often associated with them, but you can use any battery with any motor if you want - just so long at it delivers the amps! There is no reason why you should not use brushless with SLAs, or LiPos on a low-drain application - though a LiPo may be more expensive than you need for that... NiMH are perfectly capable of making a boat plane - IF you ensure that the max amp delivery is adequate. You can, for instance, buy NiMh batteries designed for wireless with max output 500mA or less - these will disappoint you if you try to use them for motor power! A handy rule of thumb for estimating optimum battery discharge is to look at the capacity in Amp-hours. A low-drain battery is probably designed to put that out over 20 hours, so divide the Ah by 20 to get an estimate of optimum current draw. A high-drain battery is usually designed to output over 1 hour - so divide the Ah by 1 to get optimum amps. That's only a generality, of course, and the battery spec sheet is the definitive place to look... "...more likely that HE had shares in a LiPo company to be able to afford them back then..." When it comes to electrical equipment I do have connections. 😊 If you think LiPos were expensive in the 2000s, you should try buying NiCad pen cells in the 1960s. Probably the most unusual battery I have used was a pack of saline/manganese oxide cells from ex-RAF life jackets, where the battery was open to the water underneath the boat and you could speed it up by scattering salt in front of it....

5 years ago by DodgyGeezer

Forum

Night Watch

"my spies are everywhere"Doug do you have one of these Chinese smart 🤣🤣🤣

5 years ago by marky

Forum

The posting of short videos

Hi Martin, Mon plaisir mon ami😉 "I am not sure quite how he managed to do this." No rocket science Martin. As I understand the situation- Posting videos via YouTube was introduced to avoid flooding the available server space with Mega / Giga bytes of files, especially now in the days of HD / UHD camcorders and Dumb which produce huge files. I've long suspected that there is an Upload limit, just like with many email services, of about 15MB. Your video fell just under that at 14.7 MB so it worked😊 I simply used the normal "Select Files" procedure to suck and see! I sucked - and we all saw😉 I did the same with Ron's "Fishtailing" videos. I propose to conduct a few tests with other videos to prove the limit. (Assuming that Stephen doesn't read this and just tell us!😉) I'm hoping that the recent site upgrade also included a server upgrade to provide more archive space as the site grows and develops. The last part is our job fellow constructors and sailors👍 Re YouTube account: I only opened one last year so that I could post my Sea Scout sea trials vids which varied from 69MB to 252MB in 1080p HD format. I'm not a regular UTuber by any means. Registering is free and simple. Only difficult bit is remembering the damn password if you don't upload regularly🤔 Happy and successful building, sailing, uploading and viewing folks. Cheers, Doug 😎

5 years ago by RNinMunich

Forum

EeZeBilts From Keil Kraft

Can you imagine, all talking on their and taking selfies on the front line and facebooking about the conditions, (that would be both sides) !

5 years ago by jbkiwi

Forum

EeZeBilts From Keil Kraft

Problem is that we are all living in our past and the young ones today have too much other electronic stuff to play with. People can't go anywhere without a phone in their hands and using their spare time telling everybody what they had for lunch that day. I tried to get my son interested in planes but he was more interested in computers, (built his own big gaming computer with water cooled everything, fans and lights everywhere for around $4000 ) and he and his friends play games against people on the net from all round the world. As WQ said they can buy anything off the net, so why spend all that time staying inside, building a model when you can buy a nice ready made one which you know will work. A good example of how they look at models was, - I was flying one of my planes one day when some young guys turned up with a new Kyosho Calmato. They had no idea how to fly it so I tried to give them a few ideas (like taxi round for a start for a few hrs to get the hang of it on the ground) but no- straight off, full up elevator and into the ground. They all went running over with their , laughing and taking pictures. Made no difference the plane cost around $500 ( they all turned up in flasher cars than mine) and they just picked it up and threw it in the car, (could have been repaired quite easily but they were going to bin it.) We had to make do, but young people just have so much choice and disposable income, they don't know what to buy next. You only have to look at how they treat a nice car these days, most just thrash them to death and buy another one. Everything is disposable today.

