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Thread: Pigs don't fly but ships do!

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    LSemmens
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    Default Pigs don't fly but ships do!

    I'm out of my mind, but feel free to leave a message...

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    This brings back memories from childhood. I was born not far from where that photo was taken. As a child in the late 1940s I saw something similar from a place near there. I had also heard on the wireless mention of a flying boat base in Cornwall. In my muddled thinking as a child I thought this is what they were talking about.

    It wasn't till we moved to Brisbane a couple of years later and I actually saw a flying boat at Redland Bay did I realise I'd got it all wrong.

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    There was a picture of a floating garbage bin a while back.It was an optical illusion.It was a wet spot on the footpath.
    Looked the same.

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    Pigs don't fly but ships do!
    Well, if a pig were located in that spot behind the inversion weather it would be seen 'flying' like that too

    ... and before anybody comes with another myth, pigs can actually swim quite well.

    In Europe I experienced a lot of inversion weather but never noticed such mirages. Probably because of smog and not living near a coast where there is a wide open view of things.
    I did notice that it extended the range of FM radio, picking up stations hundreds of km away.
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    This Fata Morgana just looked too perfect and I suspected a bit of photo editing. Not that they don't occur but usually you see a bit of atmospheric distortion etc.
    The second photo with it in a different position is more convincing than a single picture.

    There are some more common inversions around. Min min lights are a good example of an inversion. Though the distortion makes them look like they are moving.
    There are also a lot of optical inversions of the East coast of Australia, especially when there is warm water and cool air. Usually late April.
    You will see ships above the horizon but the effect is usually small.

    Mostly I notice radio inversions. There is a really good one that appears on weather radar over Barrington Tops each year.
    Often it looks like a big patch of rain over Gloucester to Nowendoc when it's clear weather and a big High Pressure system is present.

    I'm still trying to work out what is going on with the Breewarina weather radar. It looks like it has been having issues with inversions and reflections since it went into service.

    I'm assuming they are real inversions as I would have thought it unlikely they'd not set the radar up properly and have artifacts in the antenna system.
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    Quote Originally Posted by trash View Post
    TI'm still trying to work out what is going on with the Breewarina weather radar. It looks like it has been having issues with inversions and reflections since it went into service.
    This reminds me of a job we were called into assist back in the early70s. Telecom were having a problem with their 4GHz microwave system that ran from Townsville to Mt Isa via many repeaters.

    At certain times of the year between around midnight and around 1:00am the system was failing intermittently between a couple of repeaters around Julia Creek. The land was dead flat and the repeaters were spaced about 40km apart with 60m towers.

    Both space and frequency diversion was employed on the multi channel telephony system. Despite this, the signal was failing completely many times per minute, during the failure times.

    After considerable investigation firstly by the telecom techs and later by us, equipment faults were eliminated and temperature inversions with ducting was found to be the cause. We called in the meteorologists and assisted in setting up monitoring equipment on the towers.

    The washup was that the cause of these inversions was determined to be the warm moist sea breeze traveling down from the Gulf of Carpentaria 360km to the north. It took 6 or 7 hours to get there on the cool winter nights when there was no wind. As the boundaries of the inversion layer moved up and down, the microwave signal was trapped and ducted away and was missing the receiving dishes, both the main and diversity.

    We recommended spacing the diversity antennas further apart and suggested changes to the diversity receivers so that the two receivers on each path, main and diversity each shared the one local oscillator. This was to eliminate one of the effects we had observed, a baseband DC shift which was occurring each time a switchover occurred.

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    I used to monitor that link from the Darwin End! Always around dusk we'd get the same phone call from the card centre in Sydney telling us that their system was down. It was always the same answer. "It's dusk and when the inversion layers settle, so will the microwave link across the Barkly." Again, at 11pm every night they'd ask us to send a tech out to Daly Waters to check their eftpos machine with our reply "They've turned their gen set off for the night, it'll be back up at 0600"
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    Yep. I worked on a few of the Microwave links in the NT too. Though the ones that we had multipath fading with were not because of inversions but because of the tides.
    (Though inversions were common too) some of the links didn't had four diversity antennas.
    The other strange one that used to occur was faraday rotation on 950MHz and 1.5GHz links. I've never seen one with polarity diversity. I guess the scax were just too shitty to care about. Just wait 15 minutes and it'll fade back in
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    OK... I have an update for this one.
    It's not an inversion, it's just a simple optical illusion with a bit of photo editing.

    Yes I am an agent of Satan, but my duties are largely ceremonial.

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