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Thread: Laser media frequencies

  1. #51
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    Quote Originally Posted by akmetal View Post
    Why is it that on a technical forum (and this seems to be a systemic issue across many forums) that a large number of people are hyper focused on bureaucratic regulations rather than the technical details?
    As several people have mentioned, it's because those regulations are there for a reason. If you willfully ignore them, you not only run the risk of being caught by the authorities, you run the risk of doing something that will harm the industry as a whole. Some of the people here on the forum make their living doing laser shows. Threaten them with reckless behavior that could have far-reaching legal consequences and you will absolutely get flamed, for obvious reasons.

    Do I agree that many of the laser regulations here in the USA are overly-restrictive? Yes. Do I nonetheless play by the rules when I do commercial work? Again, yes. And most importantly: Do I get visibly upset when illegal operators perform illegal shows that make it more difficult for me to sell the very idea of a laser show to future clients? ABSOLUTELY YES!

    So, yeah, there is a greater focus on regulations here. But honestly, it's not unlike the focus on gun safety that you'll see on firearms forums, and for the same reason. People who are reckless with firearms make other, responsible gun owners look bad. (And I say that as someone who does not own any firearms myself.)

    It is excruciatingly painful to try to have an intellectual deep technical discussion without someone interjecting "you cant do that" or "its impossible".
    You are a private pilot, right? Would you condone someone flying their para-glider into a busy class-B airspace? I'm going to assume your answer would be no, because of the obvious chaos that could cause. But that is a topic you are familiar with, so you understand that the rules are there for a reason. Even if you don't like them all, you understand that it's better if everyone follows them.

    The problem is that when it comes to Lasers, you don't have that same level of experience, so your first reaction is "What's the big deal?". With experience, that "big deal" becomes evident. The examples provided above (France, Las Vegas, Australia) are the tip of the iceberg...

    Then too, there's a difference between someone saying "You can't do that because it's illegal" and "You can't do that because it violates the laws of physics". Yes, it's possible that you might uncover some new technology that has never been tried. But it's far more likely that you'll re-create a series of failed experiments.

    The days of a lone inventor making a monumental discovery in his backyard lab are long gone. Even visionaries like Elon Musk, Burt Rutan, or Richard Branson have teams of engineers behind them, plus the resources of a large venture capital firm. If you're going to compete with that, at least do yourself a favor and bone up on the current state of the art first. Find out what the sticking points are, learn where the science breaks down, and see what has worked (and what hasn't) before you strike out on your own.

    when I was getting my pilots license the FAR's were something you had to force yourself to read because a bureaucrat was forcing you to know it for the exam
    And 21 CFR 1040.10 and .11 is much the same. (This is the federal standard that governs laser safety, and is pretty much required reading for anyone who wants to build and certify their own laser products.)

    The FAA produces some super good quality material but some of it is just bureaucratic and costs pilots and owners BIG money to comply with which is legally / constitutionally suspect
    Again, just like the laser industry. Some of the regs make sense, some are overly burdensome (at least in my opinion anyway).

    But compliance is not legally or constitutionally suspect in any way. The government is allowed to regulate commerce. If I introduce a laser projector into commerce, I fall under that regulation. If I don't want to comply with the regulation, I don't get to introduce the laser into commerce. It's the same way with planes. The government is allowed to regulate air transportation. If you don't want to comply, don't buy a plane.

    if you do it yourself we will kick in your door and beat the s**t out of you and throw you in jail. Just let that sink in.
    You are forgetting that no one has the inalienable right to build and operate an aircraft in this country. This isn't the second amendment we're discussing here. If you want to fly a plane, you have to follow the rules. If you don't like the rules, don't buy a plane.

    the FAA applies the same rules to a small aircraft in sparsely populated areas.
    Just because an accident is more likely to occur at O'hare airport vs some remote grass strip in northern Montana is irrelevant to the question of whether or not the Government is legally allowed to regulate aircraft in the first place. The price of failure is high in both cases, and it is that high price of failure that prompted the public to give the government oversight in the first place. (And this goes back a *long* way, for lots of different types of transportation, including boats, cars, and trains.)

