If you’ve ever wondered what goes on in the ground facilities of a satellite TV operation, you could go banging on the doors or your local station. You’d probably get thrown out in short order. Alternatively, you could watch this neat little tour from [saveitforparts].
The tour takes us through a ground facility operated by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Radio Canada in Montreal. The facility in question largely handles CBC’s French language content for the Canadian audience. We’re treated to a look at the big satellite dishes on the roof, as well as the command center inside. Wall to wall screens and control panels are the order of the day, managing uplinks and downlinks and ensuring content gets where it needs to go. Particularly interesting is the look at the hardcore hardware for full-strength transmission to satellites. The video also includes some neat trivia, like how CBC was the first broadcaster to offer direct satellite TV to customers in 1978.
Battlelines are being drawn in Canada over the lowly Flipper Zero, a device seen by some as an existential threat to motor vehicle owners across the Great White North. The story started a month or so ago, when someone in the government floated the idea of banning devices that could be “used to steal vehicles by copying the wireless signals for remote keyless entry.” The Flipper Zero was singled out as an example of such a nefarious device, even though relatively few vehicles on the road today can be boosted using the simple replay attack that a Flipper is capable of, and the ones that are vulnerable to this attack aren’t all that desirable — apologies to the 1993 Camry, of course. With that threat hanging in the air, the folks over at Flipper Devices started a Change.org petition to educate people about the misperceptions surrounding the Flipper Zero’s capabilities, and to urge the Canadian government to reconsider their position on devices intended to explore the RF spectrum. That last bit is important, since transmit-capable SDR devices like the HackRF could fall afoul of a broad interpretation of the proposed ban; heck, even a receive-only SDR dongle might be construed as a restricted device. We’re generally not much for petitions, but this case might represent an exception. “First they came for the Flipper Zero, but I did nothing because I don’t have a Flipper Zero…”
Here in the hacker community there’s nothing we love more than a clueless politician making a fool of themselves sounding off about a technology they know nothing about. A few days ago we were rewarded in spades by the Canadian Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry François-Philippe Champagne, who railed against the Flipper Zero, promising to ban it as a tool that could be used to gain keyless entry to a vehicle.
Of course our community has roundly debunked this assertion, as capable though the Flipper is, the car industry’s keyless entry security measures are many steps ahead of it. We’ve covered the story from a different angle before, but it’s worth returning to it for an automotive locksmith’s view on the matter from [Surlydirtbag].
He immediately debunks the idea of the Flipper being used for keyless entry systems, pointing out that thieves have been using RF relay based attacks which access the real key for that task for many years now. He goes on to address another concern, that the Flipper could be used to clone the RFID chip of a car key, and concludes that it can in the case of some very old vehicles whose immobilizers used simple versions of the technology, but not on anything recent enough to interest a car thief.
Of course, to many readers this will not exactly be news. But it’s still important, because perhaps some of us will have had to discuss this story with non-technical people who might be inclined to believe such scare stories. Being able to say “Don’t take it from me, take it from an automotive locksmith” might just help. Meanwhile there is still the concern of CAN bus attacks to contend with, something the manufacturers could have headed off had they only separated their on-board subsystems.
How can you spot an engineer? It can be tricky, but it is a little easier in Canada. That’s because many Canadian engineers have been through the Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer and wear an iron or steel ring to symbolize their profession. The ring has a very odd history that originated in 1922 as the brainchild of Professor H. E. T. Haultain. While he may not be a recognizable name, at least one famous person was involved with creating the Ritual.
H. E. T. Haultain
The ring itself has facets on the outer surface, and you wear it on the little finger of your dominant hand. Originally handmade, the ring reminds the wearer of the engineer’s moral, ethical, and professional commitment. In addition to being a visible reminder, the ring is made to drag slightly as you write or draw, as a constant reminder of the engineer’s obligation. With more experience, the ridges wear down, dragging less as you get more experience.
There is a rumor that the first rings were made from the metal of a bridge that collapsed due to poor design, but this appears untrue. The presentation ceremony is understated, with limited attendance and very little publicity.
