Midwinter calling, day 13

Frustrations

As I start working on building a useful radio and measuring tools, it quickly becomes a wooden box with brass plate as a shield around radio parts to make it a little easier with all the insulation and grounding. Contacts are recessed in the wooden box and glued or screwed in with another wooden plate that blocks, just to keep it in place for recurring use, but so the forces for plugging in / out doesn't load the glue joint. I really want to send someone to Borgarsandr to pick up what Ruskva should have already done, but I expect to upgrade with those components in the future.

Since the Wouxun radio and ring flash are already disassembled, I also use their plastic housing to make insulators, including the radio's battery housing whose inside is thin and flat. I can make quite a few plastic parts if I carefully consider every use before cutting, but it is tediously frustrating work, which is also an interesting challenge. I have to repeat the principle of how I made IUDs and cast certain plastic parts, even though I can simplify and fuse plastic into a lump, I then modify and keep the plastic residues I carve away or drill out. A clear advantage is that its probably the same basic black ABS plastic in most of it. And another is that the few black plastic pieces together with the wooden box and the shiny brass will be quite nice. Black ink lettering will add to that.

Both radio parts, transmitter and receiver, is built into the same wooden box to minimize contacts and keep down unnecessary duplications of electrical components. Only one external connection for battery. Just one On-Off switch. Just one small surface-mounted blue LED to shows that the radio is on. Just a single oscillator etc. A single switch to switch between transmitting or receiving, which in addition to switching what the antenna is connected to also changes how a pair of transistors are electronically connected to save important transistors. Some functions like squelch, mic gain or speaker amplification are only needed for transmission or receiving, but transistors in important and sensitive RF sections shouldn't be switched since the wiring to the switch will become an issue. Transistors for audio signals are quite easy. Diode or relay switching of the antenna is just unnecessarily complex, unnecessary components and unnecessary current. In the future relay switching might be used, but not right now.

Another advantage of building everything in the same box and the electrical design I have chosen, is that I can use the same oscillator for both the transmitter and receiver. Sure, the exact frequency for transmit and receiver needs to change, but that is done with an extra trim capacitor. So just a single frequency dial on the front, plus a small fine-tuning dial that normally should be in the zero position.

Bodil is again a helpful angel and just like to be involved in the project, but on the condition that I won't give her anything for it. I've already given her so much and she likes the idea that it is her craft that protects and contains the most advanced sejd in the world. I understand that reasoning, and it also seems that the work with first the chess board, then hearing protection, the miniatures etc, the junction box symbols and the lamps has awoken her appreciation of doing crafts. The joy of doing something. Since we settled here, she's done quite a bit of small intricate work and wooden boxes. She likes to make good wooden knobs for me, and when I come and ask what is the easiest way to do something on the wooden boxes, she immediately offers to carve out holes, engraves text, symbols and scales and says that she really likes to do it, and don't mind seeing it as part of her service. I've done and still do so much for them, like the games, the light, etc. I just thank her and let Bodil accompany me in my workshop when she wants to work with it, and she likes the scroll saw and is really looking forward to the table router.

Ciara and Caeilia are wonderful and make more durable insulated cables for me by braiding or twisting thin purchased copper wire so it becomes more flexible as there are already lots of curves on the wire, and they insulate the wires from each other by wrapping paper with glue or braiding cloth and threads in a pattern so that the copper wire has a 'casing' that protects and prevents the wires from making electrical contact with each other or being touched. Some protection is needed, but the requirement is low as it is low voltage DC or Audio. Different colored thread, cloth and paper even makes it easy to follow which wire is which. Since I can forget about future plastic-insulated wires, I make sure to add a circular weaving machine for small diameter cable to my list of important future projects.

Everything, including most of the components, is handmade, so I have to make an adapted frequency scale in engraved brass for each radio with room for future extra scales. I have to assume there might be drifting frequencies depending on temperature and humidity as well. However, it should be a minor problem, and these radios should mostly be used indoors in a more or less controlled environment, and won't have much internal heat. I'm a little more worried about the antenna when it's raining or snowing, as well as static charging, so I'll need to add a high ohm grounding of the antenna to prevent static charging, and for safety's sake it will include a spark gap as well.

It's a slow frustration to just do something as simple as a connection for a morse key. Building the morse key from brass and wood works well - there is so much brass in my constructions - but then I need to connect it. With screw terminals and other things that must be manufactured, or plugs and jacks. Every time. Where the signal conductor must be isolated from the brass screen. Every time. Which must be attached to the box with something, and minimize problems with gaps, looseness or oxidations. I miss being able to pull out a sorting box and have a selection of buttons and switches, or pick between the boxes with different connectors.

