People who don't wish me any specific harm

The latest smoke detector to howl pointlessly into the night sends out 11.3V DC onto the signal pin when triggered but running off batteries. I suspect that’s 12V nominal, and it probably delivers 12V when operating on AC power.

Most importantly, it’s not like… 500mv. Or AC. Or complicated. It’s plain, simple DC.

When acting as a non-reporting satellite node, it triggers when receiving 4V DC on the signal pin (4.0 exactly), and that voltage is polarity sensitive. -4V doesn’t trigger the alarm.

Checking for DC on the signal line, I get functionally nothing. 20ma DC at most, and even that’s something I’m picking up out of noise floor shift rather than direct measurement.

(Yes, I checked for AC as well. Still functionally nothing.)

My thought was that if the signal line was somehow floating in whole number volts (for whatever reason) than maybe somehow the right RF noise could kick it over.

The problem with that is that I can now also confirm that non-detecting units go off exactly as long as a detecting device keeps saying it’s detecting by putting voltage on the signal line. If that voltage goes away, so do the satellite alarms – and immediately.

And that’s not what happens. We have to manually intervene and shut the alarms off ourselves.

The reason I paid meaningfully more than baseline for this particular set is that they report exactly which detector went off and why. That way, if it were the signal line somehow triggering the alarms, none of them would claim to be the originating unit; they’d all report it came from the signal backbone.

But they don’t. There’s always a unit claiming to be the active detector and it’s always smoke (and there is never actually smoke), and none of them shut up until we shut off that unit, which sometimes seems to require removing it from power.

So today’s afternoon check was basically just another way of confirming what we already knew, and I guess I’ve done that now, but…

All that does is get us right back to where we started, which is, “we have alarm after alarm after alarm of different makes, methods (ionisation, photodetector), and models which just in this house are determined to go off randomly, usually but not always at night, for absolutely no detectable fucking reason, and then pass self-test just fine afterwards.”

And no, regular cleaning – even weekly cleaning – does not help. I do all the things. None of it stops the problem.

If you’re new to this adventure, I have heard this exact same story from many other people at this point – though nobody I’ve talked to has said they’ve literally taken metres to the signal wires to verify that way.

Regardless, I know it is not just us.

What I’ve been told from others who deal with this is to RMA individual units that trigger randomly one at a time until you end up with a set that doesn’t. And I guess that’s what I’m gonna do, but

holy shit, team

holy shit

this is the opposite of fire safety

this is the opposite of how anything like this should ever work, I mean

what if all the RMAs are getting you are a set that won’t go off even when they should?

but whelp

guess i’m gonna find out

’cause this sure ain’t workin’.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Make sure people know: DONALD TRUMP says airports will stay fucked until Democrats agree to vote for the Women’s Disenfranchisement (“save”) Act.

Everybody who complains about airports, everyone who complaints about gas prices, anyone who complains about anything: Donald Trump HIMSELF will not let it get fixed UNTIL 21 MILLION WOMEN are disenfranchised through his mass disenfranchisement act.

I don’t give a fuck if Fox says it’s not like that, it fucking well is. “RealID” doesn’t count. Name change documents don’t count. Marriage certificates don’t count. Changed your name when you got married? Well, if you didn’t also change your birth certificate or spend a couple of hundred dollars and many hours to get a passport, NO VOTING FOR YOU, BITCH.

Which is exactly how they want it. Way too much of “centrist” media is reporting this as a general effect, but it’s not. It’s targeting women (and trans people) and that’s how they want it, because they don’t want women to vote at all, and they’ve said so a lot since 2020. In the open. In words.

So they need to strap in and hold steady, because we absolutely cannot let that happen.

Donald Trump and the entire Republican Party want only elections if they are guaranteed to win.

Anybody whinges about airports, anybody complaints about gas, remind them: that’s what Donald Trump wants, because he wants to say in power forever.

#fascism #politics #uspol #uspolitics

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

So I’ve been getting my radio game back together, since in adventurous times – particularly times with the possibility of particularly severe emergencies and communications troubles – it’s very good to have access to and practice with backup comms that will work under almost all circumstances.

I’ve also been brushing up on my Amateur radio skills, tho’ really in both cases this comes down to “buying and/or making antennas,” which has meant a bit of both, but particularly making antennas.

I feel like I’ve got the GMRS kit into decent nick. I need to make a longer-term version of the attic antenna rig; while I can do about as well in the highest front window, that setup is somewhat inconvenient and has to be taken down every day. So if I can just have something just set up full time somewhere out of the way, that’d obviously be much better. I’ve got it all worked out at this point, too; all I really need is cable. And to build a functional duplicate of my latest GMRS antenna.

There’s been a bit of a learning curve but at this point I can reach the West Seattle repeater on 15, the Beacon Hill on 16, the Queen Anne on 18 – hugely important, the busiest repeater, an unknown repeater on 19, the Maple Leaf repeater on 20, and the Snohomish repeater on 22. I can also occasionally reach the Redmond repeater on 17, but that’s kind of a best-conditions ping and I don’t know how useful it’d actually be given how weak my signal must be even when it does get picked up.

Also, I’ve gone ahead and coded up North Bend on 21, just to have it there even though there’s no way in hell I’ll ever reach it from here.

Meanwhile, over on the Amateur bands, the new 70cm/2m antenna – this one, I bought – has made a huge difference and really broken me out of my UHF Hole. I’ve been adding Amateur repeaters as I verify I can reach them, and I even managed to get the local 1.25m relay into parrot mode so I know my voice is audible for sure now.

So far tho’ GMRS is much more active, probably because it’s much easier and because the license doesn’t require a test. You can just buy one for $35 and it’s good for 10 years. And it works with FRS which requires no license at all.

It’s also far more limited – no HF component at all, just UHF, just FM, no arbitrary frequencies, just channels and repeaters – but low barrier to entry is most definitely a good thing here.

I’ve got more posts I want to get caught up on but tonight I just wanted to get something – anything, really – out there to celebrate digging my way out of this RF hole which is where I live. So, uh…

RADYA! Yeah! xD

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.