Threadjacking

Jump to Latest
#1,601
circuit_diagram.png


From: xkcd: Circuit Diagram

- keantoken
 
#1,602
- set up four marijuana factory farms, a step that could usher in the era of Big Pot

should support Weeds
Click to expand...

Oakland could go to pot in a big way with four proposed factory farms -

The state's pot-friendliest city could approve a plan to set up four marijuana factory farms. But it has ignited intense opposition from medical marijuana activists, dispensary operators and growers.

Reporting from Oakland — Oakland could approve a plan Tuesday to set up four marijuana factory farms, a step that could usher in the era of Big Pot.

The proposal is a testament to just how fast the marijuana counterculture is transforming into a corporate culture. And it has ignited a contentious debate in Oakland that could spread as cities face pressure to regulate marijuana cultivation and find ways to tax it.

If the City Council approves the plan, one Bay Area businessman has already made it clear that he intends to apply for a cultivation permit. Jeff Wilcox, who owned a successful construction firm and has already incorporated as AgraMed, hopes to convert his empty industrial buildings near Interstate 880 into an enormous production facility. He plans to manufacture growing equipment, bake marijuana edibles in a 10,000-square-foot kitchen and use two football fields of space to grow about 58 pounds of marijuana every day, many times the amount now sold in Oakland.

"Everybody knows it's going bigger and big money is moving in,"
Click to expand...
said Dale Gieringer, an Oakland resident and prominent marijuana activist. As the state edges toward legalization, he said, more businessmen will seek to capitalize on a fast-growing market in a recession-hindered economy, forcing cities to make difficult choices on how to exert control.

What caught the City Council's attention was Wilcox's projection that he could hire 371 employees and pay at least $1.5 million a year in taxes. Oakland faces severe budget deficits and has already let go of 80 police officers.

Last week, a council committee sent to the full council the proposal to allow four large cultivation operations, worried that a delay might allow other cities to get the jump on Oakland. "I do want to encourage a few large growers because I think that's where the industry's going, and I don't think you're going to be able to hold that back," Councilwoman Jean Quan said.

But it has ignited intense opposition from medical marijuana activists, dispensary operators and growers in Oakland, who complain that the plan fails to include the growers who have risked federal prosecution for years to supply the city's four dispensaries. Normally secretive, they have started to speak out.

"It's not providing a pathway for folks to become more legitimate," said Dan Grace, an owner of Dark Heart Nursery, which raises about 10,000 pot clones a month in a 3,000-square-foot space. Grace said that his operation could triple its size — if Oakland allowed it.


Oakland takes pride in setting new marijuana precedents. It was the first city to regulate dispensaries, make marijuana crimes the lowest police priority and enact a special tax on marijuana. And Richard Lee, who operates one of its dispensaries, put the marijuana legalization initiative on the November ballot.

Even if Oakland approves the plan, it faces a serious obstacle: the feds. The Obama administration's policy is to leave medical marijuana operations alone if they are in "clear and unambiguous compliance with state law." In a memo, one council member wrote "this proposal is not legal under state law according to our city attorney." City Atty. John Russo's office declined to release his memo, citing attorney-client privilege.

Drug Enforcement Administration agents remain on the hunt for major growers. This month, agents raided a collective in Mendocino that was complying with the county's new cultivation ordinance, ripping out all 99 of its plants. The San Francisco DEA office referred questions on the Oakland proposal to the drug czar's office, which called it "the latest example of ongoing efforts to legitimize, through local ordinances, activities that remain illegal under federal law."

Said James Anthony, an Oakland lawyer who thinks the proposal should accommodate smaller growers: "There are no giant cannabis factories anywhere in the world, and it strikes me as a rather odd assumption that the first one is going to come into existence in the United States of America. I don't know. Maybe."


Oakland's proposal, drafted by council members Rebecca Kaplan and Larry Reid, would still allow small unregulated cultivation in homes but is intended to supplant hundreds of larger operations, establishing the four industrial operations "as the only legal model."

They argue that medium-size operations, often in gutted homes and illicit warehouses, are a hazard, causing electrical fires and drawing violent crime.

Many cities and counties are grappling with this issue.

More here -


Oakland could go to pot in a big way with four proposed factory farms - latimes.com
 
Last edited:
#1,604
Pretty well clears up the issue of the DEA, if you ask me. This is from the Constitution of the United States of America.


