[Coco] CoCo vs EMP WAS--> Re: Coco Digest, Vol 24, Issue 48

[Rogelio Perea]

>> The USA will never be destroyed by external forces. It will be destroyed
>> due to internal policies. But we're way off topic here!
> 
> Of course it's way off topic.  But some of us have an interest in keeping
> semiconductor systems working no matter who tries to kill them.  And the
> biggest terrorist organization on the planet is HQ'd in Washington City.

It'd be interesting to somehow rig an EMP test vault and check out the
CoCo capacity to withstand such an event...

Some years ago while working on a Harris HT10FM transmitter room, we
could not use just any laptop as the thing could lock up when least
expected. The HT10FM was putting out 10kW of FM power, granted, most
of that energy flowed to the antenna elements way up on a 300 ft
tower, the tower was located abuot 140 feet from the TX room. We could
only get an old Zeos 286 laptop to work properly anywhere within the
confines of the small patch of land dominated by the FM tower, the
Zeos was all encased in metal except of course for the LCD screen.
Other equipment in the same location would freakout: one time a
surveying team panicked when their top of the line laser transit
system locked up and did not function; any video camera brought into
the area would show more or less moire patterns on the viewfinder and
that got into the tape as well. I had an F board CoCo setup in a
adjacent room (the "office" as the station owners said) and never had
a problem with it except for a very tough time setting up the proper
aluminum foil shielding for the B&W TV I had as a monitor. The CoCo
was mainly used as an entertainment system and a nifty calculator...
station logs were kept on Deskmate's SHEET application.

Management never went for buying an EMF monitor (despite our calls for
one), and me and my colleague quit before we bought one for our own
use, so we never knew how much energy was floating around on that
particular site.

Mmmm... pondering about it... I do have access to a phasor room
(directional AM site) where 50,000 watts of pure AM are just about
everywhere... phasor room walls neatly lined with copper... mmm... I
am taking the F board over there within a week and report the findings
to the group :-)

-- 


-=[ Rogelio ]=-