[GreenKeys] How not to test a teletypewriter

[Jeffrey Angus]

  Ah the joys of the aerospace industry.

Lyon's Environmental, early '70s. Located in Gardena, CA.
They had the shake table big enough to test the Lunar Excursion Module.

One of the techs I worked with was mouthing off, so I threw a lawn chair
up on the table and suggested he go for a ride.

He found out a couple of interesting things about a table with that much
mass and enough horsepower behind it to drive it properly.

1.   A 1 Hertz sine wave at 2" amplitude is impossible to hang on to.
2.   The rumors are true about the "brown note".

One of the more "oh no" orientated bits with that shake table was when
the de-ionizer failed at high power and the cooling water flashed over.
Killed the output transformer.

Now, Chicago Transformer didn't have a problem sending us a new one,
and Flying Tiger's didn't mind flying it out to us over night. But you 
should
have seen the invoice for shipping. ;-)

Other fun things you can do at large companies. Anechoic chambers. The
one at TRW in Redondo Beach was about 35-40' square at one end, and
I think about 250-300 feet long.

I was doing some cable radiation testing and some clown did three things
to me. He turned out the lights. Then he shut the door. You have NO idea
how disorientating that is to be in total darkness and you can't even hear
your own voice. But for the grand finale, they pulled the fire foam lever.

Weird shit that foam is. I think it's made from cow hooves or something
equally disgusting. What's even stranger, is you can actually breath it.

Ahhhh, I really do kind of miss some of the more interesting things from
my days a paid aerospace whore making the world a safer place by working
on weapons of mass destruction. ;-)

Jeff-1.0
wa6fwi