Savel brain dump in English!

In other post I mentioned, that my FM generator is too weak to jam radio stations. And I remembered, that I have quite powerful radio transmitter. 16P22B-1 (16Р22Ð’-1, 16R22V-1). It is 146 – 174 MHz FM radio station – transmitter. Output is 8…15W. So it is powerful enough to jam all small town :).

I opened the box of radio transmitter. And made few scans. I need to check, if I can move the frequency to more useful area.

This FM transmitter is using digital tuning with the help of PLL. This PLL is constructed using discrete parts. It is quite old radio station. Now I think, that all this strange gold chips can be replaced with single PLL chip, like TSA6057 – Radio tuning PLL frequency synthesizers. (The TSA6057 is a bipolar single chip frequency synthesizer manufactured in SUBILO-N technology (components laterally separated by oxide). It performs all the tuning functions of a PLL radio tuning system. The IC is designed for application in all types of radio receivers.) If I could have some spare time…

I tested that transmitter in his native frequency and get quite good result. I can speak from my summer country house to my home without any interference. From one side areal antenna is original big device, and from other side just small peace of wire.

For small amount of money I acquired very old high frequency generator. It is very old, it is made in ~1960. But still working. I opened the case and discovered few radio tubes. Most interesting, that some of the tubes were changed in 1978. All high frequency parts are covered with heavy solid shield. The power attenuator is some sort of moving waveguide.

The frequency of generator is from about 16MHz to 126MHz. So it covers all FM radio band. Output is max 0.1V. Quite weak for my experiments…

And now short story: Sometimes you have some stupid, morons, idiots neighbours who listen all day to some stupid fucking radio station. Especially, that station plays some vomiting musing for low brain public. And your neighbours listen to that music very loudly. You can’t do anything, because according to law they can do this.

So, take that old FM generator, plug simple wire to output, tune to that station and pump the power to jam it. And now neighbour’s radio is playing 1000Hz tone, your favorite music (if you use external modulation) or just plain silence (only carrier, no modulation).

It is quite difficult to get such generator for everybody, so you need to build radio jammer from scratch. Visit my pages in future and I’ll try to post here the schematics.

From local factory received some bad, not working, cable TV distribution, amplifying, filtering, coding and mixing modules. It take few photos of this devices. I think, these devices have too much connectors. Especially that smaller one. It is made only from passive components- no transistors or chips…

The bigger one is more complicated- lots of transistors, capacitors, diodes, various inductors and transformers. I picked up these devices as they look interesting and a bit funny. 🙂 Maybe I’ll extract some useful components and the boxes are very well made.

There are capacitors and there are very big capacitors. The last ones are with heavy duty terminal connectors for high current connections, and the capacity of them are quite big. Something like 47000mkf x 80V or 100000mkf (0.1F)x 16V. Such devices can store lots of energy. They are used, when high currents are used in pulses- like large printers, high power audio amplifiers. That 0.1F cap is very old, I think about 20 years old, but still holding the charge. I charged it to 14V, and after about 2 hours, my voltmeters shows 13V (after night it is still 12.5V!).

The energy stored in capacitor is calculated in Joules:

E = CU²/2 ; E in J, C in F, U in V.

So that cap can hold 27.6J of energy. As you see, the voltage is more important in energy calculation than capacitance. So another big cap- 350mkF x 450V can hold – ~73J of energy. And it is lighter than low voltage one. Ant this 73J can kill you.

The capacitance (C) is the amount of charge per volt of potential that a capacitor holds.

C =Q/U ; where Q = coulombs (the unit of charge) and U = Volts.

The average power in watts is:

P_av = CU²/2t ; where t = time in seconds.

Using caps in pulse mode, the current is important. The ripple current is sometimes rated for a capacitor in RMS current. Remembering that

P = I²R ; where R in this case is ESR

It is plain to see, that this is a power dispassion rating. ESR is the sum of in-phase AC resistance. It includes resistance of the dielectric, plate material, electrolytic solution, and terminal leads at a particular frequency. ESR acts like a resistor in series with a capacitor (thus the name Equivalent Series Resistance). This resister can cause circuits to fail that look just fine on paper and is often the failure mode of capacitors.

How to measure the capacitance of such big caps? The formula is here:

Uc = Usupply(1-2.718-t/(RC)).

Discharge your cap by shortening the terminals, connect your cap to powerful and stabilised power supply in series with resistor, charge the cap for few seconds and measure the voltage of the capacitor. And compare to theoretical values:

In old magazine (Radio – Радио) I found small article about calculating PWM power transformers. The formulas are for toroid core transformers, but I think, they are usable in standard E core transformers too.

1. Calculate the power of transformer: P_t=1.3*ΣP_n , W. The power of transformer is sum of all output powers multiplied by 1.3.

2. The core max power: P=S_c*S_o*f*B_max/150 , W. f=Hz, S_c=area of core section in cm², S_o=area of the “hole” in cm². B_max= max induction in Teslas, from core datasheet.

3. Number of turns in primary winding: w₁=0.25*10⁴*U₁/fB_maxS_c , in turns.

4. Max current in primary winding: I_1max=P/ηU₁ , A. (η = ~0.8)

5. Diameter of wire: d₁=0.6*√I_1max , mm. diameter is equal 0.6 multiplied by square root of max current.

6. Secondary (ant other) winding: w₂=w₁*U₂/U₁ , in turns.

There are lots of antispyware – addware software. Some of them are free, some commercial and some contains addware and spyware… So every windows user must know few place in their system to check and remove malicious software.

1. Start menu, Startup folder. Remove all strange, unused software.

2. Visit control panel, add remove programs. Uninstall all unused and bad software.

3. Start regedit. (Start, Run, regedit). For novice users visit only few known places. It is:
My Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Winodows\CurrentVersion\ and check Run and RunOne branches. Delete all unused and alien software.

Also check:
My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ and check Run, RunOnce and RunOnceEx…

4. Also check legacy files win.ini and system.ini from windows system folder. Check for [run] section.

5. Go to your Internet explorer properties- Temporary Internet Files->Settings->View Objects. And delete suspicious and “bad” objects.

Also press Control+Alt+Delete to invoke task manager. Look in the list for alien process. Stop it and if it starts again- it is bad software. Note the software name and search for it- it can be locate anywhere in hard disk. Try to delete the file. If windows denies access to file, try to rename file or rename parent folder. Sometimes, if software is starting in more complicated way it quite interesting to change virus executable to some text file. Just create with notepad any file and rename it to virus executable. Let the f**king virus run txt file 🙂

Cool, but dangerous tool is “HijackThis.exe”. This software shows all addware starting points. You can clean the computer by selecting software by mouse.

Be careful, you can kill your system if delete too much information.

In some model of LCD modules there is special film. The purpose of this plastic sheet is to distribute light. I think this plastic is embossed with some prism or other pattern like Fresnel lenses. Just look at the images:

The film likes to make images double. But only when looking from one side. From other side, the plastics looks like bad mirror.

Gastroscope: A flexible, lighted instrument that is put through the mouth and down the esophagus to view the stomach. Tissue from the stomach can also be removed through the gastroscope.

Cool toy for every man. 🙂 It is very old, Olympus JF-B3 medical apparatus. Also I have special cool light source device. There is Olympus camera in the case, with special adapter to connect it to gastroscope. I am not looking inside any living human being, but used to examine various holes in my house. Also this device is useful to check vehicle closed chambers – to test the engine, or realise how your car is rusting from inside. The length of the hose is about 120cm.

This model has various handles and holes to manipulate the end of gastroscope. The main problem with this device that I can’t connect it to my digital camera. What nice photos I could make with it.

It is written:
“Intel, in partnership with several other companies which include the likes of IBM, Dell, Compaq, HP and Microsoft, recently introduced what will be the new standard for PC I/O in the years to come; PCI Express (formerly 3GIO or 3rd Generation I/O) is the name which it was given by PCI-SIG, the committee responsible for overseeing the PCI interface standard.

Approved as a standard on April 17 2002, PCI Express is an evolutionary upgrade to the existing PCI bus. It co-exists with the now ‘legacy’ PCI bus, but in terms of form, it is something completely new. ”

Now it is 2005. There is motherboards with PCI express x16, video cards with PCI express x16. And there is PCI express x1 slot in mainboards… But have you ever seen any PCI express device in the market? NO! So, why place that f**ked slots in motherboards? And why to remove simple PCI slots? My computer has one x16and 2 x1 PCI express slots. Thanks to God and my bright mind that I asked my computer with maximum simple PCI slots… Now all PCI express slots are empty and regular PCI is fully populated: SCSI controller, TV tuner, Firewire – IEE1394 controller, Fast LAN card. And now, I want to insert more cards to my computer and there is not place. Where are PCI express x1 devices?!?!

Maybe it is time to remove x1 slots, and rename PCIe to AGP EXPRESS! 🙂

From time to time I acquire “dead” LCD monitors. If you start monitor and see normal image and some horizontal or vertical line (black or color) this means that monitor is really dead. In very rare case you can press the LCD module and make the line disappear… But the line means that there is problem in very delicate part of LCD module. But if your monitor is not showing at all, or you see static pattern you have the chance. In fact about 80% of these monitors are repairable.

To begin repairing the LCD monitor you must have some soldering skills. Some spare LCD modules and some spare LCD controllers. These are used to test you new acquired LCD monitor modules. The LCD module can be broken (if have on with crack in the matrix), the only use of that part is to check if monitor is working. Also you must have spare modules for different sizes- 15″ and 17″ modules are not swappable. Also you need hacked back-light lamp generator to check that nice tube lamps.

If you see static pattern and LCD controller is OK, you must open the “non repairable” LCD module. You’ll find very few details. And secondary power supply- check them. Also check for missing parts. Also, with multimeter test the capacitors, resistors and etc. Look for open and short circuit. Also, good practice, is to examine the assembling. Sometime some tiny wire of flexible PCB jumps from its place.

The next image shows 17″ LCD module “Chungwa” CLAA170CE (or LM170E01 from LG Philips, LTM170??? from Samsung). In fact, don’t care who ever made LCD module. You can swap them! I’ve tested Philips modules with Samsung monitor controllers and vice versa. The LCD monitor controller ARE THE SAME. They differ only by software (firmware).

This monitor was not working at all. Few dull line and nothing. I disassembled it for spare parts. But before tearing it apart, I decided to play with it. At it began working. Maybe there was some bad contact in assembly or something. Another problem of this model- the back-light lamp connectors. And lamps were very worn out. So I soldered new lamps. (In other models the lamps are changeable, just remove 2 screws and pull out the lamps).

Now assembled the monitor without the case (I don’t have it!). That small PCB is the controller, and that strange white thing is power supply wrapped to isolating film. (230V lethal voltage!).

The next stage will be to find any suitable 17″ monitor case…