Comments by "vk2ig" (@vk2ig) on "Curious Droid" channel.

Joe Taylor K1JT won the Nobel Prize for his astrophysics work in co-discovering a new type of pulsar. Unfortunately, much of amateur radio has devolved from a pursuit of scientific and technical knowledge into the mindless espousing of religious mantras. The 5G thing is a case in point: many amateurs who support the claims that 5G has adverse health effects cannot explain how the signals from 5G have enough energy to break covalent bonds and thus trigger cancers. It's up there with the Cross-Field Antenna, the pursuit of the "Holy Grail" perfect "rectangular" filter for SDR, and explanations of how the end-fed half-wave antenna actually works (which ignore a number of fundamental concepts such as conservation of charge, etc). And the amateurs wonder why they're not taken seriously ...
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@erikarneberg11 Interesting how these people are willing to be shills free of charge. I would have thought that if being a shill was a necessity, then it would be better to be a paid shill than an unpaid shill. :D
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Increasingly the general public has no idea what shortwave is. About three decades ago many people still knew about it.
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@nineball039 You're setting a very high bar for the person to whom your comment is addressed, LOL!
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Used to hear Duga quite often in the mid-late 70s and the 80s. Now everyone and their dog are running OTHR, so you hear them often.
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14:00 CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organisation) is pronounced like "Sy-row", not "Sis-row". :)
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Or they use alien technology in the form of the power generator recovered from a crashed UFO in Area 51 ... Seriously, this was an excellent debunking video.
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@lithostheory Yep ... project this video on to a screen greater than 1.1m wide and the progress bar will move faster than a geomagnetic pole.
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@Psittac20 I think the likelihood of changing a conspiracy theorist's mind on this issue is vanishingly small - these people are what they are, so to speak. What the channel owner is achieving, though - which is vastly more important - is that people who might've bought into this particular conspiracy theory have been shown an alternative, science-based explanation of what HAARP does. This gives such people the opportunity to judge for themselves which explanation to believe: that based in science, or that based in quasi-religious dogma; and that is the real achievement of channels like this one.
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Radio amateurs were on the forefront of a lot of radio experimentation early o, but their involvement has dropped off steadily since then. Since WW2 they've had some influence in helping popularise communications modes; e.g. Art Collins making SSB accessible which in turn convinced the Curtis LeMay of the USAF to use it, probably resulting in many military forces adopting it; narrowband, low power digital modes such as PSK31, etc. But unfortunately amateur radio in the last couple of decades has become afflicted with a religious fervour instead of scientific and technical debate. Evidence for this can be found in people devoting a lot of time and energy into projects such as the Cross-Field Antenna, or trying to build the perfect "rectangular" filter for SDR. Ask the average radio amateur how an end-fed half-wave antenna works, or what is the real meaning of voltage standing wave ratio, and you'll understand what I'm saying.
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12:03 ... Eastlund disassociated himself ... Is that like disassociative recombination which is one of the free electron loss mechanisms the ionosphere? On a more serious note: it's amazing what radio communications and/or research facilities are labelled as HAARP stations on Google Maps, despite these facilities not being in Alaska, and not being associated with HAARP. For example, this one in Townsville, QLD, Australia, -19.237768, 146.722246, which has nothing whatsoever to do with HAARP, but some conspiracy theorist has labelled it as such, LOL.
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But that's not how the conspiracy theorist works. Their mind works more like that of a cult leader than that of someone seeking knowledge or the truth. There is a power kick that comes from being able to convince many people to follow one's ideas, and to hang on one's every word. In the time before (and during, somewhat) the Renaissance, the equivalent was the archbishop of a church - they had the ear of the rulers of the time, and guarded that jealously. Look at how many who sought the truth in science were deemed as heretics. In one case of a particularly well-known scientific investigator in the 16th and 17th century who dared to say that the Earth revolved around the Sun and not the other way around, the sentence for their alleged heresy was not revoked until late in the 20th century - after all, the religious institution concerned couldn't have someone making accurate predictions of certain phenomena, because otherwise the rulers of the time may start listening to that person instead of listening to the religious leaders.
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@SuicideNeil 1990s: Hey, let's go burn down the school library tonight! 2020s: Hey, let's go trolling on some YouTube channels!
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One problem with re-using OTPs is that even though an adversary may not be able to read the contents of, say, two such transmissions, they can use the two to form a "book cipher" and attack the cipher that way.
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But it hasn't been shut down. It's still being operated by UoA. Watch the video!
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@aiem That's pretty insensitive of the people laughing about that. As you say, wait until it happens to them or someone they care about - they won't find it very funny then.
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I had no problem with the ending of Game Of Thrones: Mike Whean and Yorg Race got the chop, no problem there whatsoever!
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@stevemumbling7720 Except in the case of ionospheric "tilts", where the radio signal will deviate from the great circle path. However; knowing the state of the ionosphere at the reflection points, and modelling that using suitable ray tracing software, will mitigate that to some extent.
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@Player_Review Lots of people confuse the epidemiological effects of non-ionising and ionising radiation. There are plenty of conspiracy theories about this - and they make as much sense as Flat Earth, Faked Moon Landings, the world's politicians all being lizard creatures from outer space ... just to name a few. Photons (energy packets) of electromagnetic waves at radio frequencies don't carry enough energy to break covalent bonds, i.e. they cannot knock electrons off atoms or molecules and create ions. Damage from radio waves is somewhat frequency-dependent, and includes body heating, deep tissue burns and surface burns. But higher frequency radiation such as ultraviolet, extreme UV, x-rays, etc, is ionising, and that's a different matter altogether.
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@floridmonkey2723 I suspect the reason why some may consider it to be clickbait is due to hearing the views of the conspiracy theorists and doomsday preppers who keep going on about how the magnetic field reversal is going to kill us all, etc, etc, etc.
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