Migration Paths

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Kellemora
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Re: Migration Paths

Post by Kellemora »

About the only thing I ever had super old was an IBM Journalizing and Posting Machine. Basically a keypunch machine that connected a mainframe. They had replaced it with something newer and tossed out that old thing and I nabbed it to play with. Got a lot of neat parts out of it when I tore it apart.

When I was learning to fly, I learned the homing beacon frequency on several OMNI's, that way I was sure to find my way back home before I ran out of gas, hi hi.

Near one of them was a large area fenced in with chain tall chain link and razor wire on top. Inside on a short fat tower were three satellite dishes that constantly turned also. They could have been Civil Defense also, but we thought they were for Weather spotting. The signs on the gate gave no indication of what they were for or who owned them.

I picked up a cheap Taylor electronic Indoor/Outdoor Digital Thermometer.
Even with the outdoor transmitter sitting right next to the display unit, it has been showing 20 degrees difference the entire week since I bought it.
I have a different brand down at the house and it is now about 8 years old and has always been dead on.
I also have an Accurite that the transmitter was a couple of degrees off too. But at least it was consistent.
Not like the Taylor that varies widely on what temp the remote says it is. It was on sale for 8.88, I see why now, hi hi.
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yogi
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Re: Migration Paths

Post by yogi »

The weather station I have talked about in the past can be calibrated. Not only can the temperature be adjusted but also the rainfall amount. Not sure about the humidity. The problem with doing those adjustments is that I don't have any accurate way to measure the temperature inside the weather station box to see how accurate the sensor is. I realize the outside temp, the surface temp, and the ambient air in a shaded box are all different, so I don't bother with calibration. It's more or less meaningless anyway. LOL

My clever phone has an audio meter. Actually, I had three of them installed at one time. The readings of two were very close to each other and the third one was off by about 10db. That off reading actually seemed more correct, but there too I have no standard to which I could calibrate the apps. I would really like the audiometer to be accurate if possible.
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Kellemora
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Re: Migration Paths

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Most police cars carry an audio meter, or used to.

We had a problem back home with music so loud after 10 pm it vibrated our living room windows.
The police would check the audio level up on Olive Blvd by TGIFriday's and they were well under the loudness for after 10 pm on a weekend night. However, when he came down to our street, he would get readings more than double of what he got right next to the band.

It had to do with the shape of the banks under building drive through area. It acted like a megaphone pointed right at our house.
If the cop drove past our house by about 100 feet in either direction, you could hardly hear the band.
We used to not hear it either, until the serpentine wall between our street and the bank fell down.
They were very lax at putting it back up. Took over a year, but once it was back up, no more rattling windows, hi hi.
While the wall was down, we could clearly hear folks talking from their car window to the drive up teller.
Once the bank learned how plain we could hear them, it must have stirred them to put the wall back up PDQ, hi hi.
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yogi
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Re: Migration Paths

Post by yogi »

One of the more amazing phenomena I discovered here in O'Fallon is the ability of sound to travel well over open ground. They are building a new subdivision about a quarter mile down our street and I can clearly hear individual voices when the rest of the environment is quiet. I'd be able to discern what they were saying if I had better ears. There is only open street and very few trees between me and the construction. Never heard that kind of thing back in Chicago. Then again, I lived near O'Hare International. Talk about sound pollution.

That megaphone effect is truly amazing. I know it exists but you are the first person I've heard to be a victim of it.
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Kellemora
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Re: Migration Paths

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Sound can travel down a road or river quite easily. Never buy a house at the end of where a road ends, aka a cul-de-sac, for a couple of reasons. One is sound, the other is cars ending up going into your garage, often through the garage door, hi hi.

There are several places in Missouri where the megaphone effect is heard. Most of them are in front of grottos. Caves that only go back a about 10 to 30 feet. And places along the highway where they carved through a mountain to install the roadway.
Down by Creve Coeur Lake off Marina Road, if you go over to the north parking lot, and line yourself up with the waterfall across the lake, you can hear people sitting on the rocks talking, almost as clearly as if they were sitting next to you.

I lived at 12341 Promenade Lane. The bank was built at the corner of Olive Boulevard and Tempo, in what used to be our subdivision owned buffer zone, until the trustees sold it out from under us. You might be able to Google Map it?
The back of the bank is like a Diamond shape with the point facing my old house. The drive-up window is under the bank, so the building itself sticks out over the drive-up area, which is covered by the banks upper floors.
The land on both sides of the bank slope downhill from Olive down to our subdivision.
TGIFridays was across Olive Boulevard in line with the Tempo subdivision entrance.
After they build the building on the west side of Tempo at Olive, the sound level went up even more, when the band was playing over at TGIFridays.
I couldn't but my neighbor to the west who's house sat at an angle, he could sometimes hear folks talking while standing in the entrance to Dierbergs over two blocks away. It didn't happen all the time, and apparently had to do if there were no cars parked in certain places. Oh, and only in the winter when there were no leaves on the trees.

A little further down Olive going west was a building with a pink neon stripe around it at the roof level.
You could not see the building from our house, but on a rainy night besides seeing the pink glow in the air, it caused a pink line to appear on the parking lot behind the Baptist Church which could be seen from our house.
Lot of strange things around if you're lucky enough to spot them.
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yogi
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Re: Migration Paths

Post by yogi »

Image

I don't know what I was expecting, but that old house is a lot closer to the bank than I had imagined it to be. Aside from keeping the customer conversations out of your front yard, that barrier wall seems pretty useless too. The people I'm hearing would be three or four times that distance farther away. I'm at 1125 and the chattering I hear is from those houses on the left by the new construction.

Image
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Kellemora
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Re: Migration Paths

Post by Kellemora »

As you can see, my house was the only one facing Promenade Lane in my block.
And the angle of the building, combined with that little wing-wall on the right, blasted every noise directly at my house.
When that wall wasn't there, it was so loud on Friday nights, you couldn't hear yourself think.
Where that bank sits used to be a heavily wooded common ground buffer between Olive Blvd and our subdivision.

Looks like you have a megaphone affect in front of your house too, from the loop area.
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yogi
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Re: Migration Paths

Post by yogi »

To be honest I don't think the sound from that cul de sac across from me has any sound amplification effect. Kids play in that area all the time and to my ears their sounds seem pretty normal. Since I can also hear sounds from down the road I was a bit surprised that it was so loud over such a distance. I'm not sure it's being amplified either. It just gets quiet around here at times and it seems as if anybody within eyesight can be heard. The interesting thing is that line in back of those houses across from me is an elevated ridge. It's only about a 6-7 foot rise, but I'd think that would act as a megaphone. It doesn't, and perhaps the reason is that it's not a perpendicular wall as is the bank walls.
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Kellemora
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Re: Migration Paths

Post by Kellemora »

There used to be a small cave out by Sullivan, Missouri until they widened the highway.
It was small, less than 20 feet high at the opening, and tapered to nothing in only about 50 feet.
It was also on private property at the time, so very few went to it. Besides in was fairly non-descript anyhow.
At least until a couple of kids found out that if they played a radio in the very back of the cave, it could be heard over a mile away. Once that was discovered, the cave then became a nuisance to the folks who lived in the sound path.
They were sure glad when the highway chopped through it, hi hi.
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