Yearly Archives: 2011

High Voltage High Power Fun

on Magnetron, Projects

A friend stopped by this weekend and dropped off some fun toys.

Magnetron bench setup
Magnetron bench setup

He needs a frequency locked 1000W 2.45GHz signal based on a microwave magnetron. I like the magnetron solution because it’s a cheap way to generate such a high power RF signal but they wander between 2.42GHz and 2.48GHz which is a problem for his application. I have volunteered to help him figure out a method to lock the output frequency. I think it will make a great writeup for the blog since I expect it will take a significant amount of reverse engineering and experimentation to make it work.

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Serial Port Silliness

on Uncategorized

Do you frequently use serial ports without a second thought? All you need is RX, TX and GND for a basic configuration along with some RS232 or MIL-STD-188 drivers for the cable, right? The fact that the bits are transmitted asynchronously is implied. The only difference between a Data Terminal Equipment (DTE) device and a Data Circuit Terminating Equipment (DCE) device is just the connector pinout. At least that’s what I always assumed.

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Windows Laptop Data Security

on OffTopic

Everyone knows that laptops are wonderful. I have one so that I can work almost anywhere and that’s awesome. But I’ve had lingering issues with what’s the best way to deal with private data on it. I’m talking about things like financial records, billion dollar ideas, etc that could harm me if they were publicly known. Things like my resume don’t fall into this category. It was pretty easy to decide that I needed to encrypt some of my files on my laptop, but the unfortunate truth is that encryption can be a real pain to use in a practical way. Before I started to look at different encryption methods I decided that I wanted protection from sophisticated thieves and not bomb proof FBI can’t get me protection. So let’s take a look at what’s out there for the average user.

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