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jacober_calc
And some good news to report.
Last Friday both my DM15c from Swiss Micros and a Nagoya 16 inch whip VHF/UHF antenna were delivered to my home. The calculator, as noted in my earlier post, was meant to be a Christmas present and was ordered from Switzerland weeks before, but was held up somewhere with Canada Post and came about 2/3rds in January.
The antenna is a highly suggested addition to my Baofeng 5RM handheld radio that I have been using to get familiar with traffic and repeaters in my local area. The antenna itself is wonderful and works very well. Now I am slowly working on my amateur radio license so that I can engage in some of the interesting nets that happen regularly. So far I've been tracking a Canada-wide net that takes place across a series of repeaters every weekday morning at 8 am in addition to a local net with repeaters all across the island. These nets are great because people give a short blurb about what they are up to for the day or what the weather is like where they are which is particularly interesting, even just to listen to. Another one that I've found and have enjoyed being around to listen to each evening is the Insomnia Net which takes place on a network spanning the whole continent called the WIN system. They do trivia starting at 10pm every single day of the year and people from all around Canada and mostly the United States check in and share answers. There are regulars that are fun to listen to and wait for checking in and newcomers every night. I can't wait to be a newcomer myself and check in whenever I am available.
The calculator is truly wonderful. It is a credit card sized version of the hugely popular HP15C RPN advanced-scientific calculator. It is not as thin as a credit card, you cannot fit it into a wallet and no would you want to really. The height and width of the device is credit card sized, roughly the width of the LCD screen from the original device. It has very nice upgrades include a new, much faster processor that emulates the old NUT processor of the HP device. You can also choose two different speeds for this processor to extend battery life when not doing intensive calculations. The LCD screen is a very large and clear dot-matrix display which several font options designed by the Swiss Micros team.
Even more wonderful is a two-line display option that shows two of the four RPN stack registers on the display at all times. This is great because you can see the two figures being manipulated by an operand and I like to use the two-lines for answers that programs produce to provide more context. For example, for my g-force braking program, the user can input speed in km/h and the desire g-force experienced by passengers and the program produces the time in seconds for the brake event in the y-register and the braking event distance in m in the x-register. Both items are useful for learning and planning and both can be displayed upfront and clearly in a two-line display.
The calculator also has a library of units for conversions and common constants used across several scientific disciplines. This is an exceedingly nice feature packed into such a small device. Which brings me to the whole point. I already own a DM32 RPN calculator that has an even more beautiful and large four-line display and a way more processor with way more precision for intense mathematical calculations in the palm of one's hand. But the DM32 is not really meant for the field, not for me at least. It it a home device or an office device but not an in the bus, on the road, out and about kind of device. But the very small DM15c is such a device. The perfect everyday carry that packs a very powerful punch.
And that's all about that I have by way of good news for the moment.
Last Friday both my DM15c from Swiss Micros and a Nagoya 16 inch whip VHF/UHF antenna were delivered to my home. The calculator, as noted in my earlier post, was meant to be a Christmas present and was ordered from Switzerland weeks before, but was held up somewhere with Canada Post and came about 2/3rds in January.
The antenna is a highly suggested addition to my Baofeng 5RM handheld radio that I have been using to get familiar with traffic and repeaters in my local area. The antenna itself is wonderful and works very well. Now I am slowly working on my amateur radio license so that I can engage in some of the interesting nets that happen regularly. So far I've been tracking a Canada-wide net that takes place across a series of repeaters every weekday morning at 8 am in addition to a local net with repeaters all across the island. These nets are great because people give a short blurb about what they are up to for the day or what the weather is like where they are which is particularly interesting, even just to listen to. Another one that I've found and have enjoyed being around to listen to each evening is the Insomnia Net which takes place on a network spanning the whole continent called the WIN system. They do trivia starting at 10pm every single day of the year and people from all around Canada and mostly the United States check in and share answers. There are regulars that are fun to listen to and wait for checking in and newcomers every night. I can't wait to be a newcomer myself and check in whenever I am available.
The calculator is truly wonderful. It is a credit card sized version of the hugely popular HP15C RPN advanced-scientific calculator. It is not as thin as a credit card, you cannot fit it into a wallet and no would you want to really. The height and width of the device is credit card sized, roughly the width of the LCD screen from the original device. It has very nice upgrades include a new, much faster processor that emulates the old NUT processor of the HP device. You can also choose two different speeds for this processor to extend battery life when not doing intensive calculations. The LCD screen is a very large and clear dot-matrix display which several font options designed by the Swiss Micros team.
Even more wonderful is a two-line display option that shows two of the four RPN stack registers on the display at all times. This is great because you can see the two figures being manipulated by an operand and I like to use the two-lines for answers that programs produce to provide more context. For example, for my g-force braking program, the user can input speed in km/h and the desire g-force experienced by passengers and the program produces the time in seconds for the brake event in the y-register and the braking event distance in m in the x-register. Both items are useful for learning and planning and both can be displayed upfront and clearly in a two-line display.
The calculator also has a library of units for conversions and common constants used across several scientific disciplines. This is an exceedingly nice feature packed into such a small device. Which brings me to the whole point. I already own a DM32 RPN calculator that has an even more beautiful and large four-line display and a way more processor with way more precision for intense mathematical calculations in the palm of one's hand. But the DM32 is not really meant for the field, not for me at least. It it a home device or an office device but not an in the bus, on the road, out and about kind of device. But the very small DM15c is such a device. The perfect everyday carry that packs a very powerful punch.
And that's all about that I have by way of good news for the moment.
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