Friday, July 27, 2018

Indian Military

Designing a magnetometer (a magnetic field detector), I just rebuilt the board to make it more robust. This went well. But I had blown out twelve amplifier stages through static -- so I tracked down some new ones in the city, at US 6¢ each. Now when I rebuilt the board, my magnetometer was performing much better. I took a closer look, and saw that the original parts were manufactured by the Indian military, and the replacement parts in Europe! I have now pushed sensitivity in an (adverse) built environment to 1.3 nT, which is very good. To put it simply, it means that one can detect things way smaller than a pinhead. OBSERVATION: Something interesting about the design. It could have been built exactly to plan as early as 1972, with just one exception: I use an ultrabright LED to signal that something has been found. Back in 1972 one could have used a meter instead. But I like the LED signalling -- and it is cheap.

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