It may be blurry and blotchy, but it’s ours. The first images of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy were revealed this week, and they caused quite a stir. You may recall the first images of the supermassive black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy from a couple of years ago: spectacular images that captured exactly what all the theories said a black hole should look like, or more precisely, what the accretion disk and event horizon should look like, since black holes themselves aren’t much to look at. That black hole, dubbed M87*, is over 55 million light-years away, but is so huge and so active that it was relatively easy to image. The black hole at the center of our own galaxy, Sagittarius A*, is comparatively tiny — its event horizon would fit inside the orbit of Mercury — a much closer at only 26,000 light-years or so. But, our black hole is much less active and obscured by dust, so imaging it was far more difficult. It’s a stunning technical achievement, and the images are certainly worth checking out.
Another one from the “Why didn’t I think of that?” files — contactless haptic feedback using the mouth is now a thing. This comes from the Future Interfaces Group at Carnegie-Mellon and is intended to provide an alternative to what ends up being about the only practical haptic device for VR and AR applications — vibrations from off-balance motors. Instead, this uses an array of ultrasonic transducers positioned on a VR visor and directed at the user’s mouth. By properly driving the array, pressure waves can be directed at the lips, teeth, and tongue of the wearer, providing feedback for in-world events. The mock game demonstrated in the video below is a little creepy — not sure how many people enjoyed the feeling of cobwebs brushing against the face or the splatter of spider guts in the mouth. Still, it’s a pretty cool idea, and we’d like to see how far it can go.
Ah, the great outdoors. Rejuvenating air rife with mosquitoes and other nasties, and spending some time hanging out in the woods sleeping in a 3D printed camper. Wait– what was that last one again?
Yep, it’s exactly what it sounds like. A Canadian team headed by [Randy Janes] of Wave of the Future 3D, printed a camper at [Create Cafe] in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, using high-flow nozzles on one of the largest 3D printers in North America. These layers are 10.3mm thick!!
This trailer is one single printed piece, taking 230 hours — nine and a half days — of straight printing with only a few hangups. Weighing 600lbs and at 13 feet long by six feet wide — approximately 507 cubic feet, this beats the previous record holder for largest single piece indoor print in size by three times over.
Sometimes when researching one Hackaday story we as writers stumble upon the one train of thought that leads to another. So it was with a recent look at an unmanned weather station buoy from the 1960s, which took us on a link to a much earlier automated weather station.
The restored Kurt in the Canadian National War Museum.
Weather Station Kurt was the only successful installation among a bold attempt by the German military during the Second World War to gain automated real-time meteorological data from the Western side of the Atlantic. Behind that simple sentence hides an extremely impressive technical and military achievement for its day. This was the only land-based armed incursion onto the North American continent by the German military during the entire war. Surrounded as it was though by secrecy, and taking place without conflict in an extremely remote part of Northern Labrador, it passed unnoticed by the Canadian authorities and was soon forgotten as an unimportant footnote in the wider conflagration.
Kurt took the form of a series of canisters containing a large quantity of nickel-cadmium batteries, meteorological instruments, a telemetry system, and a 150W high frequency transmitter. In addition there was a mast carrying wind speed and direction instruments, and the transmitting antenna. In use it was to have provided vital advance warning of weather fronts from the Western Atlantic as they proceeded towards the European theatre of war, the establishment of a manned station on enemy territory being too hazardous.
A small number of these automated weather stations were constructed by Siemens in 1943, and it was one of them which was dispatched in the U-boat U537 for installation on the remote Atlantic coast of what is now part of modern-day Canada. In late October 1943 they succeeded in that task after a hazardous trans-Atlantic voyage, leaving the station bearing the markings of the non-existent “Canadian Meteor Service” in an attempt to deceive anybody who might chance upon it. In the event it was not until 1977 that it was spotted by a geologist, and in 1981 it was retrieved and taken to the Canadian War Museum.
There is frustratingly little information to be found on the exact workings on the telemetry system, save that it made a transmission every few hours on 3940kHz. A Google Books result mentions that the transmission was encoded in Morse code using the enigmatic Graw’s Diaphragm, a “sophisticated contact drum” named after a Dr. [Graw], from Berlin. It’s a forgotten piece of technology that defies our Google-fu in 2017, but it must in effect have been something of a mechanical analogue-to-digital converter.
Should you happen to be visiting the Canadian capital, you can see Kurt on display in the Canadian War Museum. It appears to have been extensively restored from the rusty state it appears in the photograph taken during its retrieval, it would be interesting to know whether anything remains of the Graw’s Diaphragm. Do any readers know how this part of the station worked? Please let us know in the comments.
Weather station Kurt retrieval image, Canadian National Archives. (Public domain).
Weather station Kurt in museum image, SimonP (Public domain).
