41–50 of 131 posts
These beacons are also great for navigation. Aeronautical charts usually show the color/pattern of the light. You can use those as points to triangulate your position.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's probably just a side effect of them being powered on at the same time or not?
If they don't sync to a common clock source, they won't stay in sync for long. Probably not even for a few minutes or so. You'd get the same phenomenon that you see when operating turn signals in traffic. They seem to weave "in and out" of sync. The frequency at which that happens is the beat frequency, i.e. the difference between the two blinking frequencies.
If you have shared line power you can just use that and everything will be locked in sync forever.
If you don't want to use that or radio, and you are outside, you could try to be really clever am sync your flash phases to a specific position of the sun. This is what the Long Now clock does. It'll be a different time each day, but it'll be the same for all units, within a small tolerance.
I worked at a television station years back that was designed in such a way that the lights going up the tower were powered by the separate phases of three phase AC with the one at the top powered from all three combined. This was pretty normal but what the engineer had done was rotate them at every level so that if a phase was dropped you could count the lights and quickly see from a distance that the power wasn't r…
This is best practice for anyone who uses three phase power. A machine shop should connect 1/3 of their lights to each phase so it is immediately obvious if a phase gets dropped. Lots of equipment will suffer on two of three phases but with lower performance or even damage.
No, it’s not. It’s a neat trick that visually reveals when the utility drops a phase, but there are better ways to handle avoiding equipment damage.
Best practice is to use phase monitoring relays that can de-energize a motor when a phase is dropped/reversed to prevent damage. The trip time is adjustable and it’s more reliable than manually hitting an e-stop. It also won’t let a motor with incorrect phasing start up either. You see phase loss relays on a lot of compressor motors and other large motors.
Here’s a flyer for an Eaton product: https://www.eaton.com/content/dam/eaton/products/industrialc...
Slightly off topic: typically, lights of neighboring towers blink asynchronously. But sometimes they are synchronized. Very satisfying. Anyone knows how this works? My best guess is e.g. DCF77. Thoughts?
I worked at a television station years back that was designed in such a way that the lights going up the tower were powered by the separate phases of three phase AC with the one at the top powered from all three combined. This was pretty normal but what the engineer had done was rotate them at every level so that if a phase was dropped you could count the lights and quickly see from a distance that the power wasn't r…
It's a quick way to know if something is down, using context clues that are already there to begin with!
> Joe: [...] So whenever there's a project on the tower, it's not unusual to see the guys in some kind of a, what do they call those? > Jeff: A full ghillie suit? Or I don't know what they're called. If you see someone up in a tall tower wearing a ghillie suit [0]... that sounds like time to call emergency services while avoiding their line-of-sight. :p (Perhaps they meant "Hazmat" [1]) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w…