When all else fails, there’s radio. Hurricane Helene’s path of destruction through Appalachia stripped away every shred of modern infrastructure in some areas, leaving millions of residents with no ability to reach out to family members or call for assistance, and depriving them of any news from the outside world. But radio seems to be carrying the day, with amateur radio operators and commercial broadcasters alike stepping up to the challenge.
On the amateur side, there are stories of operators fixing their downed antennas and breaking out their field day gear to get on the air and start pitching in, with both formal and ad hoc networks passing messages in and out of the affected areas. Critical requests for aid and medication were fielded along with “I’m alright, don’t worry” messages, with reports from the ARRL indicating that Winlink emails sent over the HF bands were a big part of that. Unfortunately, there was controversy too, with reports of local hams being unhappy with unlicensed users clogging up the bands with Baofengs and other cheap radios. Our friend Josh (KI6NAZ) took a good look at the ins and outs of emergency use of the amateur bands, which of course by federal law is completely legal under the conditions. Some people, huh?
Also scoring a win were the commercial broadcasters, especially the local AM stations that managed to stay on the air. WWNC, an AM station out of Nashville, is singled out in this report for the good work they did connecting people through the emergency. As antiquated as it may seem and as irrelevant to most people’s daily lives as it has become, AM radio really proves its mettle when the chips are down. We’ve long been cheerleaders for AM in emergencies, and this has only served to make us more likely to call for the protection of this vital piece of infrastructure.
Windows 10 users, mark your calendars — Microsoft has announced that you’ve got one year to migrate to a more profitable modern operating system. After that, no patches for you! If Microsoft holds true to form, the scope of this “End of Life” will change as the dreaded day draws nearer, especially considering that Windows 10 still holds almost 63% of the Windows desktop market. Will the EOL announcement inspire all those people to migrate? Given a non-trivial fraction of users are still sticking it out with Windows 7, we wouldn’t hold our breath.
Speaking of Microsoft, for as much as they’re the company you love to hate, you’ve got to hand it to them for one product: Microsoft Flight Simulator. It seems like Flight Simulator has been around almost since the Wright Brothers’ day, going through endless updates to keep up with the state of the art and becoming better and better as the years go by. Streaming all that ultra-detailed terrain information comes at a price, though, to the tune of 81 gigabytes per hour for the upcoming Flight Simulator 2024. Your bandwidth may vary, of course, based on how you set up the game and where you’re virtually flying. But still, that number got us thinking: Would it be cheaper to fly a real plane? A lot of us don’t have explicit data caps on our Internet service, but the ISP still will either throttle your bandwidth or start charging per megabyte after a certain amount. Xfinity, for example, charges $10 for each 50GB block you use after reaching 1.2 TB of data in a month, at least for repeat offenders. So, if you were to settle in for a marathon flight, you’d get to fly for free for about 15 hours, after which each hour would rack up about $20 in extra charges. A single-engine aircraft costs anywhere between $120 and $200 to rent, plus the cost of fuel, so it’s still a better deal to fly Simulator, but not by much.
And finally, we were all witness to a remarkable feat of engineering prowess this week with the successful test flight of a SpaceX Starship followed by catching the returning Super Heavy booster. When we first heard about “Mechazilla” and the idea of catching a booster, we dismissed it as another bit of Elon’s hype, like “full self-driving” or “hyperloops.” But damn if we weren’t wrong! The whole thing was absolutely mesmerizing, and the idea that SpaceX pulled off what’s essentially snagging a 20-story building out of the air on mechanical arms was breathtaking. While the close-up videos of the catch are amazing, they don’t reveal a lot about the engineering behind it. Luckily, we’ve got this video by Ryan Hansen Space of the technology behind the catch, lovingly created in Blender. The work seems to have been done before the test flight and was made with a lot of educated guesses, but given how well the renders match up with the real video of the catch, we’d say Ryan nailed it.
Inre: Flight Simulator
The last time I flew FS it didn’t need an Internet connection.
I usually crashed shortly after take-off anyway.
i remember you could import scenery from flight sim 98 into combat flight simulator 2. i once had an awesome dogfight up the side of the sears tower. it was epic. that zero didnt stand a chance.