"Amendment 10 - Powers of the States and People. Ratified 12/15/1791. Note

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
 
#1,608
 
#1,609
currantbun

Hi folks, thanks for your interest, are you all mostly in the USA? Pleased to meet you all, I am in the UK. Before I joined EMI in London in 1969 I worked as a development engineer in radio communication systems and the frequency translator borrowed from that experience. It took about 6 months or so to design and build during quiet times often late into the night whilst being on call within the studios as an engineer providing technical support to studio sessions. I negotiated a total budget of GBP 100 with the studio manager, plus my time. That was the total cost. The device used thermionic valve (tube) technology, I remember that around 10 thermionic valves were used in the final device. As far as I am aware no photographs exist of the device and it had fallen into disuse and disrepair by 1975 which is the year I left the studios. It worked like this. It shifted the audio spectrum in a linear fashion, not harmonic. eg 1000Hz becomes 1010Hz, 2000Hz becomes 2010Hz, 3000Hz becomes 3010Hz etc. The audio baseband signal modulated a 10.7MHz carrier producing a resultant double sideband amplitude modulated radio signal. The carrier and one sideband were then filtered out producing a 10.7 MHz single sideband (SSB) radio signal with suppressed carrier. And this is where the fun starts. You then re-introduce the carrier at a slightly different frequency and demodulate the resulting signal producing a reconstituted audio passband that now has the necessary linear shift. If the re-inserted carrier is itself modulated at very low frequencies then the shift itself becomes variable and a multitude of various weird sounds can be produced. Feeding the output back to the input enabled even more possibilities and the device was exploited very effectively by AP on DSOTM. It was used on a number of other albums and continued in use as long as I was available to maintain it. It survived for quite a reasonable time in a very busy studio operation especially considering that it was constructed in prototype fashion on an unprotected open aluminium chassis with no case. At first the project had no name at all and was simply referred to as "my" project (the Keith Adkins project) but it was named as the Frequency Translator on completion. Any other questions I'll do my best to answer, hope this helps.

If you can find a communications receiver (not everyone will have one!!) and receive an SSB voice transmission you will be listening to the original audio after the modulation and filtering processes mentioned above, plus of course any effects created by the radio propagation. Most communications receivers will have a control called a BFO (beat frequency oscillator). I believe some CB radios that are SSB capable will also have this control, and it may be called a "clarifier". Adjust this control and you will be making a small adjustment to the re-inserted carrier mentioned above. This mis-tuning will give you the linear frequency translation effect, admittedly over a small passband, typically 300Hz to 3KHz. My original thought was what would happen if you created the same effect deliberately using the full audio spectrum and so I set out to do just that.

The frequency translator had only two controls, power switch and “tuning”. The tuning control operated a 180 degree travel variable capacitor via a hefty reduction gear. This variable capacitor, with a maximum value of about only 50 pF, enabled small changes to the frequency of a 10.7 MHz quartz crystal oscillator. which provided the re-inserted carrier. The reduction gear enabled the “offset” to be controlled within a fraction of 1Hz, that is less than 1 part in approx 10 million. In SSB radio design the oscillator constraints would be less stringent because the intermediate frequency was typically 465 KHz not 10.7 MHz - and also because full intelligibility would not require such a precise alignment of the re-inserted carrier. 10.7 MHz was chosen as the IF for the frequency translator because the higher audio passband requires a higher carrier frequency with respect to filter design and because, not least, 10.7 MHz components were easily available as this was the IF used in domestic VHF FM broadcast technology. Remember my budget of 100 GBP!!

Because this was an analogue device using thermionic valves it was much easier to set the inserted carrier accurately than it was actually to keep it where you set it. In other words the frequency would drift away from the setting, an effect that reduced but was not eliminated the longer the device was powered up. Not only that but because of the fairly rudimentary open chassis construction etc it was not easy to keep the waveform of the re-inserted carrier “clean” and this normally unwanted effect provided a kind of additional character to the sound you might say. In operation the tuning control would be set to an offset which provided the necessary effect. Setting it several Hz away from the centre would provide a kind of underwater effect noticeable on some of the guitar work on DSOTM whereas setting it to 1 Hz or less would provide a different kind of sound but equally unreal. The frequency drift and the “unclean” waveform provided an interesting lack of predictability and plenty of surprises no doubt, not all of them unpleasant judging by some of the enthusiastic remarks about this particular contribution to the album.

So the operator had only one control to play with and its use must have been very confusing when trying to take the frequency drift into account. The balance engineer did of course have all the usual possibilities provided by the mixing desk which included adding the translated sound to the original, feeding the output of the translator back to the input, adding reverberation. But I think mostly commonly the technique would be to set the “tuning” control to a suitably interesting sound, cross your fingers, and then simply insert the sound into the stereo image as required. Perhaps Alan Parsons would be able to remember exactly what he did on DSOTM, but you’d have to ask him that.

As regards replicating the device in 2009, I think it is quite possible that the exact sounds might be difficult to re-create with cleaner more stable silicon technology although how close you could actually get is not something I’d like to try and predict. Which leads to the interesting possibility of how easy it would be to build a true replica using thermionic valve technology. Having already done one of these I think I might leave that task to someone else. Any takers?
Click to expand...

Old guys?? "Frequency translator" re: Big Star, Pink Floyd backgrounds - Page 2 - Gearslutz.com
 
#1,612
cam pictures - and a bird(s)

An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.



An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.



An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.



An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.



An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.



An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.



An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.



Imageshack - dscn9869z.jpg



An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
 
Last edited:
#1,614
7n7is said:
currantbun



Old guys?? "Frequency translator" re: Big Star, Pink Floyd backgrounds - Page 2 - Gearslutz.com
Click to expand...

i used to have a "Frequency Analyzer" by ElectroHarmonix that was a ring modulator and an audio band local oacillator. it was a similar effect, done with solid state devices, namely a 4-quadrant analog multiplier and a sine wave oscillator. IIRC it had an external oscillator input as well as a voltage control input for the internal oscillator. works the same in principal, except didn't need to modulate and demodulate RF to get the same result. it worked completely within the audio spectrum
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom