What books do you want to read?
I’d like to read a book that is new, not just a rehash of old themes, plots and formulas.
Same goes for music and movies. Let’s get original.
Author: Stephanos Blog
As time goes on my thoughts turn to ancient languages.
It looks like my last post was in the beginning of September, and at the time I was having fun receiving images from weather satellites.
Well the weather turned, and my solar powered satellite receiver system had too many days in a row of dark clouds… so I decided to take the station down at least until spring.
I followed up spending time playing with my amateur radios — talking on the radio, playing around with radio and antennas… but even that has settled down to me occasionally pulling email over radio and just talking every few days or so.
So what’s the new topic? Well it’s language learning…
In my life I have tried again and again to learn a second language… I tried Spanish in high school… and it just did not click for me, Tried again after college, again — it appeared I have no nack for learning languages.
Years later I met a friend at work — who I worked closely with, He was from Israel, and I spent a lot of time trying to learn Hebrew — I really liked the sound of it. But only managed to learn the alphabet… Vocabulary is so difficult.
Later in life I became a Christian (another story) and I wanted to really study the Bible. Knowing it was written in Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic, I began studying biblical Hebrew and biblical Greek. At the same time I realized the modern versions of those languages were a little different, but figured it may help to look in to the modern versions… So I studied all of them… Wow, being very motivated I learned to read Hebrew and Greek, and spent more time in Hebrew. I gained a lot of vocabulary as far as being able to read, and eventually I was able to study the Bible in Hebrew and Greek using lexicons and the bit of knowledge I learned about the languages.
Coming up to more recent times, in January of 2020 my wife and my new years resolution was to learn Italian (Our ancestors are Italian) and I said, once we learn it well enough we’ll take a trip to Italy as a reward. We studied a lot but then the pandemic hit, and it hit Italy real hard… I decided, and it still seems the case, we’ll be doing no international traveling any time soon, so we gave up on the Italian lessons.
Yet now it’s becoming winter and I again have the urge to dig in to a language. Italian? Hebrew? Greek?
Well what I have done is start a refresh on modern Hebrew, but what about a new to me language?
[As an aside, I just bought a workbook that helps train you in writing Hebrew printed letters as part of my Hebrew refresh, here is an affiliate link to it… if you buy though this link I will get some financial support by it.]
So I looked online for “The easiest languages for English speakers to learn”, and the list of languages — which don’t get me wrong– I sure they are fine languages, did not seem to inspire me… None of them looked like I’d find much in the way of movies and TV so I could get exposure to the spoke language.
So it came upon my mind to take a new approach. Having already had an exposure to, basically, ancient Hebrew, and first century Greek, I thought, why not go deeper in time… And so I looked for the oldest written language.
Mind you when you do that, you will come up with the oldest artifact that has writing on it — they call that the oldest written language… Forget about artifacts that haven’t been found yet or artifacts lost to the destructive nature of time and entropy. But the oldest written language turns out to be Sumerian.
Well I have already a bit of knowledge about that. It turns out the oldest written joke we know of is written on a clay tablet in Sumerian using Cuneiform writing. The oldest cuneiform writing is a Sumerian tablet from around 3500 BC.
So now that’s my goal — Learn Sumerian! Digging in to that I found a site that said, wait… before you go ahead and start with Sumerian — which you can do— you should learn Akkadian first. Sumer is a more ancient civilization in Mesopotamia, The Akkadians came later, and adopted Sumer’s cuneiform writing to their own language. Akkadian turns out to be the oldest written semitic language. The language tree, if I can describe it in words, has proto-semtitic a the top (meaning more or less, the original semitic language). branching off of that is Akkadian, on a separate branch, down a level or two we find Arabic, and other languages, down below that we find Hebrew. These are all very ancient languages, and are related together in that all semitic languages have common features…
So I began my study of Akkadian — and already see, yes, there is similarities to ancient Hebrew, and then it dawned on me… This is where my real language interest lies– in ancient languages of the middle east, and in their writings. Sure I can rely on experts to translate things to English, but it all seems more real to learn to translate myself.