WE DID THAT TOO!!! HAHAHAHAH
US tax payer paid billions for HUMAN transfer and what did they deliver?
FACTS
“delivering a single booster catch for $3 billion he was meant to be
delivering the human Landing system for $3 billion, a vehicle to take people from
lunar orbit to the surface and return them back safely to lunar orbit and when
they were getting their $3 billion off the US taxpayer this is what they submitted for their plan”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75a49S4RTRU
yea but booster reuse was part of the plan, which nasa oked. to top off the tanker that fuels you for the tli burn, descent, and return. remember how limited the lm was, you could get a rover and 2-3 days of consumables. duplicating that feat is pointless. instead land with a huge ship with lots of room for eva equipment, rovers, experiments and sample return. one trip could return more valid data than the entire apollo program.
when compared to what the other competing launch provider has done, boeing with its clusterduck starliner. ula with booster problems, etc. i dont even think dream chaser has flown. id go into more detail but my usual source of information (the ksp forums. rip kerbal forums, best game community ever!) has been down for almost a week.
BINGO!!!! actual space exploration and colonization not a toe in the water and limp home with a suitcase full of rocks.
This is not a human rated rocket (yet). Abort means FTS == Klabooy
This is a step toward that. Wanna put your money on the Boeing “Apollo cement mixer capsule 2.0”? they couldn’t even replicate the ablative heat shield out of modern materials. They ended up altering their “terminal burn” thru the atmosphere into a “double hop” to slow down twice. Heck, SpaceX even provides complete signal contact from ship to shore (along with video) during reentry and controlled landing on land (or sea) of the whole space ship. Ship versus a converted missile nuclear warhead shaped package. SpaceX uses reusable components while NASA dumps their 1970s era antiques in the ocean. finally and most significantly, SpaceX costs WAY less, ansd can be turned around for reuse very quickly/ Something NASA promised with the Space Shuttle but in 30 years, never delivered.
Possibly pedantic note from someone suddenly concerned about a whole ‘nother state…
“This Report” says “Ashville, NC” not Nashville, TN…
The “chopstick catch” was great to watch, it was only later that I realized its fuel tanks were nearly empty, so it was a lot lighter than liftoff.
Still, a great accomplishment.
I hope you werent expecting it to land with a full tank :P
What if they had to abort shortly after lift-off?
They’d probably have to splash it?
If it’s like the old space shuttle “RTLS”, then they’d get dumped over the ocean. The top would have to be fished out, and the booster, if it’s still intact, would also need to be fished out. This would be the ideal process if it was manned, the capsule is probably designed for emergency splashdown after separating from the main rocket.
It’s also possible there’d be a self destruct if there’s no living thing onboard. Most unmanned rocket that has malfunctioned also had destructed to avoid having rogue rocket landing in someone’s backyard.
‘to avoid having rogue rocket landing in someone’s backyard.”
Yay! Volksrocket!
The FTS (flight termination system) will automatically destroy the rocket in flight by rupturing the fuel tanks if there is a problem outside of acceptable limits.
On a Falcon 9 launch you can hear the callout ‘FTS is safed’ once the upper stage reaches a safe trajectory and again just before the booster lands.
One of the big problems with the first full stack Starship test was that the FTS was activated when they lost control of the rocket but it failed to make big enough holes in the tanks to trigger an explosion. It eventually broke up and blew up on its own.
one year to migrate to linux. got it.
i really wish the reactos team would get the ball rolling.
I have a Win7 partition on my desk PC.
Last week I had to log into it. It had been so long since I’d done that, I had forgotten the password, lucky the password hint was good enough.
But I need to update the Linux side too!
I meant that it was a long time since I logged into the Win7 side, the Linux side is used regularly.
I’ve been running Linux on my home machines for nearly 30 years at this point (holy crap… 1994/1995?! I’m actually shocked it’s been that long!)
A coworker, who not only works on our Windows side of the business, but also runs Windows at home, recently asked me for recommendations for moving to Linux, due to the impending Windows 11 changes MS is forcing on customers.
