Cammo Paint questions

[MiketheBike]

Guys,

 

I am about to paint my 109FFR and would like some advice and honest opinion (like you wouldn't be honest!)

 

Do I go plain nato green, or do I go cammo?

The black paintwork is generally good, but the lighter colour is naff.

 

I would ideally like to go down the black/nato green route, but is it hard to do properly? Generally, are the transitions from black to green sharp, or do they blend (I have seen both, but not sure what is strictly correct). Does that depend on whether its sprayed of brushed/rollered?

As it stands, is there too much black (looking at others', there does appear to be too much).

 

Piccy of it as it stands right now.

Thanks,

 

Mick

[ArtistsRifles]

I saw that one - quite interesting!

 

Have to admit - the two young ladies form that show could come and jangle their keys/wield their spanners on my vehicles at any time!! :)

[fv1609]

Radar guns are calibrated by a tuning fork.

 

 

Not really, tuning forks are only used as a test source to verify the equipment is working correctly.

 

I have been a licensed radio amateur since 1964, much of that time was spent building, modifying surplus equipment & operating on the 10GHz band ie appx X-Band.

 

Before microwave semiconductors were affordable or even available much of my effort was directed towards modifying low power radar systems with a small klystron. Most of these worked on around 9.5GHz, but with care it was possible to adjust & distort the cavity to make them work in the amateur band.

 

In those days amateurs operating on that band were only a handful over the whole of the UK. Given the rather line of sight nature of these communications, one was often wondering whether the equipment actually worked.

 

As the kylstron was both the transmitter & the local oscillator for the receiver, it was possible to put the detected signal into an audio amplifier & listen to the difference in transmitted & received signals.

 

From my bedroom window I directed the dishes to the street outside. The Doppler effect meant that as a vehicle approached there was a low pitched "woosh" and as it sped away a high pitched "weeh".

 

With practice one could gain a fairly good idea of the speed without having to look at the vehicle. Size didn't matter whether it was car, bus or bike as long as there was some metal to reflect from.

 

Having observed & listened to all manner of vehicles & conveyances, I never noticed any failure or distortion of the signal even on a thing that vibrates like a bus.

 

Tony could it be that you bus wasn't going fast enough to trigger a response from the police or are you suggesting you put the safety of your passengers at risk by breaking the speed limit :shocked:

Edited June 6, 2008 by fv1620
I put "vibraters" instead of "vibrates"!

[Tony B]

Clive with our old buses a chance to speed would be nice. Mind you we are getting new 6 speed MAN's boy do they fly. It is acepted by Police and Court's that a large vehicle such as a bus can distort the reading of Radar guns and Gatzo's. I value my licence to much to test it out. :-D

 

I know some of the people who invented the ANPR, there are ways of fooling it. :cool2:

[fv1609]

I value my licence to much to test it out. :-D

 

Good man, I knew we could rely on your integrity.

 

I think rain must be challenge to the reliabity of radar traps. Given the principles of weather radar! As a radio amateur I found that although people would climb up mountains & the like to get a good signal out. I learnt to stay at home & wait until it rained above me. The range was extended for me from 1 km or so up to 150 km, far further than I could reach on the VHF bands under such apparently appaling conditions!

[Tony B]

If you know where I could get them, I'd like to get the graphs that give frequency recomendations for night and pressure etc. Can't remember what they are called. I've got the 19 set and would like the paperwork to go with it.

[fv1609]

If you know where I could get them, I'd like to get the graphs that give frequency recomendations for night and pressure etc. Can't remember what they are called. I've got the 19 set and would like the paperwork to go with it.

 

Frequency propgation charts? Try asking these 19 Set people:

 

http://www.qsl.net/ve3bdb/

[Tony B]

Dat's de bunny! Ta!:yay:

[AlienFTM]

If you know where I could get them, I'd like to get the graphs that give frequency recomendations for night and pressure etc. Can't remember what they are called. I've got the 19 set and would like the paperwork to go with it.

 

I have vivid memories of working Salisbury Plain in the mid-70s with a C13 A set. We always, but always used a frequency somewhere in the 2MHz band toward the bottom of the range, tripping over shipping in the Channel which all seemed to use the same frequency. It was abysmal for a Recce squardon command net if I am honest and to this day I can hear the Squadron 2IC trying to raise his voice to castrato to try and make himself audible to RHQ. Now that I stop to think, I believe that later we found it easier to work at night at the other end of the HF spectrum (C13 went up to 30MHz).

 

ISTR that Clansman HF sets (I am thinking UK/VRC321: manpacks may have had restrictions to save weight) worked the same frequency range: 1.5 - 30MHz - albeit with narrower channel spacing, thereby increasing the number of frequencies available - which actually butted right up against the bottom of the Clansman VHF range (again, thinking UK/PRC353: same caveats about manpacks) which covered 30 - 76MHz without the Larkspur coverage gap (1.5 - 30 HF; 36 - 60 VHF).

 

Logic says that the lower the frequency (i.e. the further it is away from VHF), the less affect the polarity of the antenna will have on the signal, so that over long or very long ranges, logically low frequencies are better. This allows the use of sloping wire and dipole antennae to incease the airwave / skywave components of the transmitted signal (even if the latter requires an Ionosphere that starts to break up at sunset as solar radiation stops ionising the upper atmosphere). But it is still not really suitable for the short - medium ranges of a Recce squadron. We could fit adaptors to out HF antennae so that the rods sloped to improve the airwave component, but they naturally aligned with the direction of travel of the vehicle which was invariably the wrong way, favouring our transmissions to the enemy instead.

 

VHF and higher-frequency signals are more sensitive to polarisation of the antennae. Accepted practice is to align said antenna vertically, since it would be impossible to know a horizontal bearing on which to align all antennae, especially on the move.. You may find you get a better mobile phone signal if you align the antenna vertically with the mast (but do you know in a modern digital phone which way the internal UHF antenna is aligned?

 

I remember one occasion 15/19H in Paderborn, 13/18H in the UK and the 15/19H-affiliated frigate HMS Arrow, in Hong Kong, decided to play about with our HF and see if we could communicate efficiently. ISTR we were able to talk quiate happily with 13/18H but got not a peep out of Arrow. I think we may have sat there most of the night in case somebody had got Arrow's time zone wrong (even though we all always worked Zulu time on the radio unless the exercise was particularly trivial). We tried moving the droopy dipole up and down the regimental footbal pitch to get signal reflection off either HQ Squadron accommodation at one end or the QM Stores at the other without success. We tried aligning the dipole in the horizontal plane to maximise the signal in the direction of Hong Kong but to no avail.