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Meta-comment: These are some of my favorite HN submissions - a direct link to a Wikipedia article with no other context, but one that is apparently interesting

Meta-comment: These are some of my favorite HN submissions - a direct link to a Wikipedia article with no other context, but one that is apparently interesting enough for it to make the front page. I enjoy the process of figuring out just what it was that other people find so fascinating, although it can be a dangerous rabbit hole to go down!

mahathu 5y ago
At the risk of sounding ignorant to anyone with more knowledge of radio technology than myself: I recently purchased a radio-controlled alarm clock and was highly fascinated by how these devices get their time (and date) information accurately encoded through amplitudes and frequencies of radio waves from some radio antenna hundreds of kilometres away. I'm young enough to have grown up with the internet and have a decent understanding of the different network stacks in use today. But radio communications and their various applications is still such a fascinating topic to me!
- zh3 5y ago
  Because of the long wavelength and high powers, the radio waves can be picked up pretty well by small ferrite aerials ('loopsticks'). In most cases, all the receiver has to do is detect the presence/absence of a signal; the transmissions start and stop every second, with variations in the starts and stops encoding the time (mostly it's necessary to receive a full 60s of transmissions, to get 60 bits of data that can be decoded to give the time). It's one of the easiest radio signals to pick up, a cardboard box with a few turns of wire around it and single transistor are enough in most of Europe.
moehm 5y ago
I thought the same, so my quarantine project was a site which collects good Wikipedia articles and their respective discussions posted on HN. To make browsing more structured, it also tags every article with topics, in this case "Germany", "Time" and "Radio Stations". If you find yourself one day without a good Wikipedia article to read, you may want to check it out: https://www.mostdiscussed.com/ https://www.mostdiscussed.com/
- dgritsko 5y ago
  This is really cool, nice work! It's funny, as I was typing my original comment, I was thinking to myself "some kind of aggregator for these links would make a great side project..." - and turns out you were way ahead of me!

mahathu 5y ago

At the risk of sounding ignorant to anyone with more knowledge of radio technology than myself: I recently purchased a radio-controlled alarm clock and was highly fascinated by how these devices get their time (and date) information accurately encoded through amplitudes and frequencies of radio waves from some radio antenna hundreds of kilometres away. I'm young enough to have grown up with the internet and have a decent understanding of the different network stacks in use today. But radio communications and their various applications is still such a fascinating topic to me!

zh3 5y ago
Because of the long wavelength and high powers, the radio waves can be picked up pretty well by small ferrite aerials ('loopsticks'). In most cases, all the receiver has to do is detect the presence/absence of a signal; the transmissions start and stop every second, with variations in the starts and stops encoding the time (mostly it's necessary to receive a full 60s of transmissions, to get 60 bits of data that can be decoded to give the time). It's one of the easiest radio signals to pick up, a cardboard box with a few turns of wire around it and single transistor are enough in most of Europe.

moehm 5y ago

I thought the same, so my quarantine project was a site which collects good Wikipedia articles and their respective discussions posted on HN. To make browsing more structured, it also tags every article with topics, in this case "Germany", "Time" and "Radio Stations". If you find yourself one day without a good Wikipedia article to read, you may want to check it out: https://www.mostdiscussed.com/ https://www.mostdiscussed.com/

dgritsko 5y ago
This is really cool, nice work! It's funny, as I was typing my original comment, I was thinking to myself "some kind of aggregator for these links would make a great side project..." - and turns out you were way ahead of me!