Personal

ISP has been down

Posted by George on July 10, 2005
Posted in: Amplifiers, Personal. Tagged: , .

I have not had computer access for the last two weeks. Bellsouth (our ISP) was down most of this weekend. Even though I live in a major metropolitan area, all I can get is SLOW dial up, and that doesn't always work. I just got to my email. I have tried to answer everyone as best as I could. The answers to the common questions about the board status is below.

I sold a few boards to some inexperienced people at work to get their feedback on the assembly manual. I gathered their inputs, and made revisions. The revised manual is almost finished. The safety and safe meter use pages were done at their request, yet these pages get few hits. I will have some one build an amplifier using the new instructions before putting the boards back up for sale.

Unfortunately, my father became ill before I was done and I spent each weekend at his house (80 miles away), or at the hospital. He passed away last weekend, hurricane Dennis visited this weekend, and the funeral is now scheduled for next weekend. My mother needs care, and the legal arrangements need to be taken care of.  Since the weekends are when I usually work on this, not much has happened. I can't say exactly when I will get it all done.
I plan to upload most of the basic assembly and checkout instructions to the web site, so that a potential builder can see what is involved before purchasing a board. I can't say yet when the assembly video will be done since I am new to digital video editing. I will post the progress on the web site.

I got a question about the picture of the amplifier shown above. Won't the transformers interact since they are so close together? Yes they did! Since that picture was taken I have rotated the power transformer 90 degrees to correct a hum that could be seen on the FFT analyzer when the amp was first switched on. Oddly enough the hum disappeared as the rectifier tube warmed up. Sooner or later I will take new pictures. The hum was only barely audible with my ear to the left speaker, but might have been a problem with more efficient speakers.

I have plenty of new information to add to the site, just no time to do it. I have an 833A SE amplifier running on my bench. It puts out over 200 Watts RMS at 4% distortion. It uses the same SE amp PC board. I will put the details up when I get caught up with all of the ugly stuff.

Wilma destruction

Posted by George on January 5, 2005
Posted in: Personal.

I have come to realize that the news that we see daily on our TV is not being shown outside the local area. Every day we see pictures of devastation, long lines, 1000's of people who have been left homeless because their homes have been declared unsafe. It has now been 10 days since the storm hit and there are still between 1/2 and 1 million people (including me) without power, depending on which TV channel that you watch. There are emergency crews from all over the country fixing power. I saw a graphic on the TV news that claimed that they have counted over 11000 broken power poles in Broward county alone. On a normal work day it takes me 15 minutes to drive to work. Now it takes 1 hour. Most grocery stores have no perishables in stock.

Why is this information being not being shown in the national market. Maybe people are sick of seeing this stuff. Or maybe there are forces that don't want the 'potential' tourist to see this, and cancel a trip to Florida. South Florida makes a great deal of money on tourism and real estate sales.