"And other swivelling methods"

[Dave J.]

The company I work for (Fisher) has been in the long range locating business since the early 1930's. The company has also used similar and unrelated technologies for short range locating. Fisher spun off the marine communications and radio direction finding division approx. 1970, but the underground locating division is alive and well more than 40 years later.

Today I was called to work to sort through a bunch of boxed-up stuff that had been in cold storage for a few years, and decide what to keep and what to throw out. As it turns out, most of the stuff in those boxes was museum items inherited from the defunct Los Banos operation. Geiger counters, acoustic leak detectors, a radio direction finder, some old 2-box units, some old TR "floor polisher" metal detectors, a searchcoil alignment fixture built in 1932, and a complete geophysical transmitter-receiver system with tripod and rotating antenna mount. The geophysical system was vacuum tube from 1956, but similar things date back decades earlier.

* * * * * * * *

The pity of LRL hobbyist experimentation is that the hobbyists have made the mistake of believing that commercial L-rod LRL "treasure finders" are technological apparatus that a hobbyist could perhaps replicate, when in fact such commercial stuff is fraudulent. It is not based on any kind of scientific principle other than the principle of deceiving gullibillies. Real electronic VLF-LF locating apparatus has meanwhile been around for about a century (predating even Fisher) and the underlying science is not a secret.

If someone either has no knowledge of the underlying science, or knows it but wants to argue with the Universe over its way of doing things, then fairy tales are what you get. With a sufficiently elaborate alabi system, the game of trying to defeat the Universe can go on until the coffin puts an end to it, such is the fate of mortals.

--Dave J.