So, one thing I did note is that a lot of the PETG vendors these days have been ratcheting up the speed that their normal non-rapid PETG filaments are printable at as well.
For example, Prusament PETG is good up to 200 mm/s and Elegoo’s Pro PETG is good up to 270 mm/s.
This can get very expensive very fast. Okay, so 20 years ago concert photographers shot on 800 film pushed to 1600 or 3200 and shot on f/2.8 constant lenses, sometimes f/1.8 primes and then walked naked through the snow to milk the developer rodent for the C-41 chemicals. And now 6400 looks pretty darn good on a small sensor even. But it just means that concert photographers want more more more more!
200mm at f/5.6 is going to be really really hard to work with. Or whatever the Sony is at the same zoom setting.
I shoot a lot of smaller dance and circus shows and I use the Olympus 12-40mm f/2.8 Pro, which is about 24-80 in full-frame terms. If I wanted to do larger arenas where I’d be farther away … I’d probably get the longer brother of my 12-40mm f/2.8 Pro and put it on a second body or just swap lenses regularly. If you are going to be fairly far from the stage in an arena, I’d probably suggest you get something that’s got a shorter zoom range but is faster and then use even just the kit lens for the wide shots because the longer the lens, the more problems you will have both with your hands shaking the lens and the subject moving.
Yah, out here, there’s one set of frequencies on the government bands for the officials to use and then ARES/RACES has a set of frequencies in the ham band that we’d plan on using. And, yah, the whole thing about all of community resilience is that it lets them focus more closely on fighting the problem where presumably the more interesting things we’d do is windshield surveys from a car or communications between the ARK’s (caches) and POD’s (points of distribution).
All of this depends on your geography? There’s one the need to have a communicator in a neighborhood, and there’s a separate need, maybe, for within the neighborhood.
So, for anything of medium density up, if you have a person or two in a park or other public space with a radio and a clipboard and a yellow vest, people will assume that’s the communicator? The case where either FRS/GPRS radios or T-Decks (or both) come in handy is when you can’t assume people are going to hit up the public space. And, again, having a trained communicator helps prevent the official and community services from getting overwhelmed. The local ARES/RACES has a defined standard way of using the Modified Mercali scale to collect information quickly in the aftermath of an earthquake, if everybody’s telling their stories there’s not necessarily actionable information.
Depending on geography, height does play a role. The higher-level better-trained communicators have extendable fiberglass tower thingies to get the antenna 25 feet up in the air. So you might be able to have a solar-battery meshtastic relay on a boom? Couple that with potentially some number of regular meshtastic nodes with fixed installs on buildings…?
And, on the lines of the formwork being something Meshtastic is good at, things like making it easy to collect M-M earthquake values is another potential thing?
Where I live, we’ve got a set of different community resilience groups, where one of them is CERT (which I’m not part of) and the other one is ARES/RACES (which I joined lately). And I already got a lecture from one of the ARES/RACES guys who is also in CERT that I ought to also join CERT. And, at least for us, both CERT and ARES/RACES come with a badge and background check.
ARES/RACES is, honestly, the biggest slam-dunk? Because part of the problem, at least looking at the experience of things here is that at least some of this needs to be organized ahead of time with identified people who have been background checked. And part of this is that you can generally go all-city with a reasonably priced VHF/UHF handheld, maybe with an antenna tower, worst case with a 50W base station radio.
Except that you need a ham license and you can’t just have a set of radios at the caches for people to use. There’s some arguments I guess about if the FCC ruling is meant to say that amateurs can break all rules in a life-or-death emergency or randos can break all rules in a life-or-death emergency but presumably the FCC has better things to do. But either way, you kinda need to know a bunch of stuff to use them effectively.
Which isn’t entirely a bad thing? Because there’s a world of difference between someone who can use a radio and someone who can send a message properly and quickly with the hard words turned into phonetics, etc.
Meshtastic has a lot of desirable properties for EmCom. It’s not there yet? I’d like to see it get there.
The big thing is that some solar powered Meshtastic nodes and some other random battery powered nodes have a lot of the positive attributes of a VHF/UHF handheld in that you are going all-city without using up nearly the sort of power that would be required to keep cell phones up to go all-city.
A meshtastic “repeater” is a lot simpler than a UHF/VHF repeater.
But there’s problems.
For example, there was a guy who got himself a big fine lately because he was getting on the channels that the firefighters were using and trying to convince them to save some of his land as if he was a fire department worker. Running it in amateur mode with amateur power might be nice, but amateur mode means no encryption.
I lost power on Wednesday and I couldn’t really get good cell service. Because everybody just grabs their phone for entertainment. The problem is that you want Meshtastic to have fun uses outside of merely EmCom so people use it and it doesn’t just sit there as an abstract concept, but you also don’t want it to go down because everybody’s bored.
In a comms-down situation, you cannot hand someone a LoRa board with meshtastic on it and let them use it to augment their phone because if there’s no cell service, there’s no way to get the app.
One fairly concrete problem that hits me is that in ARES/RACES we do packet radio. Part of the thing is that if they do activate CERT and ARES/RACES in an emergency, there’s a lot of paperwork to attend to, and it’s required because afterwards the insurance companies gotta do their stuff and the city needs to declare how much the disaster cost and everything. Obviously paper sucks and is bulky so the emergency center has packet radio in case the internet is down to send messages. To me it feels like there’s a very Meshtastic-friendly application for that specific part of the puzzle. And I think part of that is pub-sub and store-and-forward.
tl;dr: dono. VHF/UHF radios with FM-encoded audio still wins on the “will always work” whereas meshes can fail to work because they are too thin or too oversubscribed. But Meshtastic has a bunch of positive attributes that make it a worthy tool for emcom, with a bit of work.
Not really, although that was clearly a popular impression created by the 1980s Right Stuff movie.
Both the US and USSR had the A4/V-2 rocket and both the US Redstone and USSR R-11/SS-1 “Scud” were grown-up and bug-fixed versions thereof.
The US kept the Operation Paperclip folks going throughout the program, leading to Von Braun’s team designing the Saturn V rocket, even though the Redstone Arsenal / Marshall Space Flight Center folks didn’t design some of the other rockets.
The USSR kept their Germans under a tight leash and every time they designed a rocket, they’d have the Soviet team design the same thing, they’d compare, and then after a few years, they sent back their Germans to live in obscurity because the Soviet team had gotten good enough.
Thus big rockets ended up being a German ex-Nazi party member, Von Braun and his Saturn V vs a Ukranian, Korolev and his N-1.
Thus, an astonishing number of rockets are based off of the A-4 design, many of them with the Scud as the middle step. And neither America nor Russia gets to really take credit for their chief designer, where obviously both men were mostly acting to provide structure to the giant armies of engineers who did the actual work (but doing it well, the USSR program really screwed things up after Korolev passed away). But there was a bunch of really neat bits of rocket science that the USSR did in the 70s-80s that was well above where the US was specifically because while Korolev was Von Braun’s generation, most of the newly taught Soviet scientists were not. Where, again, the real problem was that Korolev didn’t have any good successor leaders and the USSR was in a state of stagflation.
And you can say many things about the USSR space program, but they were significantly less “nazi” than the US program.