541

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: Shooting stars

« on: October 15, 2018, 03:01:08 PM »

I would propose an interesting experiment.  Take a ship to Antarctica.  My sister and her husband did just that earlier this year so I know that it can be done.  Once there, you could launch a drone.  Use that drone to take pictures of the bottom of the dome mount.   You might crash into the dome, but if you did at, say at 1000 feet, that would be a huge victory for the flat earth society.  If everything was properly documented you might even win the Nobel prize.  You might also 'piss off' the operators of the dome so be careful. 

542

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Amateur radio shows the earth is round

« on: October 15, 2018, 02:36:42 PM »

The word amateur just means 'something done without payment', it doesn't mean that the person 'knows nothing'.  I have been an amateur radio operator for well over 50 years.  When I was in high school I started out playing around with radios as a hobby.  Later, I did become a 'professional' and engaged in 'playing around with radios' for pay.  I would agree that it's difficult to witness the roundness of the earth using HF radio.  The only instance I can think of that I've personally witnessed when I was in high school was hearing Russian stations using Morse code on about 14 MHz.  Usually the sounds would have the normal characteristics of any station in the world.  Occasionally, the sound would have a strong echo along with it.  That echo occurred because the same signal from the Russian station would come from two sources.  The first source was the 'direct short path' route, and the other signal came from the around the earth 'long path' route.  I suppose that the flat earth model could claim that the second signal was from the firmament, but that then opens a whole other 'can of worms'. 

543

Flat Earth Community / Re: Revolution

« on: October 13, 2018, 08:58:19 PM »

No one mentioned the microwave link industry.  A lot of the internet goes intercity via microwave.  Microwave equipment manufacturers claim that you have to factor in the curvature of the earth (among other things) when designing a microwave link.  After all it is a line line of sight technology.  Maybe they are just trying to sell more equipment by claiming that you can only get a certain range between sites if you don't.  It's nice to sell 10 sets of equipment rather than 5 that might only be necessary for a flat earth installation.  You would still have to take natural obstructions into consideration on the flat earth like a tall building that could be in the path.  However, you wouldn't have to consider buying an additional 200 feet (or more) of expensive tower and feedline to overcome that pesky curvature of the earth problem that the sellers of the equipment claim will be needed. Even if you don't build your own tower, and just rent space, most tower owners charge more if you want a higher spot on their tower.  Think cheaper rent.  Could this be a great business opportunity for some young entrepreneur?  Think of the advantage he would have when submitting a competitive bid for a new link. Soon the cellular phone folks will be cranking up the new 5G technology and that should exponentially increase the amount of data flowing around the country. The new 'internet of things (IOT)' will greatly increase the dependency of the 'average Joe' on the internet.  If I were you, I would consider keeping this technology quiet and maybe even look into the patent possibilities.   

544

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Curvature visible to naked eye

« on: October 13, 2018, 02:07:17 PM »

My comment was meant to mean that you wouldn't expect to see a curved horizon no matter which way you looked when nothing else is visible.  The fact that you saw a boat partly hidden by the curvature of the earth is one of the reasons why sailors for many hundreds of years came to the conclusion that the earth is a sphere.  A good marine radar will also confirm what your eyes see.  You have to be very careful about completely trusting your senses.  Don't believe that?  Well, just visit a good magician and he will school you.  All the moisture at the surface of the sea and swell can cause much of the hidden view of a vessel to disappear then reappear over a short period of time.  The fact that you could see more of what was hidden by the earth's curvature the higher you got was the reason for a crow's nest on a mast of the old sailing ships.  A sailor with a telescope on that mast was usually the first one who shouted 'land ho' while approaching the coast.  Additionally some of the 'ole time' sailors would even keep numerous land birds with them.  They would be released if shore was believed to be nearby.  A 'birds eye view' would be even higher than a sailor in the crow's nest.  If a bird suddenly took off in a straight line away from the ship you would have some certainty that the bird is making a 'bee line' towards land.  Sometimes the bird would be mistaken and come back and land on the mast somewhere.  In that case it meant you had to keep sailing in your intended direction some more and keep a close watch on that bird.  Now we have GPS and radar. The radar can usually start to see echos from the coast line long before your eye can.  Those echos will start to appear right out of what used to be empty ocean.  Again another indication of the curved earth.  On the flat earth paradigm it wouldn't matter how high you were.  Sure, you would be able to see farther inland at height but all you really need is to see is the initial vestiges of land.   

