[GTALUG] Dirty Power and Wi Fi Far field effect

[Russell Reiter]

I remember the campus well, I use to drive by it all the time whenever I
was involved in a project in that region.

Here's a bit of wifi trivia. For some reason 1978 comes to mind but I could
be off for a decade or so. However the story starts here. Nikola Tesla
approached the US government some time after the first world war and
demonstrated some of his RC stuff. The military liked the tech but drew the
line at Tesla's claim that even the power for the armaments themselves
could be broadcasted.

Fast forward to the Environment Canada Dufferin Campus in the present day;
it was two EC researchers who proved Tesla's concept by flying a small RC
aircraft in a circle over that location for 24 hours with power broadcasted
to it by microwave. They landed after 24 hrs and said that was enough time
to prove they could go on indefinitely and for reasons of community safety
they ended the experiment.

Sixty or so years from first inception and iteration to proof of concept.

At least professor Higgs got to see his boson spring to life. I'll always
remember this quote attributed to Tesla when a reporter asked him about all
the publicity Marconi and Edison were getting at the time. He said, and I
paraphrase here; let them have it, between them they use 14 of my patents.
I am for the future.

Clearly this was a man who knew who and what he was and as any one who
knows his full story could attest to, his own purpose in life.

In today's wired world we are touched by Tesla technology every day. AC is
still the wild west of power transmission. I mean when Swedish technology
can sneek stuff onto vulnerable tech via the wired grid, what do the WiFi
possibilities become?

Russell


On Sunday, March 15, 2015, Walter Dnes <waltdnes at waltdnes.org> wrote:

> On Sat, Mar 14, 2015 at 06:57:49AM -0400, Russell Reiter wrote
> >
> > Hydro is working all over the city to rectify some of the more serious
> > load balancing issues generated by considerabble over optisim in the
> > effective technology of the day the grid was built. I guess this is
> > to stimulate investor confidence before selling the whole dog and
> > pony show to someone else.
>
>   Two issues... more people and more power usage per person.  My war
> story.  I used to work at the Environment Canada building on Dufferin
> just south of Steeles before I retired.  The building went up around
> 1969/1970, and was planned in the 1960's, to meet 1960's needs, with
> "sufficient spare capacity" ha ha ha.  The building had been designed to
> support an IBM clone mainframe.  As part of the plan some scientists and
> their CS support staff and some other staff had real honest-to-goodness
> "green screen" Volker Craig dumb terminals.
>
>   I arrived there almost exactly 30 years ago, in March of 1985.  At
> that time "the PC Revolution" was just getting underway.  I remember my
> management agonizing about whether they should get me an IBM PC with a 5
> *MEGABYTE* add-on drive, or an IBM PC-XT with a built-in 10 *MEGABYTE*
> hard drive.  They eventually got the PC-XT.  Fast forward a few years,
> and you're looking at several hundred people, each with a desktop
> computer, plus a monstrous monitor.  And they all needed power.
>
>   Needless to say, the building was running rather close to power
> capacity.  It took a a couple of years to get the building upgraded, and
> I assume that Toronto Hydro had to upgrade equipment on their end.  I
> don't remember any blackouts due to that issue, but I got the impression
> from management that we were running close to the edge for a couple of
> years.
>
> --
> Walter Dnes <waltdnes at waltdnes.org <javascript:;>>
> ---
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