    Also, the FAA has relaxed many regulations for several classes of light aircraft. So it is possible to get into flying without spending a fortune or having perfect health. But you must accept limits on what you can fly and where/when you can fly it.

    I think this over arching issue of people being hyper focused on bureaucracy is a major issue and impediment to intellectual / technical discourse
    The difference is that you don't see anything wrong with your stated goal of building a directed-energy device that will be deployed near an airport for the express purpose of illegally interfering with the operation of a remotely-piloted aircraft. Several members here on the forum *do* recognize that this is a federal crime with serious consequences. Moreover, if this endeavor involves a laser and you get caught, the event will have far-reaching repercussions in the industry at large. So, yeah, people are naturally going to be reluctant to discuss it.

    there is always multiple people that never fail to bring up some obscure buried regulation and its super irritating as they bring it up BEFORE the technical discussion.
    This weeds out the people who aren't really serious with regard to safety and regulatory compliance.

    Put another way, if someone asked you about buying a Beechcraft Bonanza so they could fly it to their cousin's farm on weekends and avoid the 3 hr drive, how long would you wait before you told them about the fact that they needed a pilot's licence to fly it, or that they needed an FAA-certified mechanic to work on the engine, or any of the myriad other regulations they would need to follow? (Not to mention the fact that the plane will be more expensive than their house...)

    do you know how many people told me I was crazy that I needed a zillion hours to fly a pitts and that "air line captians" have wrecked pitts etc etc etc. Well here we go with a laser
    If you were planning to build your own CO2 laser or flashlamp-pumped ND:YAG laser from an existing design, no one would be saying that it's impossible. But you're talking about building a laser that doesn't exist yet, and worse, you're proposing to use it illegally. Bit of a difference there.

    Adam

  2. #52
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    I will be doing no laser show and I will not be competing with anyone for a light show. If I ever get to the point of testing it will quite literally be in the middle of nowhere. Think, those islands between Canada and Greenland level of middle of nowhere.

    Fortunately we dont have class B airspace here, there was a big fight .... probably 7-10 years ago about making our one tiny class C space a class B space. I am pretty sure the stink rose to a national representative level and congressmen shut down the FAA so we have no class B up here and there is only one VERY tiny class C. People dont like the FAA here and our national reps are very responsive to non elected bureaucrat actions (ie FAA agents). The class C is a weird shape in order to accommodate the "ultra light pilot" without causing safety issues with 747's and large planes, but they dont get a nice huge upside down cake like in other places. Even the military air space allows private pilots to do high speed passes down their strip if you radio the air boss, I know people who have done it and when I called they said any time so long as they are not doing war games. The local small airport then allows the base to fly big heavies down the base of their run way to simulate high speed low altitude landings so its symbiltic.

    The constitution does not explicitly state that you have a right to walk down the street, sorry but our national representatives disagree with you and the FAA is put on a tight leash in this state, yes you have to have your arow docs and some other basic things but when the FAA starts getting over zealous and starts trying to enforce semantics they know that all someone has to do is contact their congressmen and it creates a big head ach for them. Now if someone is flagrantly WAY out of bounds then yes your right, but what we are talking about in this thread is extremely minor details like a TSO stamp on a relativly unimportant piece of equipment (I dont need ADS-B to keep my plane from falling out of the sky). They do get really excitable about AN bolts that come out of China ... as they should, those hold my wings on.

    But this melodrama about non safety critical items does not exist up here because someone could loose their job in the FAA if they started doing that. Its just like Radios, I was on a random frequency to talk to another acro pilot to coordinate our manuvers and not be on ctaf .... well it was a military frequency lol A major got on and said hey you need to get off this frequency .... and that was all, no one sent a swat team to our homes and roughed up our wives. I had an ELT slide out of its case and went off, I could not turn it off until I landed, taxied and put the plane in the hangar ... no one cared.

    The same is going to be true for lasers, you go to the middle of nowhere and NO ONE CARES. I suppose if I were wildly successful and I accidentally shot down a satellite I might face some consequences, but in reality I would probably get a job and a bunch of money.