545

Flat Earth Projects / Re: Wiki - Moon

« on: October 12, 2018, 07:20:16 PM »

For the last 50 years or so the ham radio community has been engaging in moon bounce activity.  These 'hams' are, of course, just regular people whose hobby happens to be designing, building, and/or operating radios of all kinds.  I have been a ham radio operator myself for well over 50 years.  On of these hobby pursuits has been known as moon bounce.  You can actually bounce a radio signal off the moon and have it return to your receiver or the receiver of another ham operator.  If you believe in the well known universal constant speed of light then using that figure has allowed the ham operators to calculate the moon's approximate distance of about 384,400 Km.  Hams are usually not involved with the government in any way and take no money from anyone.  They do all they do because it's a hobby and fun.  The efforts to conduct the moon bounce activities have been enhanced because the astronauts that visited the moon (if you so choose to believe that) have left behind a reflector that makes the returning signals stronger.  You can believe this or believe that the conspiracy has even penetrated into the private population.  Maybe I can take advantage of this and enhance my retirement benefits with an additional check from some government 'black' agency.  I wonder.... 

546

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Curvature visible to naked eye

« on: October 12, 2018, 06:39:41 PM »

You wouldn't ever expect to see the curvature of the earth under these circumstances.  The earth is so large compared to a man.  At sea, in any direction you care to look, the visible horizon is always at the same distance away.  This is why the horizon will always look like a flat line at sea.  Sure, you can climb a mast and look from there, but you will still see the same thing.  Trust me, I've had to do it countless times.  There are other ways to verify that the earth is a sphere, but looking at the horizon won't get you very far.  Even looking at a another ship coming towards you, or going away from you can be difficult.  The atmosphere can cause the light to bend and deceive your eye.  This is especially evident at sea because off all the moisture in the air for obvious reasons.  A radar is a little better tool for observing the effect of another ship coming up over the horizon of a spherical earth, but even then the microwave energy can also bend a little because it just like light, but of a lower electromagnetic frequency.  You can see some of the effect, for sure, if you carefully observe the target echo on the radar, but it is still difficult to see even if you know exactly what you are looking for.  Even the radar on an aircraft at 42000 feet looking down on the earth would only see a difference in distance between a flat earth target and a spherical earth target of about 0.1%.  There are other ways to verify the spherical earth paradigm.  Experiments have been done for 1000's of years but the results still aren't believed by some.  Let the struggle continue.

547

Flat Earth Community / Re: Revolution

« on: October 12, 2018, 02:40:06 PM »

A good place to start would be to produce an accurate flat earth chart.  We always used the United States WGS 84 and British Admiralty charts for navigation.  The WGS 84 charts are based upon the earth being a oblate spheroid.
The British charts are Mercator projection charts.  Those charts greatly distort the actual shape of the land masses on the earth.  Any course that we follow from China to the United States is always a curved one and we have to steer a different heading every day.  A good flat earth chart would have the shortest distance between any two points on the earth as a perfectly straight line.  Such a chart should be easier to produce as well.  The grid lines of latitude and longitude should be easy to produce on a flat plane.  The well known arctic and antarctic circles would also have to be accurately depicted.  It is well know by the Alaskan people that they are the home of the 'midnight sun'.  A simple trip to a place like Kotzebue, Alaska would confirm that the sun never sets and never rises there at certain times of the year.  Years ago my father and mother flew a small Cessna 182 from Iowa to Katzebue so  I know that it can be done.  Radio communications has changed a lot in the last 30 years as so many people use cell phones for communications.  Most TV reception is received either by cable or satellite dish.  However many companies still heavily depend on microwave communications to transmit data from point to point.  The antennas used are usually on top of tall, expensive, towers. Good line of site communications over long distances by microwaves should be possible with much shorter, and cheaper, towers.  I see a great business opportunity there as well.  If I were 50 years younger I would sure be tempted to investigate a golden opportunity like this.

548

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: Albert Einstein: Father of the Universal Accelerator

« on: October 11, 2018, 08:16:09 PM »

Maybe I'm missing something here.  I do understand how a constant acceleration of 9.81 meters/s/s could make me not like what I see on the scale.  Yes, I believe that gravity is kind of 'spooky' and why Einstein had a lot of problems with it.  When I was in school we were always taught that acceleration was a vector.  You have the magnitude correct, but what about the direction?  If a direction could be determined maybe you could verify using other celestial bodies that the earth is indeed speeding up and heading off in some direction at a constant rate of acceleration.  The other big problem is that my 'back of the envelope' calculations reveled that if the earth started at 0 speed, relative to what, I don't know, and then started a constant acceleration to make us all stay on this earth, we would reach the speed of light in about 1 year.  Of course if you choose to believe Einstein, as you get closer and closer to the speed of light, the amount of energy to keep the constant mass in constant acceleration would rapidly increase towards infinity.  It looks to me like you need some other theory of attraction other than a constant acceleration.  The theory will 'crash and burn' eventually unless you can change the speed of light.   