5 years ago by jbkiwi

Forum

Batteries in a DX5e

"...At the moment you cannot find out what your contention ratio is. The average used to be 50:1 for home customers and 20:1 for businesses, but improvements to broadband infrastructure have rendered these figures obsolete...." Ah - I see what you're thinking. The statement that the figures are 'obsolete' refers not to the fact that speeds have increased, but to the fact that these ratios used to be fixed. For all modern networks they are now dynamic, which is why you cannot 'find out what it is'. It is changing all the time. But the number of signals multiplexed into each channel is still a factor in the bandwidth you will obtain. Dynamic contention rations are set by algorithms, and modified on the fly by humans with knowledge of the likely load. Mobile phone bandwidth, for instance, would be increased considerably around Wembley during a Cup Final. Extra mobile Base Stations are put in place during events like Glastonbury to maintain adequate service. So contention ratios are not 'just statistical planning tools' - they really have an effect. If you monitor your service throughout the day you should see the network 'breathe' - expand and contract as the load comes on and off it. Unless, I suppose, you are on a link which is kept at a static high service level for Emergency Network purposes... "...Bad luck with your connection DG ☹️...." I'm not unhappy about my connection - it's likely to be as good as fibre can make it. The point is that I have considerable local contention, since I run several web servers and other services through the same connection. Anything I measure on my local browser is affected by other computer users in the building, external using the local hot-spot and, of course, people browsing the web pages or downloading. I could only get a 'best service' reading by closing all this down - which would make the kids and wife unhappy, at the very least... :( Though it might save me a fortune on internet purchases of dresses and shoes...😊

5 years ago by DodgyGeezer

Forum

Batteries in a DX5e

Hi Dodgy, Consensus of the IT pundits seems to be that Contention ratios are no longer particularly useful in the days of Broadband and ever more local exchanges. Anyway, here's the spec of the product I use T-COM Magenta M. Even the minimum quoted would seem to be more than enough for Skype & Co.😊 At the moment still copper, FO should be installed shortly. My GF who live a couple of miles away already has it. ".... but I wonder if a pool-side broadcast might be another alternative? ... - so all you would need is a member with a good battery, a firm mobile link and an open-ended contract..." Doesn't that bring us back to the cost factor raised by John? Also, even with a good battery constant constant video streaming would probably pretty soon flatten it☹️ A decent video camera hooked up to a Laptop / Notebook with a Hotspot connection might be better? Suggest if this topic progresses that it be continued in a new thread, of appropriate title. Under 'General Resources' or 'Hobby Chit Chat' perhaps? Cheers, Doug 😎 PS T-COM has just announced their prices for 5G mobiles and Flat Rate. €900 for a Samsung 5G phone, €85 / month for the Flat Rate. Plus a warning that to use the full speed you need to be close to the cell antenna! "Am Mittwoch startete die Telekom auch den Vertrieb erster 5G-tauglicher Smart und 5G-Tarife. Das Samsung Galaxy S10 5G wird für knapp 900 Euro angeboten. Der 5G-Tarif für unbegrenztes Surfen kostet knapp 85 Euro im Monat. Das sind fünf Euro mehr, als die Telekom bisher für ihre "echte" Datenflatrate mit LTE-Geschwindigkeit aufruft. Mit 5G sind allerdings Downloadraten von bis zu einem Gigabit pro Sekunde (Gbit/s) möglich, mit LTE sind es bis zu 300 Megabit pro Sekunde (Mbit/s). Um von der vollen Geschwindigkeit des 5G-Netzes profitieren zu können, muss sich der Nutzer allerdings in der Nähe einer Antenne befinden."