I was happy to provide recommendations, of course. ;)
Devuan, right?
B^)
As a Devuan user myself, I still say that the gateway Linux is Linux mint.
Ease of use is always going to be more important than all of the other considerations in getting folks to transition away from winders.
And here I am, about to upgrade a 7 to 10 (my parents’ desktop). No way its going to 11 without some hardware investment.
Supposedly the free 7 to 10 upgrade window is closed. They said it was closed several years ago but it actually still worked until recently. You can run Win10 unactivated indefinitely, it just bugs you to buy a license and there’s less customizable options like wallpaper.
I also recommend Rufus (rufus.ie) to create a bootable USB Win11 installer that bypasses 4GB RAM and TPM 2.0 requirements (via registry edit). However MS could change this at any time rendering your old laptop running Win11 even more dysfunctional.
7-to-10 uplift still works as of last month
+1 on the ReactOS comment. It is “better” and at least marginally useful now, but still not out of alpha yet.
The big problem with ReactOS is that it only supports Windows XP drivers (last I checked at least) which means it has zero support for modern hardware (the last graphics hardware from NVIDIA, AMD/ATI and Intel that had Windows XP drivers was released around a decade ago)
And unless something has changed, ReactOS probably doesn’t support the modern APIs needs to make modern apps run either.
“Will the EOL announcement inspire all those people to migrate?”
Yup, it certainly will! I have only one machine left that is officially capable of running Windows 11, and when Microsoft decides to obsolete that device, that’s it for me – no more Microsoft – ever.
Not even Windows Q?
The only OS that will run on your 32 q-bit quantum?
You don’t really need it unless you are doing something specific, they have so much emulation now-a-days its actually quite an easy task. Even gaming on linux is easy and fun. Out of the box emulation and so many various other options for alternatives you will probably like more than the ms versions.
Ham radio mostly useless with esoteric claims of useful in emergency. Emergency finally happens, ham actually useful. Old timer neck bears still manage to complain. Geez guys. You wonder why the youth numbers are abysmal. And this from me- an apologetic ham op (unde the age of one thousand)
Friends were into ham so I got into it. After license I quickly realized it’s 90% nostalgia for them and not fun useful or interesting for me. Glad it was useful during the emergency, I wonder if the unlicensed users were more helpful…
Depends. A city with just a bunch of folks with a 5km range on VHF screaming into the void is rather useless.
(D)ARES actually organises training sessions for those who participate, also to get in contact with the emergency services, and of course you can get messages out of a city to a place tens of kilometers away – something you’re not able to with just a handheld.
Whackers are useless, but there are a bunch of people who take the emergency stuff somewhat seriously and participate in traffic management training.
What happened to the old land line phone? With basic cheap unpowered phone, they’d still work even during bad storm and extended power outages. At least here in Michigan, virtually all telephone lines are buried and as a low voltage line, they rarely suffer damage or degradation like high voltage AC mains.
Germany: scrapped for (yet to come) fiber optics. In case of power outage we are back to yelling for communication :-/
Same in France: migration to fiber is going on, and no more copper in 2030.
About power outage, it was already true for old land line: the power was coming from the central equipment of your phone provider, so if power was lost there, no more phone. Usually there was a back-up power supply (battery or generator) but probably with a limited capacity/duration. But it’s true that with fiber, you now need to have power to both central equipment AND to your Internet box at home, and most people don’t have backup power supply at home (but with more and more photovoltaic electricity generation at home, this weakness is also evolving).
FYI, my cable/fiber provider has a small
UPS included with the home box, how long it would work, if at all, I don’t know.
User side power via solar is only for hackers and stand-alonable (what’s inselfähig in english?) solar with inverters working without internet connection. The central UPS was rather beefy and could be superseded by mobile units (which would have to be ordered from unaffected areas while the original auxiliary power was still available), which is difficult for userside UPS. If everything went down the tubes one could take the bare wires and bootstrap point-to-point emergency lines with whatever was available. For fiberoptics you could try and send morsecode with a flashlight or by waving the cable end in the sun, but…
I still keep a land line for pretty much what reasons you mention.
As for what happened in western NC? and the surrounding areas?
