Comment by badc0ffee
1 day ago
I had to think for a second to realize that HF means lower frequency than VHF, not high frequency in an absolute sense.
1 day ago
I had to think for a second to realize that HF means lower frequency than VHF, not high frequency in an absolute sense.
It's very silly that "high frequency" is among the lowest frequencies, and that we wound up with Very, Ultra, Super, Extremely, and Tremendously High Frequencies!
It's because when the term was first used, newer electronics to generate those frequencies had only recently become available.
The HF band is 3-30 MHz. Maritime navigation was operating on 500kHz (.5MHz) for most of the 20th century because that was what Marconi's alternators used at the beginning of the system. These machines produced the carrier frequency mechanically by rotating a disc with lots of tiny magnets on it at high speed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexanderson_alternator
Reminds me of High Speed USB.
Long live Fast Ethernet
I thought you had to be joking, but... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tremendously_high_frequency
And here I was thinking that GregTech's "Ludicrous Voltage" sounded out of place...
Scientists and engineers have fantastic senses of humor when naming things.
> The time derivative of acceleration is called jerk, and the time derivative of jerk is called jounce. One published paper whimsically named the fourth, fifth, and sixth derivatives of "snap", "crackle", and "pop" after the cartoon characters on boxes of Rice Krispies breakfast cereal.
Back in ye olden days, HF was really high! What we'd consider today to be near useless due to limited bandwidth and insane antenna requirements were once the primary frequencies for communications.
I wondered if that was the case! 28 MHz must've seemed pretty high at the time. :)