There are so many options to choose from. I just discovered that I can use the LimeSDR itself as a VNA, though it may still have some rough edges at this point.I am trying to figure out the best price/performance point. I know this is subjective based upon my budget for building n EMdrive, which is currently not very well defined but I am giving priority to an adequate testing and verification rig, as well as a time budget for documentation to enable others to reproduce any encouraging design.
All,A update on the shop.Got paint on the walls, lights bought and hung and will start moving in the other machines, band saw, lathe, English wheel, buffers, grinders, tool boxes, extra doodads for the shop like hardware bins, racks etc.Hope to maybe have enough room for my work bench area, but will see. If not then I have another workshop that's a 18'x20' that needs most everything from floors to insulation, walls and power.My Very Best,Shell
I always considered magnetic and electrical "waves" to be distortions in the space-time continuum, much like gravity, not as something physical that moves through space. Clearly it is a different sort of distortion, but the ways in which electrical and magnetic fields interact with solid objects are not entirely different from the way gravitation interacts with mass. Somewhere in there lurks the Unified Field theory.
Quote from: R.W. Keyes on 05/21/2017 11:44 amThere are so many options to choose from. I just discovered that I can use the LimeSDR itself as a VNA, though it may still have some rough edges at this point.I am trying to figure out the best price/performance point. I know this is subjective based upon my budget for building n EMdrive, which is currently not very well defined but I am giving priority to an adequate testing and verification rig, as well as a time budget for documentation to enable others to reproduce any encouraging design.Had a look at LimeSDR (here and here) and, for sure, it's an interesting board; I just have some doubt about the accuracy of its measurements and the cleanliness of its signal (harmonics and so on); also, when it comes to measurements, other critters, like the SynthNV or the MiniVNA allow to setup a sweep and let the device do the job, storing the data in the device's internal RAM and then returning them, this speeds up things quite a lot, but the LimeSDR doesn't seem capable of doing so, I mean, apparently to sweep you'll need to send a flow of commands to the device... am I wrong ?Also, and since we're at instruments and tools, I think that adding some pointers to VNA devices, signal generators, (pre)amplificators, attenuators and the like to the wiki (e.g. here) may be a good thing
Quote from: SeeShells on 05/18/2017 02:52 amAll,A update on the shop.Got paint on the walls, lights bought and hung and will start moving in the other machines, band saw, lathe, English wheel, buffers, grinders, tool boxes, extra doodads for the shop like hardware bins, racks etc.Hope to maybe have enough room for my work bench area, but will see. If not then I have another workshop that's a 18'x20' that needs most everything from floors to insulation, walls and power.My Very Best,ShellNice setup, Shells; just curious, are you planning to setup your test rig as for the design published in the wiki or did you change your mind and decided to go for a different test rig (e.g. like Jamie's one) ?
Winter came ... and at 8700 foot in the Rockies it can be brutal. Just couldn't keep it warm. I moved it into a "kind of unused" room in my home. I built 2 different test stands after that, using modified torsion pendulum style designs. http://imgur.com/a/LSwQN
Thanks for asking, sorry guys I promised I'd post more but sometimes I get very busy for a old lady.
What if spacetime was quantized?
(...) a few monopole related posts got banished into the aether -a shame because they were good though they were tangential to the topic.
The LimeSDR is built around the LMS7002D FPRF http://www.limemicro.com/products/field-programmable-rf-ics-lms7002m/ which has built-in calibration features which I hope will be adequate for VNE calibration. It's got a build-in microcontroller and the LimeSDR has 256MB of RAM, so I think it likely that the VNE program is uploaded to the onboard RAM, run by the microcontroller, and results stored in that RAM. A user program would later download these to a PC via the USB3 port. Does the 12 bit DAC/ADC create a sufficiently clean signal? I don't know. I'll look at the resolution of what the SynthNV and MiniVNA have in their DAC and see how they compare, and may ask on some other forums as well.I think you are absolutely correct about posting test equipment on the Wiki. That's what it is ideal for.
Quote from: ThereIWas3 on: 05/22/2017 09:45 PM "There is something there, and we know it has a characteristic impedance of about 377 ohms."Quote from: flux_capacitor on 05/22/2017 10:57 AM"What if spacetime was quantized?"In the quest to quantize spacetime, has to start with the elementary particles, particularly the electron and photon and work their way down through small particles like gluons and the neutrino, and perhaps identify a sub particle zoo before one can claim spacetime. The vacuum is not a void. We might have difficulty with measuring particles like the neutrinos let alone preventing or removing neutrinos from the vacuum. Until then, we only have a vacuum.Quantizing space? Resonance is a sign of quantization. Perhaps spacetime itself resonant? Wheeler-Feynman suggests that resonance might be across time, not just space. The future and past may participate in present forms of energy density such as mass and perhaps define charge.One has to determine if the characteristic impedance of vacuum space can be reduced. Can we drop the vacuum temperature to 0 degrees K and obtain 0 ohm resistance? We simply don't have a good grasp of how to engineer the vacuum just yet especially wrt the emDrive.Then there is this pesky thing called charge. The electron represents charged mass although a ±1/3 charge quark might be more fundamental. The photon appears to represent uncharged massless energy until we look a bit closer. The photon appears to interact with spacetime. Is the electron built from photon(s)? That question leads to the photon and whatever that is made of. Could it be the photon is constructed from sub elementary particles. Some electron models suggest a quanta is the building block for the photon, and furthermore, the photon is the building block to an electron. So a sub elementary particle set of {quanta} may be the fundamental building block. Could the monopole be a missing particle we simply don't see? And what is the role of a magnetic monopole in quantizing spacetime, and with entanglement and action-at-a-distance.The emdirve embraces the fundamentals of physics we know while pushing out the boundaries of physics.
Quote from: ThereIWas3 on 05/22/2017 03:40 amI always considered magnetic and electrical "waves" to be distortions in the space-time continuum, much like gravity, not as something physical that moves through space. Clearly it is a different sort of distortion, but the ways in which electrical and magnetic fields interact with solid objects are not entirely different from the way gravitation interacts with mass. Somewhere in there lurks the Unified Field theory.What if spacetime was quantized? Imagine spacetime not as a continuum but as a multidimensional map of successive discrete "tiny squares" each described by an unknown "quantum entity" (don't know how to call such thing surely equal or below the Planck length). Then an electromagnetic wave would be the physical interpretation of a step by step propagation through one "case" to the next one, of the "activation" and "deactivation" of such a quantum entity through spacetime. As for the associated particle (a photon, but why not also any particle composing matter) would be the physical local interpretation of an "activated case" (or the average of a group of activated cases, if one wants to include Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in that very rough idea).Following that idea, nothing really "propagates" physically, only the information, which triggers the apparent movement of the wave and of its associated particle. A moving particle would then be like those light arrays on top of a wall in the dark, sequentially switched on and off rapidly with a little delay with respect to the previous one, giving the impression of a luminous object quickly propagating through space, whereas in fact there is only an apparent propagation and no movement at all… Another way to express such a view: considering the atomic orbital of an electron in an atom. With the appropriate amount of energy, an electron can "jump" from an orbital to the other. This is a quantum leap, a discrete atomic electron transition. The wave function changes. But fundamentally, is it really the same electron which jumped from one orbital to the other, or is the higher energy electron a different one than the previous one described on a lower energy orbital…
Well, my new lab is now completed and I'm in the process of moving my old lab gear from the house to the new facility, which I'm thinking about calling either the Gravity Reaction Lab or The Sorcerer's Apprentice Lab.
Shells -4 builds! Give us a clue - are you still looking for a signal outside the noise, do you have a signal and are optimising your design, are you characterising the effect in detail with a view to publishing, or something else?
Because I choose to dream.I believe we are at a cusp of our growth on this ball of mud and if we don't evolve from this tiny seed called earth we may perish and never know the glorious heights that await us, or the true challenges of a universe that has no bounds. Yes, I dream, for humanity. -Michelle Broyles
Quote from: Star-Drive on 05/23/2017 01:32 pmWell, my new lab is now completed and I'm in the process of moving my old lab gear from the house to the new facility, which I'm thinking about calling either the Gravity Reaction Lab or The Sorcerer's Apprentice Lab. Apprentice Sorcerer Gravity Appliances Reaction ....hmmm help me find something for the D, so that the acronym will be ASGARD