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I think this is the first time that Kari is interested in why something works. Not just that it does. She really wants to know 'how in Freya's name' a little brass and copper can make a voice be heard from a distance. It makes me believe that Iselin would really want to be a part of this, and it hurts a little when I think about how sad Iselin will probably be that she missed all this. But I promise Kari that if she want she - and very likely Iselin - will learn more about electricity, electronics and radio. There will be more constructions, and when I have more experience of problems and constructions here, they will be able to help and I can provide better information. In the future I will let them build a simple diode / crystal radio which they know is 100% Alfheimr. By their own hands.

I will also need someone to help me perform tests at a distance, and Kari now understands that these radios are not only meant to work from one end of the house to the next, or a few hundred meters, but a bit of the distances I hope to reach. That I hope to reach the end of the world she's just heard rumors about. That I hope to be able to send a message to someone, maybe be able to have a conversation, via two boxes, to the end of the world. Where it takes weeks or more by boat, with as she sees it; a few funny shaped pieces of copper and brass in a wooden box. Mind. Blown.

I confirm to Kari that this is extremely high technology compared to the life here, but it can evolve to something much more incredible. I will not be able to do that as it is incredibly advanced, but in Midgård we can not just talk from one end of the world to the other. I show the mobile phone, which she has seen many times but mostly heard music from or seen pictures from, pretty much like my digital compact camera. She knows that all three of us humans from Midgård had one each, and that we were out hiking in the mountains. It's one of the few things we all really had one each of.

I explain that it requires huge amounts - really insane amounts of advanced technology and constructions - but in Midgård, two people with such mobiles can talk to each other, almost anywhere in the world, even between many ships in the middle of the oceans. Immediately. See each other on its screens, live video instead of just a camera that saves a picture. Can hold up and show what each party sees and show it while we talk. Take a picture that others can see. And it is common technology we take for granted to work. In large parts of our world, almost every person has one in their pocket every day. It is not a luxury, it is basically needed for everyday life, and it does not have to cost more than a daily wage for the simplest mobiles in the richer countries, but it of course depends on how much a daily wage is. And if you want a fancier model.

There are millions of conversations between people all the time, who may be in the same house or in another country. Or on the other side of the world. Had this been Midgård, I would have expected to be able to call Iselin whenever I wanted, or anyone in the crew. I would be able to call Digraldi in Borgarsandr and he could sends a picture of how the work is going, och call me to ask a question about a job for me. We can even quickly give orders to a bank that keeps our silver to transfer it to another person in another bank, and it happens right away. So I could call the Jeweller and talk about what I want. He can send pictures I can look at, choose which one I want, pay and he sends someone with it to me already the same day - without me having to even leave my chair. We have fast enough transports that it could have been delivered here in a couple of hours, otherwise I would have expected it to arrive a few days later by normal mail. I can do the same to most countries in the world, and the package will arrive a few weeks later. I've ordered plenty of stuff from the other side of the world, and actually been annoyed that it took more than a month.

Kari just sits and stares at me, the mobile phone in her hand, and in the empty air in front of her. After a while, she asks if Iselin knows about this. I nod and says she knows more than that. Much more than that. Kari wants to know more. Know more about Midgård. So I warn that it will totally change her worldview, how she sees this world and the environment, and the world will never be the same again, and maybe she should wait until Iselin is back and can talk to her. But Kari wants to know. She no longer wants to be a slave in the countryside who only cares about her local area and takes the day as it comes, but a wise traveller who have seen the world. Understands the world. Understands it better than any Elf except Iselin.

I bring Kari to the library and roll out the map that shows where we are. Where she went to buy Tom's things. Where Iselin is now. Where Skiringsalr is located. She has seen it many times before and now understands that the map describes the world. So I explain more. When Kari better understands the map and the scale, and why Asta really became fascinated by them, I show her the globe. Like so many others, Kari has not really thought about it: It is a funny paper globe with a lines on it like a work of art with some use she has not yet understood - which me and Iselin built and Asta focused on copying for herself. Sure, Asta sat staring at the Globe, but Kari didn't really think about it. Why would she? Or she has deliberately avoided thinking about it. I show how the big maps, which describes such a large part of Kari's world with places so far away, is but a tiny place on the globe, and that this is a real map of the world she lives on.

The world she's always lived on.