549

Flat Earth Community / Re: Is it irrational to believe Flat Earth?

« on: October 11, 2018, 04:32:04 PM »

You aren't too far off.  On a large container ship you can be standing between 130 and 150 above the waterline while on the bridge.  Our radar antennas are on a small tower even higher than that.  If we are approaching another container ship coming from the opposite direction it too could have a mast height approaching 200 feet above the water.  You are not reading the loran document correctly.  Loran uses low frequencies that will bounce off the earth's ionosphere, or firmament, if you choose to believe.  Lower frequencies have a much longer 'line of site' range.  As an amateur radio operator years ago I would try to contact Russian stations using morse code.  Sometimes the lower frequency propagation would be such that I would receive one signal from the direct route and another from the same place only from the other direction around the globe.  It was rare to hear this but when you did it was easy to tell.  The echo you heard was very distinctive.  Even as a kid in high school messing with electronics equipment I had indications of the global earth.   The only problem with any lower frequency station is that the physics of the situation limits the speed of any data transmission you wish to use.  To get the gigibit speeds you hear advertised all the time on TV you need microwave frequencies.  Microwaves are limited under most circumstances to line of site (global) distances.  That's why the antennas used are generally on tall tower, and those towers are spaced out in the 40 to 50 mile range. If you can get a tower on top of a hill it can help.  If I were the CIA I would also try and 'tweek' my enemies with mis-information especially if I knew that they could read my documents.  The dumber you can make your enemies think you are, the smarter you become. 

550

Flat Earth Community / Re: RE believers - why are you here?

« on: October 11, 2018, 03:49:12 PM »

My simple experiment also would show why the local business men spent millions more than necessary to build tall radio and TV towers to enhance coverage area.  Why not just save a bunch, build a smaller tower and get the same coverage using the flat earth model?  Even better, use a much smaller transmitter and antenna system, and bounce the signals off the firmament.  Wait,  In the last 50 years none of them have been able to get a system that would work like that.  They all think that the earth is a sphere and the higher that they can make their tower (spending millions) the larger their service area will be.  Every measurement I ever made with a field strength meter shows that.  Please help me figure out how to use a much smaller antenna, use a lower power transmitter, and just bounce the signals off the firmament to all the TVs in the local area.  Additionally, you would be helping the 'global warming' cause because the TV transmitters wouldn't have to use nearly as much electricity.     

551

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: satellite hoax

« on: October 11, 2018, 03:30:05 PM »

I suppose that the US 'authorities' could be colluding with the Chinese, Russians, Japanese, and some other countries to keep all their sham GPS systems under wraps.  What they should do is parole Bernie Madoff and put him to work for the government.  It's a great lie, my hat is off to them.  All the technical data observed perfectly match what I would see if the information was actually coming from an object in orbit.  This occurs even on a moving object like a ship.  Data transit times are perfectly adjusted and always match the expected values.  Maybe I'll have to get back to all the physics teachers in high school, and all my former college engineering professors and tell them that they need to adjust their curriculum.  It really doesn't matter much. I can ignore what I've learned about physics.  We always got the emails we needed and could make the necessary phone calls.  The cargo got hauled and I got a paycheck.  That's all that counts. 

552

Flat Earth Community / Re: Is it irrational to believe Flat Earth?

« on: October 11, 2018, 02:52:05 PM »

Yes, you can do 'line of sight' on a globe.  The only difference is that the observable distances are shorter.  Even on a globe you can see another large ship 15 miles away.  In the navy you are under a 'watchful' eye while on the ship.  When sailors got off the ship they can do all kinds of strange things in foreign ports. Just ask the navy shore patrol.  I'll bet you that the interview was conducted while the guy was off the ship and under those circumstances, can say anything he wants so long as he doesn't disclose something of a classified nature. When I was working on navy ships I wouldn't tell just any 'land lubber' the whole truth.  It's to your advantage to let your enemies believe that you are an idiot when you may not be.  That guy did a good job of that.  Under those circumstances you really can't tell if what the guy said was what he really believed, or if he was just trying to put up a 'smoke screen'.  As far as that goes, I might just be trying to do the same thing myself.  I'm carrying on.