If I follow the trail from Akkadian and Sumerian, to Arabic and Hebrew, and maybe even go as far as ancient Egyptian… I will be happy that I’ll have a more direct connection to the area of the world and the time periods I find very interesting. Will I be able to read that original joke directly from cuneiform? The code of Hammurabi right off a photograph? The Epic of Gilgamesh? Only time will tell…
Knowing myself, this surge will last a month or two before I run out of steam and have to put it aside for some other interest… How far can I get ?
I see wild animals
The answer is yes, I see wild animals, but living in a suburb those animals are birds, some small such as sparrows, some large such as crows, and squirrels. More rarely I see a fox or 2 at night on my cameras, and the largest animals I see are deer, who seem to like to munch on things in my garden.
Driving around town, I have seen geese and ducks congregating around ponds, and of course seagulls in parking lots — they seem to like parking lots. A few times I have been treated by seeing groups of wild turkeys walking around our neighborhood.
This brings a tear of joy to my eye
It’s the onions… yes they’re so good, and yes tears, many tears.
How to make a weather station really work.
So I got all the pieces together since my last post about weather satellite images. The hardware update is I got a very nice antenna:
Click the photo to see on Amazon.com
That alone improved reception, by eliminating a lot of noise. Also added an LNA:
Click the photo to see on Amazon.com
That’s placed right at the feed point of the antenna, it amplifies the raw signal, filters it for just the 137mhz band, and amplifies it again. (note, if you intend it for all weather operation, you’ll have to do something to weatherize this unit)
Those two things gave me the most clear satellite images I’ve gotten yet, and more importantly, it pulls the signal in from lower satellite elevations, so I get more of the pass, meaning I get more of an image in the north/south direction. You can see with this photo, I get almost from the arctic down to a good chunk of Florida on a good pass:
Now it was time to make this work in the garden for real. So I have a back corner garden, it has the biggest view of the sky in my yard, and gets a good amount of sun for the solar panel… So I’ve had a setup of a 25 watt solar panel, a 21 amp hour gel battery, and a charge controller that I’ve used to put other experiments out in the garden… however those experiments were done with a small circuit board with a relatively cheap ESP32 on it… That draws maybe 400ma… and I was able to run that experiment (A magnetic field logger) pretty far into the winter before it quit.
Now the the Raspberry PI 4 can draw up to 3 amps, which is significantly more than the panel/battery combo was designed for… but I gave it a try. I had it attached in such a way that the charge controller would cut power to the PI if the battery dropped below 10.5 volts — to save the battery… It’s a deep cycle battery, but it should not be drawn down to zero.
For waterproofing… the battery and charge controller are in a plastic battery box that has 2 downward facing vents on it. But there’s a problem… on a night when the dew is strong, it gets moisture condensing in the box… this is not good. It really needs a fan for airflow.. but I’m not sure if I can afford the power…
So since I don’t want my pie to get damp, I bought a waterproof electrical box… put the PI and the SDR radio in it and all looked happy. Then a sunny day came, and wow great for the solar panel, but not so great that the waterproof box has no where to dissipate heat… running compute intensive stuff with the radio and LNA running caused the PI to detect an overheat situation. Also at the same time it drained the battery down and the charge controller shut the whole show down…
So I tried again… Now I have a task that runs once a minute on the PI. it uses “vcgencmd” to get the throttle state of the PI… if it detects a persistent under-voltage, or over heat it kills all the satellite tasks and hopes for things to cool down before the next pass.
Ok so another very hot day came along, and at least the task shutdown worked, and the pi began to cool off. But not fast enough for me… So I moved the whole thing into the battery box again, and now the task is…figure out how to get heat out of a sealed plastic box.
