Bob McLeod doesn't work in the broadcast industry directly; he's in power generation
operations. He's also a ham, WA1RM. He says he enjoyed our recent column on grounding
and wanted to comment on the lack of proper grounding of large transmitters.
Bob cautions that before you grab a ground wire to check if it is attached
to something, you should short the unknown ground to a known ground, or at least
use a pair of lineman gloves, with a HV rating, to protect yourself while checking.
If possible, bring another person along too. You could get quite a surprise,
not to mention a good jolt, if you became the path to ground.
A great tip, Bob. One never knows where wires may go, especially at undocumented
sites. A contract engineer told me recently of a very large voltage potential
noted between a transmitter equipment rack and the "ground" strap.
He found it by, you guessed it, touching the strap while also touching the "grounded"
rack.
Last column Paul Sagi wrote of the benefits of those little keychain-type LED
flashlights.
Torrance, Calif.'s LEDtronics has a powerful LED FlashLED, the FLT-4001, seen
in Fig. 2. It's not a keychain, but a compact flashlight - or rather, a "flashLED"
- that can provide 1,800 foot-candles of white light from its 1-watt Luxeon
LEDs. Fig. 2: The battery on this FlashLED will last for eight days.
|
Fig. 2: The battery on this
FlashLED will last for eight days. |
The company says these are the brightest solid-state light sources available
commercially. The LED integrates a collimator that focuses the light into a
tight beam. Of particular use for the engineer is that the white LED lamp operates
for more than six years.
The battery life of the FLT-4001 is spec'd at eight days on three alkaline
C-cells. The FlashLED is about 10 inches long and weighs about a pound with
the batteries installed.
With specs like that, no more dead flashlight. Visit www.LEDtronics.com.
