Ham sandwich navigation and radar failure

"Roy Smith" wrote in message
...
Hamish Reid wrote:
vi, humph. It's ed. Kids these days... :-). Anyone else for teco?

Never did any TECO, but I did use SOS, a close cousin. Used to be
pretty good at the 029 card punch too :-)

SOS is to TECO what a J3 is to a G-IV.

-Ron
.. MAKE LOVE
NOT WAR?
[4K CORE]

In article ,
Roy Smith wrote:

Hamish Reid wrote:
vi, humph. It's ed. Kids these days... :-). Anyone else for teco?

Never did any TECO, but I did use SOS, a close cousin. Used to be
pretty good at the 029 card punch too :-)

SOS? Luxury! I used to enter things with the front panel switches on
the PDP-11 (all too true, unfortunately -- I really am *not* nostalgic
for those days. Give me a nice G5 Mac any day).

Hamish (who once had his own vast 2.5Mb RK05 disk)

In article ,
Hamish Reid wrote:

In article ,
Roy Smith wrote:

Hamish Reid wrote:
vi, humph. It's ed. Kids these days... :-). Anyone else for teco?

Never did any TECO, but I did use SOS, a close cousin. Used to be
pretty good at the 029 card punch too :-)

SOS? Luxury! I used to enter things with the front panel switches on
the PDP-11

Been there, done that.

Give me a nice G5 Mac any day

Like the 12" PowerBook I'm typing this on? It's actually quite a modest
machine by today's standards: 1 GHz G4 processor, 512 meg ram, 40 gig
disk, wireless ethernet, read/write CD/DVD, blah, blah, blah, but just
try and carry an 11/45 onto the subway and see how far you get.

Hamish Reid wrote:
In article ,
Roy Smith wrote:


Hamish Reid wrote:

vi, humph. It's ed. Kids these days... :-). Anyone else for teco?

Never did any TECO, but I did use SOS, a close cousin. Used to be
pretty good at the 029 card punch too :-)


SOS? Luxury! I used to enter things with the front panel switches on
the PDP-11 (all too true, unfortunately -- I really am *not* nostalgic
for those days. Give me a nice G5 Mac any day).

Hamish (who once had his own vast 2.5Mb RK05 disk)

I still liked the RL02 better! :-)


Matt

Roy Smith wrote:
In article ,
Hamish Reid wrote:


In article ,
Roy Smith wrote:


Hamish Reid wrote:

vi, humph. It's ed. Kids these days... :-). Anyone else for teco?

Never did any TECO, but I did use SOS, a close cousin. Used to be
pretty good at the 029 card punch too :-)

SOS? Luxury! I used to enter things with the front panel switches on
the PDP-11


Been there, done that.


Give me a nice G5 Mac any day


Like the 12" PowerBook I'm typing this on? It's actually quite a modest
machine by today's standards: 1 GHz G4 processor, 512 meg ram, 40 gig
disk, wireless ethernet, read/write CD/DVD, blah, blah, blah, but just
try and carry an 11/45 onto the subway and see how far you get.

Why, who would mug you for an 11/45! :-)

Matt

"Roy Smith" wrote in message
...
Steven P. McNicoll wrote:
Does this possibility make you nervous while the radar is
working?


Nope. The loss of radar will not cause the ATC facility to hit an
aircraft
or terrain.

But it could cause an aircraft to hit an ATC facility. Probably why
you guys are moving all those tracons off the fields and into safe
locations in the middle of nowhere.


LOL! One of the standard jokes around the Center here is that no matter how
bad you screw up, at least the wreckage won't hit the building...

Chip, ZTL

"David Brooks" wrote in message
...
Question for the enroute controllers. You have a spamcan or two, not filed
/G, cleared direct to some fix. You don't care whether they are navigating
with pilotage, a VFR GPS, or a ham sandwich, so long as they are on radar
and don't go too grotesquely out of the way.

Now the radar goes kaplooey, or whatever noise radar makes when it decides
not to be radar any more.

In a Center, it sounds exactly like 100 controllers and engineers all saying
"Oh ****!" at the same time...


How do you get these guys into the no-radar rules - point them at the
nearest navaid? Tell them to join the nearest airway? How do you maintain
separation?