I recomend everyone Skip the useless jump cut cruft “reporting” of the big networks and the “social” media and go check for a few multi-rotor vids on youtube where the operator just follows a river bed.
No blather and no treacly music, just 8~10 mins of seeing how really badly this just ripped away anything in its path, once the debris began to churn into the waters..
Take note of the riverbeds and creeks, some scoured 20~30 ft deeper than a week earlier. Some smaller dams will be silted in and of little help with flood control until they can be cleared.
Some rivers/creeks in a new location almost.
Concrete bridges sweep away entirely and ground into throw pillow sized rubble in maybe an hours time. Asphalt paving just a dark slurry now. All this roiling detritus just acting like a giant shot blaster. Almost Nothing we’ve built withstood this onslaught.
Other infrastructure just blasted out like hydraulic mining against a hill side. Pipes and wires just shredded and dangling in the air, where there once was 6~8 ft of packed gravel and soil covering them.
Flood plane maps will be mostly just old data now in many places. Places that barely flooded before, are now in a newly created regions of flooding issues.
A staggering amount of supplies and repair equipment (trucks, trailers, excavators and and backhoes), food and cooking equipment, local medical supplies… all just tumbled into hundreds of tons of debris, half buried in a river or gorge somewhere.
“I still keep a land line for pretty much what reasons you mention.”
We still have a “land line” with our telco provider, but it is just part of the fiber laser now. The copper is no longer attached to the demarcation box. I mentioned in a comment above that the home box does have a small built-in UPS, but I have no idea how long it would operate.
I’ll speculate that it wasn’t feasible, likely because of money, to make it effortlessly survive this. There’s a lot of places in the appalachians that are always the last to be reached by any sort of “modern” infrastructure, resource, etc. I could easily see a rural provider letting what copper they have get old as they try to afford the capital to install fiber, while a lot of people can only get wireless/cell coverage. Part of the reason my landline always used to work when hurricanes hit is that I was in an area used to hurricanes and they were prepared, not because it’s that much harder to damage phone lines than grid power. The grid does need at least the affected section to be turned off anytime it’s downed, where the phone is a bit better about that, but if the line is broken because a hillside collapsed, you’re screwed either way. Oh, and burying things doesn’t make them safe; even if nothing natural happened to the ground at all, someone will come by with a fiber seeking backhoe sooner or later.
When a lot of hams got phones the repeaters went rather quiet, suddenly everybody’s talk’n.
Wine ain’t my taste but linux is so I need to do some homework with wine. A couple of apps in a bottle and I’ll be done with Windows.
“we dismissed it as another bit of Elon’s hype”
Re: your recent post referencing censorship and politeness and appropriate on-line behavior.
We may not like the guy’s politics, but Musk’s vision is much more palatable than most other industrialists. Wacky as he is, he has become a ‘force’ for the positive power of technology (We will have to pretend that some of his ground vehicle designs do not exist). Odin and Thor knows, that too much tech has become a force for evil.
Wow, what a powerful and insightful post! It’s incredible to see how vital radio communication remains, especially in times of crisis like Hurricane Helene. The stories of amateur radio operators stepping up to help their communities really highlight the importance of having robust communication systems in place.
I found the controversy about unlicensed users interesting. It’s a reminder that while emergency situations can bring people together, they can also expose underlying tensions within communities. Hopefully, discussions can lead to more effective collaboration in the future.
On a different note, Microsoft’s “End of Life” announcement for Windows 10 is definitely a big deal. It’s hard to imagine so many users being pushed to migrate, especially when many are still hanging onto older systems. It’ll be interesting to see how this impacts the market.
As for Microsoft Flight Simulator, that bandwidth usage is staggering! It does make you wonder about the economics of virtual flying versus real flying. It’s a fascinating time for technology, with so many factors at play.
And speaking of technology, the SpaceX booster catch was nothing short of amazing! The engineering behind it is mind-blowing, and it’s inspiring to see what innovative solutions can be developed. I can’t wait to see what comes next from SpaceX.
This has to be one of the most poorly written synopses I have read on HaD. WDS in full effect. Sad.