The Macbeth Color Checker is a tool for serious photographers and film developers.  It provides a set of known reference colors which can be used as a setup and adjustment standard in film and video production.

This is one of the most frequently visited pages on this web site.  It is a big bunch of technical links without a lot of fanfare or decoration.  Lots of material about GPS, time and frequency, benchmarks and other standards, antennas, Morse Code, and other cool technical topics.  This page is sure to expand rapidly, which is both the cause and the effect of being written a no frills format.

Years ago, the Emergency Broadcast System relied upon this list of passwords to authenticate a national emergency warning.  Broadcast historians, as well as those of you who study the Cold War and Civil Defense, might find this interesting.  Recently expanded to include other documents about the EBS system.

This is a page about an obscure FCC memorandum about the construction and testing of Beverage antennas for reception of distant AM radio stations.

On this page I describe the technique I used to drive a long string of series-connected super-bright LEDs.  The use of a current limiter makes the system much more resistant to failure.

Your monitor may be able to display millions of colors, but there is a relatively small set of 216 colors which are accurately reproduced on any web browser.  These are sometimes called the 216 Browser-Safe Colors, also known as the Safety Colors.  And as it turns out, there are other semi-standard colors which all browsers seem to recognize by name.

My field trip to the Arlington Continuously Operating Reference Station, which is a super-accurate benchmark.

This is a hobby in which people hunt for survey markers, usually a brass disk embedded in the sidewalk or the side of a building.  But reference marks can also include radio towers, water towers or church steeples.  What could be more fun?

The page also includes GPS background material and a list of GPS-related web sites.

An akdart.com exclusive -- not very technical, but it is our most popular page!

Almost as much of a technical topic as a political issue, Carnivore is an e-mail wiretap system being developed and used by the FBI to read everybody's e-mail looking for suspicious words and phrases that only a criminal would use.  But aside from being an outlandish invasion of privacy, it's astonishing that such a system can and was secretly developed and deployed.

Editorial comment:  I'm sorry, but I am no longer willing to sit quietly while the government spends billions and billions of tax dollars for... nothing!  Allow me to challenge your assumptions.  NASA did not invent Teflon or Tang or Velcro.

There is only one Loran-C station in Texas, and it's located in Raymondville, down in the southern tip of the state.  I dropped in one day in 1984 and took some pictures.  Don't try that today!  The security is probably much tighter and the guys probably aren't as friendly to strangers with cameras, in these days of terror alerts and such.

The top floor of the tallest building in Dallas contains a very important radio communications hub and has a spectacular view of the city, even on a hazy day.

Electronic voting would be okay, if there was some way to audit the vote afterward and prove that everybody voted the way they meant to.  At least to the extent that it can be done with paper ballots.  With electronic ballots, you have no way of knowing if you voted or not.

Some of these photos show the arrival of the first videotape machine at KRLD-TV in Dallas.  Others show the original Cedar Hill candelabra tower and various Dallas skyline angles from the 1960's.

This sounds like a political issue, and it is, but the controversy has resulted from one side using scientific facts and the other side using emotional outbursts to get people to agree with them.

Guest commentary by Dennis Barr, who offers a theory that the combustion of hydrocarbons -- not global warming -- has made the sea level rise over the last century.

One of my hobbies is the science of precise time and frequency measurement.  After thinking a lot about greater and greater precision, eventually one begins to wonder what precision really is.  At least I did.