Again this post is going to be about something that you might use everyday, though it is being used less and less now, but might not know much about it.  It's a radio.  They used to be much more prevalent before tv got popular, then they got relegated to the car, but now with mp3 players and satellite radio they are rarely used.

I found this page on the FCC website while doing research about radio broadcast stations nearby.  I thought it was pretty interesting that you can see so much information about what is around.  These are FM stations within a 50km radius of New Paltz.  The labels for the columns seem to be off a little, but the numbers are pretty self-explanatory.  The column with the kW next to it is the power radiated by the station, the higher the number, the better signal you would receive.  The third column from the right is the distance from the point you entered to the station, again the smaller the number, generally the better the signal.

One of the numbers I didn't even expect to see would be the HAAT or Height Above Average Terrain, which essentially is how high up the tower is off the ground.  The higher the number, the less things that will be in your way, so it should result in a better signal.

They also have ones for Am radio and digital TV which you may also be interested in checking out.

Anyway, that was just a little site that I found that may be interesting or helpful to some people.

Note: If you do decide to use the search, it will probably be best to go to the bottom and use the latitude and longitude (you can google where the lat/long of where you are, use this to convert it to DMS) as well as radius size and leave everything else blank.  Also there is a selection box for the output, I think Query is the best option to choose because it seems to be the easiest to read.

USB, What is Means

Alright, I know it has been a long time since my last blog post but I think this one is pretty interesting, at least to me it is.  This one is also going to be a bit more technical than you may anticipate, but I will try my best to make it as understandable as possible.  Today's topic is about USB.

That's right, this post is about that Universal Serial Bus (USB) that you probably use every single day and probably never gave a second thought as to how it works.

There are several types of USB connectors that have various uses:



The most common types you have probably encountered are the Type A and mini USB connectors. The difference between the Type A and Type B is Type A is typically for a host, that is, the device that is sending out the information, and Type B is for the device that is receiving the information.  Nowadays, a lot of deices that use USB can both receive and transmit data so Type A is the most common.




If you ever look at a USB plug closely you will most likely see 4 or 5 connectors.  Typically the two outside pins are used to supply the Voltage as well as the Ground.  So when you connect your phone into the wall to charge it, it is only really using the two outside pins, and the two in the middle aren't being used at all.

This is the part that I found most shocking, there are only two pins used to transmit the data, the two middle pins and these two pins send the same exact data, just one is the negative of the other.  This is called a differential pair and I am not going to go into the specifics of why they do this, other than that is to ensure that the the signal received is clean and free of noise.  I think the fact that these two little pins can transfer over a billion 1's and 0's in a few seconds is amazing, and I know if someone asked me to design a device to do that I would have to use way more than two pins.

I guess that is just something to think about when you are uploading pictures from you phone to your computer.


Picture 1
http://www.l-com.com/lcom_emails/2008/092308/usb_connectors_sm.jpg
Picture 2
http://newnex.com/images/ura-1001-clear.jpg

Helium Availability

Recently I was reading a book on Solid State Physics (fascinating I know) and it mentioned that they used liquid helium to cool the magnets to get maximum efficiency because liquid helium has a boiling point of about 4 K  (-452° Fahrenheit), or you know, really really cold, and as the magnets get colder, they becomes more magnetic.  Then I remembered hearing somewhere that there is a helium shortage so I decided to look more into it and I found that this is actually true and since we use helium for many different things some of which is very important, this could be a problem. 

The reason why so much helium is being lost is because when we use it in things like party balloons or welding machines, it simply just floats into the air and since Helium is the second lightest element in the universe, it leaves the atmosphere and drifts into space.   Since we don’t have a way to artificially create helium, the only way we can get more is by drilling into the ground the same way we drill for oil. 

You might think, “So what, we lose the ability to have silly floating pieces of plastic at our parties.  What’s the big deal?” Well that would be alright if that was the only thing helium was used for but it is also used for more important things such as MRI machines.  They use liquid helium for the same reason that was explained in the book I was reading because if you didn't know, MRI stands for Magnetic Resonance Imaging so without the helium to cool the magnets, the machines wouldn't be able to work.

Liquid helium is also used in many scientific labs where they have to spend thousands of dollars on systems that can recycle the helium from the air of their labs as waste as little of it as possible.

The price of helium is also becoming a problem and as helium becomes scarcer, the price will rise causing some problems for industries that rely on it such as the medical industry.  The graph below shows the price history for helium, and while it was from an article written in 2012 it is still fairly accurate to today’s prices and shows that the price has nearly doubled in the last 15 years.

                Now I’m not saying you should stop buying balloons for your parties, or boycott PartyCity, I just thought that it was interesting that something we see everywhere also has many important uses and that sometime soon could all be gone.

Introduction

My name is Ian Matthews, I am an Electrical Engineering student tasked with completing a senior design project that is supposed to encapsulate all of the knowledge that I have acquired over the past 3 years.  There is a lot of research involved in this project and when I get bored, which is quite often, I find something in my reading that is only slightly relevant to what I am researching and start looking into that instead.  It doesn't help me get my project done but I usually find some interesting facts (interesting to me at least) along the way.  I will be writing about these tangents or side thoughts here on a semi regular basis. Let's see how this goes.