I’ve done calculations and the panel should be able to more than keep up with the PI, meaning it should result in a net charging up of the battery… The problem is.. when a processor runs hot it draws more current than normal. And it’s probably why when the first heat situation hit, and was runaway, it drained the battery down below the threshold.
One more thing… I have an RTL_SDR dongle… if you turn the bias tee on to power the LNA.. well it stays on even when you’re not using the radio.. It stays on until you explicitly turn it off… That never happens in Raspberry-NOAA-V2.. so I inserted a command to shut the bias tee down between passes. This saves 300ma which is significant.
So now also on order is a “Witty PI” — which is a daughter board you attach to the PI.. it does nifty power management, like,, shut the pi down on low voltage, hight temperature, and or on a schedule… That’s exactly what I need… I can ditch the charge controller low voltage system and use the Witty PI’s version… if voltage goes to low it will do a graceful shutdown of the pi, and wait till voltage charges back up again, if the temp goes too high, it will do the same,… and for extra power saving, I can shut the pi down on a schedule, since the satellites have a consistent morning and evening schedule…there’s a good 8 hours of no passes, that I can basically shut down and draw zero power during.
By the way.. the pi itself has no real way to shut down and come back on again on it’s own because it has no real time clock. also when you halt a PI 4, it still consumes 300ma on it’s own just to sit and do nothing. The Witty PI will bring that down to an absolute zero for the pi because it controls the PI power source. The Witty PI itself draws less than 10ma when idle.
An interview with a foot
Daily writing prompt
Interview someone — a friend, another blogger, your mother, the mailman — and write a post based on their responses.
I interviewed my foot and all it would say is “You steppin’ on me all the time man…”
The last thing I searched for
Daily writing prompt
What was the last thing you searched for online? Why were you looking for it?
Well I have been searching online for solar filter film, so I can make solar filter’s for my camera lenses. The April 2024 total eclipse is going to go almost directly over my house. So I want to be ready to take photos in case it’s not cloudy as usual.
What did I watch a a kid?
Mainly Star Trek, Mission Impossible, Hogan’s Heroes, Gilligan’s Island, Lost in Space.
All in black and white. Oh and Monty Python’s Flying Circus… can’t forget that.
Now I don’t watch TV… none of the current shows are really any good.
More about weather sat reception
The whole image covered the entire east coast USA. I cropped the usable piece out. The raw image looks like white clouds on a gray background. Processing software inserts land and water coloration and state borders and precipitation probability.
Ok, Here is more info about receiving weather satellite images…
What you need (for NOAA APT and Meteor LRPT sats):
1. a radio that can receive in the area of 137 to 138 MHZ
2. a suitable antenna, tuned for that band
3. some way to capture the audio
4. some software that converts the captured audio to an image.
Oh and you’ll need to somehow get satellite tracking information
But in my case specifically I’ve gotten and done this:
1. got an RTL-SDR Blog V3 sdr radio (already had one for short wave listening). This is a USB device, you hook an antenna to it, and hook it to a usb port, you can use the suite of software in the rtl_sdr linux package to do basic radio listenning
2. Well I’ve been in the antenna hacking stage, right now I have it hooked up to a dipole antenna of mine that just happens to have low SWR in the area of 137.5MHZ. But ever hating fussing with antenna construction, I ordered what’s called a V-Dipole built just for NOAA weather sat reception. So a V-Dipole is just a dipole but the two elements in this case are set at an angle of 120 degrees to each other, rather than having them in a straight line. By doing this it basically get omnidirectional reception and also reception from UP, where the sats are. The actual antenna to use for this is a helical antenna built for the weather sat band, Unfortunately I cant’t find clear instructions online to build, and I see no one selling one, I did see at a legit ham radio store site, that you could pay $300 for a built one for another band. Uhm… No.
3. and 4. To capture the audio and process it I am using Raspberry-NOAA-V2, findable on Github. basically you devote a raspberry pi 2 or greater to have a fresh OS install, and install that software, It does the full job of tracking sats, and listening at the right time, and converts the audio to sat images with various “enhancements”.
