Recent content by DaveInDenver

For what's it worth I put a similar topper on a pickup years ago and asked what the roof rack weight rating would be for the factory installed racks. This isn't the exact one but it was essentially the same thing the manufacturer was offering. There were 3 points of contact, the two on the...

For what its worth, the luminaires I most recently spec'd produced 5000 lumen at 4000K on a 30 foot pole. At grade (in other words, on the street) the datasheet says they produce 0.5 foot-candle, which is the same as 0.5 lumen per sq-foot. This would be approximately 5.38 lumen per sq-meter...

This doesn't seem controversial, it would have been like Bill Collins, Pontiac's chief engineer at the time, suggesting you might not want to daily drive a GTO if you really expected to be driving a regular Tempest. If you were lughead 22 year old young man you wouldn't care, give me the...

Credit makes it possible, not necessarily sustainable. But they're not interested in anything temporal beyond next quarter.

I imagine the enclosures are something they make or have made for them custom. The closest I can think of are thin IEC enclosures (like Eaton B-line below) but those are going to have a door and full back, which may be redundant in this application. You know what I mean, for control panels...

50 km is pretty good for VHF at handheld. To get 130 km would take 1000 meters of elevation gain and that's technically possible if I do a high peak. That's right at the horizon, beyond line of sight. It's not a question of power. With VHF and UHF it's line of sight and radio horizon. To go...

41.6 miles is pretty incredible on VHF. That's nearly what I can count on getting when activating peaks here and that's with the advantage of 5000' elevation gain and a 3-element Yagi on the Front Range side looking out into the plains. If conditions are favorable 50, maybe 60, miles is good...

The problem seems obvious in the 3rd video tear-down. There's a plastic form between the internal busbar and the terminal. Giving benefit, maybe running it insulated with a bolt was a failed attempt to be a fuse. That's a big benefit of the doubt. This is not ideal, the guy in the first two...

You bring up brushes, which is a good example. They are wearing out faster running over the rings than any electrical process could. Technically speaking all electronics can wear (so to speak) eventually at an atomic level but what is much, much more common is environmental damage (either...

What kills alternators is heat. I don't know if a 2016 Tundra has a smart alternator but regardless you don't need to worry using even 100% of your capacity as long as you keep it cool. The advantage about a smart alternator is that the ECU will be more likely to actively protect from...

CTCSS is continuous tone-coded squelch system and DCS is digital code squelch. They can be single transmit or receive or both on TX and RX. The difference is CTCSS is analog (and is the same thing as PL Tone, which is Privacy Line, a Motorola trademark) and DCS is digital codes instead of a...

I need to be clear, Canada has a FRS/GMRS, just that a U.S. GMRS license (all Part 95 radios, CB, FRS, GMRS) doesn't grant any authority and the radios aren't the same. On the air the differences aren't that great so it's a letter of the regulations situation. The radios need to carry an...

Canada has the General Radio Service, which is the same channels as the U.S. 27 MHz CB. As I understand them the rules up there are as loosely enforced as they are down in the States. You used to have to get a temporary operating license even for CB. You can talk to Canadian CB'ers across the...

CB, GMRS and FRS are essentially only in the United States. There are similar services and even sometimes on similar frequencies in other counties but the rules differ and the radios are not the same. If you want to be legal you have to follow the rules of that country. Maybe this only...

I guess I'm confused then since asking about country of origin is usually a question workers rights and environment not a technical one. Perhaps intellectual property theft straddles both. The actual quality of what they make varies too much from world class to pure crap to make a blanket...