We fake it while we transition into non-radar... Literally. You can't just
point everyone at an airway, and the theory of aiming everyone at the
nearest navaid could be downright dangerous in busy airspace. There are
some super busy ATC sectors that only have one navaid in the whole sector,
and in airspace where the average aircraft is doing six to eight miles a
minute. Not necessarily the safest idea to take people off of random nav
direct destination to put them over the nearest navaid choke point and on
airways as your first move. You transition to non-radar airplane by
airplane as you can and as the strips indicate is safe. No body buys a deal
when the automated system collapses because it is usually impossible to go
immediately from radar (5 miles) to non radar (20 miles) separation. A good
Center controller can put three fast moving aircraft at the same altitude
into an 18 mile ring of airspace using radar separation. Turn that radar
off and now he needs 60 miles for the same three planes by procedure unless
he can establish another non-radar rule to reduce the bubble.


Does this possibility make you nervous while the radar is
working?

Not at all. It happens from time to time that the system goes belly up.
You just hope it happens on your day off. Twice I've seen both the primary
system (NAS) and the back-up system (DARC) go tits-up. That's where the
much-maligned, low-tech, old fashioned flight progress strip comes in handy.
Funny how the pointy headed contractor technocrats keep trying to convince
us that paper strips are "obsolete". The thing is, strips *never* break.

Chip, ZTL

Personally, I like the washing-machine-like RP06. I love the seek tests
that looks like someone put it on the "spin" cycle with a couple of wet
towels off-center.

"ed" if I have to (if things are really screwed up), but use VI
regularly on a headless server. SOS? Now that's a blast from the past.

Matthew S. Whiting wrote:
Hamish Reid wrote:

In article ,
Roy Smith wrote:


Hamish Reid wrote:

vi, humph. It's ed. Kids these days... :-). Anyone else for teco?


Never did any TECO, but I did use SOS, a close cousin. Used to be
pretty good at the 029 card punch too :-)



SOS? Luxury! I used to enter things with the front panel switches on
the PDP-11 (all too true, unfortunately -- I really am *not* nostalgic
for those days. Give me a nice G5 Mac any day).

Hamish (who once had his own vast 2.5Mb RK05 disk)


I still liked the RL02 better! :-)


Matt



--
Remove "2PLANES" to reply.

In article ,
Roy Smith wrote:

In article ,
Hamish Reid wrote:

In article ,
Roy Smith wrote:

Hamish Reid wrote:
vi, humph. It's ed. Kids these days... :-). Anyone else for teco?

Never did any TECO, but I did use SOS, a close cousin. Used to be
pretty good at the 029 card punch too :-)

SOS? Luxury! I used to enter things with the front panel switches on
the PDP-11

Been there, done that.

Give me a nice G5 Mac any day

Like the 12" PowerBook I'm typing this on? It's actually quite a modest
machine by today's standards: 1 GHz G4 processor, 512 meg ram, 40 gig
disk, wireless ethernet, read/write CD/DVD, blah, blah, blah, but just
try and carry an 11/45 onto the subway and see how far you get.

I actually still have the "boot PROM" from an old PDP-11 (not sure
which model) -- it's just a standard Unibus board with 16 diodes and a
bunch of resistors on it. You cut the diode leads for a zero, left 'em
alone (or soldered them back) for a one. It's larger than your
PowerBook...

Hamish

In article ,
Hamish Reid wrote:

In article ,
Roy Smith wrote:

In article ,
Hamish Reid wrote:

In article ,
Roy Smith wrote:

Hamish Reid wrote:
vi, humph. It's ed. Kids these days... :-). Anyone else for teco?

Never did any TECO, but I did use SOS, a close cousin. Used to be
pretty good at the 029 card punch too :-)

SOS? Luxury! I used to enter things with the front panel switches on
the PDP-11

Been there, done that.

Give me a nice G5 Mac any day

Like the 12" PowerBook I'm typing this on? It's actually quite a modest
machine by today's standards: 1 GHz G4 processor, 512 meg ram, 40 gig
disk, wireless ethernet, read/write CD/DVD, blah, blah, blah, but just
try and carry an 11/45 onto the subway and see how far you get.

I actually still have the "boot PROM" from an old PDP-11 (not sure
which model) -- it's just a standard Unibus board with 16 diodes and a
bunch of resistors on it. You cut the diode leads for a zero, left 'em
alone (or soldered them back) for a one. It's larger than your
PowerBook...

Hamish

I'll see your boot prom and raise you a three-board core module from a
pdp-8 that's hanging on my wall.

Somewhere in the closet I've got some CDC-6600 memory. Probably more
interesting from a history of technology point of view, but not as
pretty, so it lives in the closet instead of on the wall :-)