NOAA sats, NOAA 15, 18 and 19, are in a polar orbit, sun synchronous , meaning they fly pole to pole, with a period of about 90 minutes, and they keep themselves aligned with the sun, so that their images always have the same lighting on the day side. They don’t have a normal camera in them, they have more or less a single line Earth scanner in them… so as they fly they are scanning a line of the earth perpendicular to their path, and they put out about 2 scan lines a second. The signal is analog, AM modulated on a 2400hz carrier, the whole shebang is FM modulated somewhere in the 137mhz band, a different channel for each sat. The Meteor sat is a Russian sat that uses a digital encoding, but it’s the same basic scanning idea, just a different scan line encoding.
You don’t really need to know all that, you use software to decode the signals, and generally you can expect NOAA images to be like old time TV, sometimes a clear signal, sometimes snowy. And the Meteor, being digital, will be clear, but with black lines where the decoder failed to hear a decent signal.
Well, Raspberry NOAA V2 (RN2), is a great package that just handles everything for you to track, record and decode the 3 NOAA sats and a Meteor sat. I’m running mine on a headless RPi 4, with minimal OS (no GUI). RN2 runs a web server on the pi so you can check schedules and look at captured images.
Well we have to talk about the Meteor M2 saga.. It seems that Meteor M2, was giving great results — looking back at other people’s posts and videos about it, but it has failed… and it’s replacement ? Failed. So now we’re up to the newly launched Meteor N2-3. Support for that sat in RN2 is in beta development. I took a peek at that code, and found that, yes, once it is released I can expect amazing sat photographs from it.
And we should talk about the realities of antennas and Raspberry PIs….
I have played with radios since I was in grade school. Always putting a lot of energy into the question — why is my reception so bad? I have played with antennas and long ago came to the conclusion that they are magic, and a kind of magic I can’t grasp. Sure there are formulas, and calculators, and simulators all for designing the perfect antenna, but when it comes down to it, you never have the perfect antenna, and you never have the perfect antenna installation.
So these few days have been spent fussing with antennas. And as I said.. I ordered one, and hope it does it’s magic, but in the mean time, this above is the best image I got so far, and it was done with a hacked together v-dipole from an old TV rabbit ears, at ground level (Some say go as high as possible, some say no.. it needs to be between .4 and .6 meters off the ground.)
Mind you… as far as antennas and SDR and RPi’s go… the PI itself is a noise source. USB is a noise source… so I have two chokes on the USB cable to the SDR dongle, I have a choke on the power going in to the PI, and I have everything stretched out so the SDR dongle is as far from the PI as possible, and the antenna is as far as possible away.
Earlier today, I used my 40M OCF Dipole, (installed in my garage):
So you can see my motivation… that image says I have the potential to get images from the gulf of mexico up to way north in canada…
My next steps: Once the actual antenna comes in, install it properly. Also I have a 137mhz band pass filter on order. Also have a much better radio on order. Ultimately this is all going into a waterproof box in my garden. I had put together a 12v battery, a solar panel and a charge controller, for a past experiment… Now it will be re-purposed as the beginning of my garden weather station.
Wow. It really works! Astrophotography!
Well all the hard work has paid off. Here is a photo of the Pleiades.
After weeks of fully clouded skies days and nights… We had a clear night. And was I tired. I just went to bed.
I woke at about 4:30am, and went out and set up a reception experiement for weather satellite photos, and saw the sky was cool and clear…
So I brought all the equipment out to my back patio.. did a quick polar alignment with my red dot finder. Put the camera on and took a few test shots of a star.
It seemed to work for a 30 second photo… AND I focused by eye! The stars were so bright I could see them in the viewfinder.
And Oh Oh!.. There is Jupiter and to the left plain as day is the Pleiades, So I aimed the camera at it as best I could and took 12, 30 second shots… Stacked them… no calibration frames, cropped it and that’s what I got. Nice round stars!
Stefanos's Blog 