i think that business logic goes against your first point. spatially: if you have source of cheap energy and want to make money out of it, instead of making little money (by making fuel) why not make more money? (by setting there energy intensive manufacture) this seems to be current meta, with places like iceland and norway making aluminum and nitrogen fertilizers respectively. this can continue in other places and maybe extended to some other industries.

temporally (because there are also sunny and windy days when regular people won’t consume all energy): this scheme requires cheap electricity, which is needed for cheap hydrogen. this requires massive renewables buildout, which means electricity is cheap for regular people, which means that every gas stove/heater and car will get replaced with electric ones, both residential and maybe perhaps faster for industrial users (more available loans). this means you have to reinforce transmission grid anyway. this also means cheap hydrogen, and because main input to its production is electricity, it makes more sense to use electricity when it’s cheap. this means it’s naturally suited to suck up all excess generation (both daily and seasonal), and also if electricity production is seasonal then so should be price of hydrogen. if price of electricity or hydrogen varies, then some industries can suck it up at greater rates when it’s cheap. i’m thinking here of aluminum smelting (electricity input, daily variation, already done), or ammonia synthesis, or direct reduced iron smelting. i bet there’s more. the point is, maybe you get to avoid storing hydrogen to some degree, because you can effectively store energy in finished or semi-finished goods. you can, for example, make some direct reduced iron and just store it when hydrogen is available, and then smelt it into steel in arc furnace when it’s not. fertilizers are already sold in annual cycle and stored long term, and anyway ammonia is much easier to store than hydrogen. how it plays out will depend on energy/hydrogen costs vs storage costs vs capex for overcapacity costs. all together, i think this means that because of large amount of generation needed, you don’t actually need to store energy this way at all, because when generation is low then electrolyzers turn off, and something will work at all times, probably. when you’re able to do that, you won’t need to

in terms of scale, first your lunch is eaten by EVs of various shapes, then by use of hydrogen for transportation (rocketry fits there), then you have to compete with biofuels (jet engine will take anything that burns without ash and can be pumped). then some of methanol will be used for fuel first, because it just works in engines and fuel cells, and it’s a step before hydrocarbon synthesis. only then synthetic petroleum makes sense, this basically leaves some aviation (that won’t use methanol) and military uses

drones can be also shot down and operators radiolocated very quickly

no, because they have separate comms using completely different bands. esp when you’re talking about military

if you switch to different band, probably nonstandard and unlicensed, then there must be someone else to listen

not everybody heard of gas town within first two weeks

i don’t know if they started it. what i suspect as their contribution is bold claim that electrofuels might be cheaper than regular petrol in the glorious future, while currently they’re much more expensive. (30x?) strict prerequisite for their competitiveness is cheap electricity, but at this point they’re not needed. there was also Porsche owned wind power to methanol plant, and while methanol works as petrol replacement, all the plastics in contact with it must be resistant which is not a given. i guess the main value of it for them is propaganda, they’re not ready for EV manufacture

the point is, as always, to continue doing business as usual (in this case, by inhibiting BEV adoption). that fuel is carbon-neutral but also extraordinarily wasteful. trump’s deal is something called “clean coal”, which isn’t (it suggests carbon capture, but it’s not a thing, they marketed normal emissions control like we have in europe as some unusually green innovation). i think he was also captured by gulf monarchies for the one hour when their representative talked to him

e: wait it still makes smog so checks out

recently learned about electrofuels. it’s a hypothetical rube goldberg scheme where you put enough energy to propel 5-7 EVs in, and pull out enough gasoline to fuel one car. it’s sold as a green technology, because now gasoline is green somehow. this spin ignores that it would require massive buildout of renewables + nuclear, and just by doing this electrification of many energy end uses just makes sense, including transportation. (what the fuck is train??) it’s also sold as a long term storage for renewables, but i struggle to see how scheme that has less than 30% roundtrip efficiency can be considered “storage”. just build more renewables and don’t use them all if needed

i thought they were yet another rationalist offshoot

real. every prediction i got from computational chemists was wrong

like any other, it can be even seen deforming in the last frames

slowmo shot of the last american nuclear test delivered by airdrop, it is spherical, but not because of condensation cloud (that moves away quickly and is transient anyway)

does it mean that libertarians will lose interest in it real soon

there’s a couple of amusing hells inside that job, you either have to deal with construction crews and contractors, jump between power poles including in cold and rain, wrangle with paperwork for permits for new lines, or fix horrors left by someone before you, it can be also dirty and people-facing

in this case it’s hard to tell one from the other

i still think that lots of people damaged by chatbots will stop in their tracks when this vc money burning charade ends, they won’t be able to set up it all locally because chatbots brainrotted them even if it was possible in the first place

If you don’t care about precise size, balls can be made cheaply by dropping drops of metal down tower where they are cooled by air as they fall, and then by water after they solidify. Then just sort by size

Ferrite beads allow you to use old calibration. If you make 1:1 balun just by threading coax through toroid, you can use old calibration as well provided it’s the same coax. Keep in mind minimum bending radius of coax. There are other designs, like using twisted pair on toroid, then you have to include balun in calibration as well (it adds some electrical lenght). If you noticed changes after making air core, this suggests that you do have some common mode current, this will make your measurements sensitive to random changes as rf current flows on the outside of cable where it shouldn’t

I’ve seen people using PE-Al-PE pipe for variables, this gives you layer of good dielectric (polyethylene) (but not as good as air) in dimensionally stable form. One connection is aluminum layer inside the pipe, and for the other you’ll have to figure it out on your own. Retuning might be required anyway within the band (magloops are narrowband) Common way to make variables is to bolt two of them in series, so that no sliding contact is used, moving part is the same for both. This is good for high voltages also but i’m not sure if you’ll need it

they do that anyway, there’s a lot of ground. balls have lowest drag per mass for randomly oriented tumbling object

you can just pour balls in but any other shape has to be arranged one by one

Yeah this lower one looks better but still probably your capacitor value in loop is way off, try to find frequency where impedance is real (purely resistive; green line on smith chart crosses horizontal line in the middle) and work from there, then you’ll know whether to increase or decrease it. what LH0ezVT said makes more way sense than that, i forgot how magloops work. but you still might want variable capacitor

resonance is narrow so you might miss it. there’s a reason why magloops are made with variable capacitors (sometimes retuning is required due to changes in ex. humidity)

how have you made your capacitor anyway?

you can put some ferrite beads on your coax close to feedpoint in order to eliminate common mode currents. better yet, use a balun. this might help you in getting more reproductible results

e: note how swr gets much higher when off resonance with properly calibrated nanovna. when measuring antenna with cable, you’re seeing loss in cable as a degree of lowered swr but only with high swr, because energy is lost in cable when it bounces around and never goes back to nanovna