553

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: satellite hoax

« on: October 11, 2018, 01:08:23 PM »

You said some of the loran stations were fixed and some where 'at sea'.  The diagrams you show had all the fixed stations.  We had publications on the ship that showed all that.  What I don't see is the repeater stations located 'at sea'.   I don't think we need to worry too much about hitting anything on an island. We use very accurate satellite based GPS.   

554

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: satellite hoax

« on: October 11, 2018, 04:42:49 AM »

I'm not sure where you are getting your info, but LORAN isn't used too much anymore, at least by the merchant marine.  On my last ship we did have a LORAN C receiver, but it had been shut off for the last 4 years I was aboard.  I have no objections with using LORAN and have done so on other vessels.  The accuracy was good.  GPS made LORAN unpopular and had become the preferred method of navigation.  The main objection to GPS is the ability of an enemy to jam or spoof it.  My understanding is that military ships carry LORAN in case of an attack  on the GPS system in an opening salvo of a major war.  I'm hoping that won't happen.  There are several other ways to transmit and receive data at sea.  I rode herd on 4 different satellite systems.  One gave me full internet and telephone service worldwide.  If you don't believe satellites are real, it really doesn't matter.  Data was coming in and going out, somehow.  That was the important thing.   My guess is that all the LORAN stations you mentioned have secret locations at sea.  If not I would be interested to find out where they are so we can make sure that they are navigational charts.  I wouldn't want to hit a tower with a 1000 foot ship and so any damage.   

555

Flat Earth Community / Re: Is it irrational to believe Flat Earth?

« on: October 11, 2018, 03:51:29 AM »

I did listen to the entire talk radio show.  It was late at night and kind of reminded me of listening to Art Bell telling ghost stories.  All I can say is WOW.  I have no evidence, but would say that the navy guy was quite young. The guy did have all the lingo down pat and was a good talker.  I thought that he just had a cursory knowledge of some of the stuff he was talking about and used just enough of the lingo to make is seem that he was knowledgeable.  The show was quite entertaining for me and I laughed a lot.  All I can say is that I probably was working on radars, flying airplanes, and taking apart gyros long before that guy was born.  In my opinion, some of the stuff he said was just plain BS.  Other stuff had a hint of truth and understanding but still wasn't quite correct.   You are correct in saying that I'm now washed up on the beach but I don't mind being in retirement.  If you did read my previous post you will see that I also signed my own paycheck for 23 years and wasn't letting another bozo tell me what to do.  I sold out and went to sea because it was on my 'bucket list'.

556

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: satellite hoax

« on: October 10, 2018, 05:46:43 PM »

Of course in order to win in court you would have to prove the non existence of the satellites.  Maybe the launch sites for the balloons and drone aircraft could be found.  I can attest that the KVH system does work well and from what I could see, each and every day, sure looked like a geosynchronous satellite.  The logistics and infrastructure required for such trickery should employ thousands. They seem to offer a good high speed internet connection and telephone service in the important shipping lanes in the Pacific Ocean.  Additionally the antenna pointing (azimuth and elevation) data perfectly mimics a satellite in each and every way.  I would really like to find out how they could keep those balloon and/or drones in a fixed spot day after day, month after month, year after year.  My hat is off the KVH.           

557

Flat Earth Community / Re: Is it irrational to believe Flat Earth?

« on: October 10, 2018, 05:15:04 PM »

I came across this website and was originally surprised to see people who still believe the earth is flat.  I did a few quick 'back of the envelope' calculations to try to get a perspective on the situation.  Say the earth was the size of a basketball. To continue on with the comparison, a typical human would have to be the size of a virus.  A real virus is too small to be seen with the typical optical microscope.  If you were that virus your basketball 'earth' would look quite flat in any direction you chose to look. The virus could have been taught a flat earth curriculum as well.  In this hypothetical case it would not be irrational to believe in a flat earth.  Now assume that the virus would get on an airplane and fly to the other side of the basketball 'earth'.  Still the typical virus would experience little to change his perspective.  In both cases the Flat Earth paradigm would perfectly match the senses.  On a practical basis there would be little reason to believe anything else.  Now if that virus started to work for a company whose profits depended on hauling cargo from California to Shanghai but kept ending up in Hong Kong, then it wouldn't be too surprising if that virus might look into finding the reason for the difficulties.  After consulting with some classic virus scientists some navigational instruments were tried that were based on the radical global basketball design.  Even though these designs seemed 'crazy' at the time, they seemed to work and the company thrived.  The virus was promoted to chief engineer and could pay for his new car.  In this second case it would be completely irrational to ever again believe in a Flat Earth again.