    If I sold a plane and someone wanted to buy it I would not care as long as they had a cashiers check, preferably multiple checks less than 10k each. Half of the pilots here dont have a pilots license but are probably more competent than most other pilots, they just cant stomach paying some examiner $500, the FAA does it to themselves by not keeping prices in check on the things they mandate.
    Last edited by akmetal; 12-22-2018 at 14:49.

  3. #53
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    Here's a little hologram I made 32 years ago you may like. There are flying wires and a dim ring indicating the spinning prop tips that are hard to see in the pic. It was made with a 15 mW He-Ne. I was using much larger lasers soon after that, but started there. I wish you'd consider building a laser, any kind of laser, and get it operating well before moving on to inventing a new type or trying to build the biggest first. Just sayin'.


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  4. #54
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    Quote Originally Posted by Eidetic View Post
    Here's a little hologram I made 32 years ago you may like. There are flying wires and a dim ring indicating the spinning prop tips that are hard to see in the pic. It was made with a 15 mW He-Ne. I was using much larger lasers soon after that, but started there. I wish you'd consider building a laser, any kind of laser, and get it operating well before moving on to inventing a new type or trying to build the biggest first. Just sayin'.


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    There she is that’s my baby, I went right from a citabtria to a pitts s2b with less than 100 hrs total time at that time lol.

    I did build a green laser a few years ago. The commercial diodes are extremely fragile also a pain to electrically insulate if you want to build a pointer case for them.

  5. #55
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    Where can you buy GaAr powder and is that the P/N type base used for 808 nm laser diodes (still waiting for the books to get in)?

    What are the P and N type substances used to dope the GaAr?

    It looks like I will have no choice but to build a refractory furnace outside for the GaAr and glass optics, but especially the GaAr.

    https://www.sheffield-pottery.com/LO...AR-p/lvclc.htm

    https://molybdenum-cn.en.made-in-chi...t-Furnace.html

  6. #56
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    ..................
    Last edited by kecked; 02-03-2019 at 06:57.

  7. #57
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    Sorry GaAs

    But its not impossible to bond a metal to a gas, that is how they formed uranium gas and separated it.

    I just need to get the GaAs to bond to the undoped layer. The sucky part is all these things come out as cylinders.

  8. #58
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    Quote Originally Posted by kecked View Post
    When you learn to combine gallium and argon let me know. You’ll get a Nobel

    gallium arsenic is what I think you mean and it doesn’t work like that. You are so far out of your league I find it amusing. Dude you are really embarrassing yourself. This reply is a kindness.

    Just for fun of learning look up doping of semiconductors. based on your level of knowledge and don’t even try to reply you know what you are doing just read about it so you don’t kill yourself or someone else. There are plenty of good parts you can buy off the shelf.

    Goodbye and and please don’t win the Darwin Award. As much as I’m flaming you I still really just don’t want to,see you hurt yourself or someone else or get arrested. Spend some serious time reading.
    So we are on a technical forum talking about cool stuff and your first thoughts were that I actually meant Argon ... rather than considering it could have been a typo?

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    .....................
    Last edited by kecked; 02-03-2019 at 06:57.

  10. #60
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    Quote Originally Posted by akmetal View Post
    Sorry GaAs

    But its not impossible to bond a metal to a gas, that is how they formed uranium gas and separated it.
    Of course it isn't impossible to react a metal and a gas, how do you think rust is formed? Or any number of things for that matter.

    I assume you're referring to uranium hexafluoride (solid, not gas) which is produced by reacting uranium tetrafluoride with fluorine. Fluorine is highly reactive (which is why it's not found in nature in its elemental form). There's not much it won't react with. You name it, fluorine probably reacts with it.

    Argon on the other hand reacts with just about nothing, just like the other noble gasses. Basic chemistry.

    Being a gas has nothing to do with it, the element and its chemical properties are what's important.

    Quote Originally Posted by akmetal View Post
    So we are on a technical forum talking about cool stuff and your first thoughts were that I actually meant Argon ... rather than considering it could have been a typo?
    Why wouldn't he think you meant argon? You said Ar, which is argon. Given the level of knowledge you've expressed in this thread the assumption is that you meant to type GaAr instead of GaAs.
    Last edited by Diachi; 12-29-2018 at 22:28.

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