View single post by Schuyler
 Posted: Jun 22nd, 2010 09:45 AM
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Schuyler

 

Joined: Jun 7th, 2010
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In pulling together the pieces it seems to me that the receiving radio is a weak link. It’s a Yaesu VX-7RB, which is a “handi” with an extremely tiny speaker, about an inch in diameter. There are no controls for treble or bass. It sounds kind of tinny to me. It’s only saving grace is that it receives on the rather obscure frequencies we’re interested in, plus I have it already. But given that sound is the essence of the experiment, I think it needs replacement.

 

Therefore I have decided to rectify this by moving to a better receiver, an Eton Satellit 750: http://www.etoncorp.com/product_card/?p_ProductDbId=351064 which is must more robust, can be hooked to an outside speaker, plus can use alternative antennas. For the antenna I am going to get another “Lil Will” so that both send and receive will be twins. This is more in line with the original Spiricom design which used two equivalent antennas, though O’Neill simply made those out of pieces of wire.

 

As I have come across accounts of other Spiricom experiments, their explanation shows them to be really pretty poor attempts—when I can find them. The literature is full of statements such as, “No one, ever, has made a Spiricom work.” But when you try to find just who has tried it, it’s difficult to find anyone. Few of these subsequent experiments are documented. I did find one done by a friend of Meek who had some of the original Spiricom equipment, but not all. It sounds like a portable version. The tones were originally made by homemade oscillators invented by O’Neill himself to specifications, he says, dictated by Mueller based on music harmonics. But in this portable experiment the woman used a continuous loop tape and run on a cassette recorder.

 

If this is a true account, no wonder it didn’t work! There is no indication this was a direct connect to the transmitter. In other words, she played the tape into the transmitter microphone which would have resulted in a double carrier wave, one from the cassette playing in the room and one from the transmitter to receiver interchange. It must have been pretty loud in the room, but it certainly wasn’t a duplicate experiment. That may not have been the case, but the real point is we have no way of knowing because these secondary experiments were so poorly documented, if at all.

 

I have also made on other change in the system. I found a better tone generator from NCH: http://www.nch.com.au/tonegen/index.html It has more options than the previous software and was not crippleware when I tried it out. The 13 tones are already programmed into the software and it appears to be working just fine.