558

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: The use of Polaris for celestial navigation proves a round earth.

« on: October 10, 2018, 03:18:37 PM »

Early navigators could use Polaris to determine their latitude and their compass to proceed East or West, providing they were in the Northern Hemisphere.  What the compass didn't tell the navigators was just how far East or West they were, in other words, what was their longitude.  Such information could be critical to a sailor approaching the coast of California on their Easterly journey from China.  You needed a sextant sighting from other stars, a very accurate clock, and an ephemeris to obtain your longitude.  The first global sailors didn't have an accurate clock or ephemeris so just engaged in the procedure of  'running their Easting or Westing down'.  In other words the sailor would put the ship on the known latitude of their intended destination and proceed straight East or West until they found land.  When they were approaching the coast many indications were seen.  Clouds or land birds were some good indicators.  Some would even keep several land birds in a cage and release one if they thought they were near land.  A released land bird would fly up and circle the ship until it saw land and then proceed off in a straight line toward it.  Of course the 'birds eye view' was a bit farther at altitude because of the curvature of the earth and the sailors knew it and took advantage of that fact.   Today we don't need to do any of those things, but I have often seen shore birds on the container ship flying around and getting scraps of stuff laying around on the deck.  After we left the dock some would depart and fly off towards the shore.  Others would stick around too long and be trapped.  Usually they would die do to lack of fresh water.  Even today, modern sailors, and probably birds, believe in a global earth. 

559

Flat Earth Theory / Re: <Side perspective>: FE secret key

« on: October 10, 2018, 04:44:46 AM »

At sea the earth appears to be perfectly flat.  However you see the spherical nature of things just every so often.  A lot depends on the weather.  After spending half my life (literally) at sea for the last 20 years, the most spectacular visual representation of the spherical earth is the view of Mt Fuji in Japan coming out of the open ocean.  Mt. Fuji is about 12000 feet tall. The top is over two miles above sea level.  That means you can see Mt. Fuji 100 miles out at sea.  At that distance the nearest shoreline is about 40 miles away.  The mountain just appears to grow out of the sea with no other land visible.  Now it takes an unusually clear day for you to see that but sometimes we would get lucky in the winter if it was especially cold.  After a couple of weeks at sea with no other view except the ocean a nice sight like that can really make your day.

560

Flat Earth Theory / Re: The Horizon is Always at Eye Level

« on: October 10, 2018, 04:27:34 AM »

Checkout the theory of operation of the sextant.  You will find there that there is a height of eye correction needed in your measurement.  On the last ship I was on I think the height of eye was about 130 feet.  That meant if you were standing on a bridge wing taking a sighting with your sextant you had to compensate the measured angle with the height of eye.  If you were to be on a small sailboat taking a measurement at the identical time as someone else on a large ship you would get a slightly smaller measured angle because you are closer to the level of the horizon on a small sailboat.  What you are actually measuring is just the angle of the navigation body above the horizon and a very specific time.  You need the time very accurately because the earth rotates under the star.  When you have an angle from your sextant and your time to the second you can enter the navigation charts (ephemeris) with this data and determine the zenith point of the body that you just measured.  The zenith point is that point on the earth that is directly below the body.  Once you have that position you can make a mark on your chart and draw a circle with a radius determined by the measured angle.  Now after all that work all you have is a line of position.  Your ship's position should be somewhere on that line.  To get your actual position you will need to repeat the same procedure on another star, planet, or the moon.  After you plot the second body you will have your position where the two lines cross.  You could also 'shoot' the sun and determine it's highest point in the sky by measuring it at local apparent noon.  This will give you some information about your position as well.  Few people do this aboard ship these days except for the maritime academy cadets who need to learn celestial navigation as part of their training.  GPS is the primary means of navigation, but using a sextant can teach you a whole lot about the Sun, moon and stars and they way they behave.  This all assumes that the earth is a sphere. Finally, the Horizon is not at eye level.  On any practical measurements the angle difference is very small but if you don't compensate for your height of eye above the horizon your determined position could be off by several miles.  That's no problem unless you are trying to avoid that spot where the rocks are only a few feet underwater.