5 years ago by RNinMunich

Forum

Batteries in a DX5e

"...Max 50Mbps download, 10Mbps Upload, option for 100/40Mbps if I want, which also answers DGs query..." Well, not completely. We need the contention ratio to know what you actually get - 'max' is never achieved in practice. But being able to watch films means that you could view a stream. These comments came from the thought that a video link might be set up for board members to chat. I suspect that the free WhatsApp facility for four would be worth trying, but I wonder if a pool-side broadcast might be another alternative? Here we would be thinking of 'covering' various club meets around the world - say, Mayhem Wicksteed Park or Fleetwood in the UK, and no doubt others in Germany, the US, etc... Smart can be used as webcams - see https://www.windowscentral.com/how-use-your-android-phone-webcam-streaming - so all you would need is a member with a good battery, a firm mobile link and an open-ended contract...

5 years ago by DodgyGeezer

Forum

Batteries in a DX5e

Hi Doug, I think I was referring partly to cell here which use a data usage plan ( as do your home PCs for internet), you can choose anything from 60G to unlimited (smart ) which includes text, phone and internet. My phone is just a prepay, - phone and text,- as I have the computer -fibre connection- for internet (plan includes land line, email, 60G $75 per month) and never use internet away from home If I'm just doing this stuff I use very little but if I start watching movies etc, obviously I will use a lot more. As I said I'm not sure about the system there but am assuming it's similar. I don't like using apps anyhow as I don't trust a lot of sites for security reasons, as you so rightly point out. P.S was doing that in my sleep so probably was not making sense 💤 John.B

5 years ago by jbkiwi

Forum

Batteries in a DX5e

It would be nice to find a few modelers of like mind here Martin, to give a bit more enjoyment of each others work, but I think most of them are too old now (or have snuffed it) and the young ones as I said are not interested and have glued to their faces. At least we can still all 'meet' fellow enthusiasts and take an interest (and learn new things) on a global level through the Internet, but it would be much better in person. Would be great if we could work out a cheap way to video group chat. No doubt by the time we all kick off it will be common practice with technology improving daily. Doing it by phone or I pad etc internationally is cost prohibitive.

5 years ago by jbkiwi

Response

Re: Aero-Naut Classic

Great post fantastic project - most of use Li-Po batteries without any issues allbeit in portable or laptop computers, some cell , portable chargers and elsewhere. Heck, a standard alkaline 1.5 or 9 volt battery can cause issues if not properly used or placed under stress. But - I’ve made mistakes myself and come close to bad issues using power sources improperly or without heeding instructions such as using them full out without allowing them to cool. it’s all about using caution and precautions, understandably accidents do happen though

7 years ago by Brucef102

Forum

Invalid Files

Understood Red. Just wondered cos several members have often reported problems uploading pics from and tablets. I do have a Samsung mobile (and a vintage Nokia with fold out keyboard😉). BUT; I use them for phoning and SMS only, very occasionally the camera if I don't have my Pentax or Sony with me. I dumped or deactivated all Apps that I never use and don't want. Cheers, Doug 😎

5 years ago by RNinMunich

Forum

Invalid Files

Hi Doug - not all of us possess dumb - still use a desktop PC - not a laptop either. I see it was not I that was wrong ! Stephen - know that computers don't do what you want them to do- only what they want to do. Worked as a systems analyst for a few years - could not wait to get back to being a boring accountant ! No need for apologies - think its a thankless job when you only get moans when you get it wrong - never praise when you get it right

5 years ago by redpmg

Forum

Motor Anti-Submarine Boat MA/SB

Ahoy there! "at the risk of a flogging round the fleet" Marginally better than a keelhauling I suppose😀 "officer on the port side is carrying his mobile phone" Paint it yellowish white Steve an say it's his Cheese sandwich!😜 Why is Deans suddenly synonymous with mobile ? What era was this boat anyway? Whenever I read of MAS boats I think of the Italian Navy in WW2! Cheers, Doug 😎

5 years ago by RNinMunich