A couple of weeks ago, the Veritasium video, “The Big Misconception About Electricity” created quite a stir. If you’re interested in the physics of electricity, you might want to watch this yourself.
Also, he has almost 12 million subscribers on YouTube. If we could somehow convince him to do a video on amateur radio, it would get a lot of play. I’ve emailed him about this and am now waiting for a reply.
My question to you all is are there other video producers out there like Vertiasium who are doing something similar? I’ve been browsing YouTube for the last hour, and while there are a ton of videos on radio waves, for example, they’re all pretty dry, academic stuff. I want to find someone that can not only explain a topic, but spur a viewer’s imagination as well.
I know we have a bunch of amateur radio YouTubers, and they all do some great videos, but their audience are folks who already have amateur radio licenses. They’re preaching to the choir. I want someone who can produce a video that people outside the church will watch and convince them to join the congregation.
What do you think? Do you have any favorite video producers who might be able to pull this off? To sweeten the pot a little, let me remind you that I’m the Communications Manager for ARDC. We make grants to organizations and projects that promote and support amateur radio. If we find the right producer, funds might be available.
By the way
Dave Jones, of EEVBlog fame, has done a video on this topic, tackling it from an engineering point of view. It’s worth watching, if you’re interested in the topic.
Sandip Nambiar says
The team behind Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell makes videos that hits a positive vibe with children and adults alike. I would love for them to make a video on Amateur Radio or some topic under this hobby like CW or Propagation.
Jack Vaughan says
Good idea!
Dan KB6NU says
Thanks for recommending Kurzgesagt; I just checked out their YouTube channel. They do have some interesting videos, but they’re tackling topics wayyyyy bigger than amateur radio. I’m not sure that they’d be interested in a smaller topic like ham radio.
Christian Sweningsen KD2LIN says
What really made this what it is, is the deep-pockets sponsor. They’re who you’d (we’d) have to convince.
And yes, it’s a great idea.
Christian Sweningsen KD2LIN says
When I do radio workshops I use a very effective demo I found when I taught high school physics, that pictures many essential phenomena absolutely basic to radio.
Two identical setups: ringstands with horseshoe magnets laying upright on the base, with poles horizontal (the opening between the legs/poles facing sideways, away from the stand; from the side view it’s a “C”). A coil of magnet wire a few inches in diameter is suspended from the “ring” fitting, so that it’s centered on the upper leg of the magnet, and free to swing.
The two instances of this setup are separated and the respective coils connected by wire – “like telephone wires”.
Then one coil is pulled back and released. The other coil responds, in an identical rhythm, easily seen.
The key is that the lengths of the suspending wires are equal, and so they are pendulums in mechanical *resonance*. The response of the receiving coil builds and builds, quite dramatically (well, subtlety dramatic, but *effective*).
I offer the picture of a child on a swing; the carefully timed kicks that increase the amplitude.
This is a picture of everything involved – electrical generation, and conversion to work; transmission and reception; the reciprocity of information; the importance of resonance.
I then diagram what we’re seeing, in a graph of velocity of the coil over time – from still, zero at the top, then increasing, to fastest at the bottom, slowing, stopping at the highest point, reversing direction, speeding again…
Very easy for the viewer to relate to, and results in a sine wave. Then offer Faraday’s law that the electrical outcome hat we are witnessing – evidenced in the response of the other coil – is proportional to velocity, and so the diagram is also of the electrical outcome – voltage and current.
This offers a way into frequency, wavelength and amplitude; and antenna design.
And the magic of long-distance communication, with extremely subtle energies made perceptible.
Michael KE0BOZ Wells says
Interesting video, though I am guessing Dan, you didn’t discuss the technical aspects of the promoted video because there was a fair amount of criticism of the video – being that the question posed was really a trick question.
The question – imagine a circuit of a battery, a switch and two wires 300,000km long (the distance light travels in one second) thus reaching a distance about 1/2 way to the moon and returning back to be connected to a light bulb that is physically only 1 meter distant from the battery. When the switch is flipped on, how long would it take for electricity to turn on the light bulb assuming it will turn on with any amount of electricity?
a) 0.5 seconds, b) 1 second, c) 2 seconds d) 1/c seconds [i.e. c = the speed of light in seconds] or
e) none of the above.
The unintuitive answer that was cited as the correct answer was “d) 1/c seconds because 1/c seconds is the time light takes to travel 1 meter, the distance the light bulb was physically distant from the battery. It was an unintuitive answer because most people have the assumption that the electricity would have to travel the lengths of the two wires before it would complete the light bulb circuit and since electricity travels at the speed of light it would take 1 second to reach the light bulb and another second to return to the battery. The author of the video was making the point that electricity does not travel really inside wires but through the electro-magnetic waves outside the wire therefore the electromagnetic waves would bridge the 1 meter physical distance from the battery to the light bulb long before the time it would take to travel along the wires a round trip distance of 600,000 km.
The critics pointed out that the question was really a ‘trick’ question because the author stipulated that any amount of electricity would turn on the light bulb – not what usually happens in the real world. The amount of electricity that flowed across the one meter gap between the battery and the light bulb acted much like a capacitor and inductor functions where electromagnetic waves induce electricity to flow across an air gap, for example, into adjacent wires – this is not how we usually operate a light bulb. In fact the amount of electricity that must have jumped across the 1 meter air gap was so really infinitesimally small it wouldn’t light up a normal light bulb.
If light bulbs really lit up with so little initial electricity before the circuit had built up a normal charge by flowing around the whole circuit then why would we even need wires connected to the light bulb! In fact if light bulbs should light up with any amount of electricity no matter how small, then not only would the world save save on huge amounts of electricity consumption but lights would stay on permanently due to not only electrical leakage from a battery but just from all the electro-magnetic radio waves that are constantly filling our air space in our environments. Just turn on any FM radio and start tuning to see how many electromagnetic waves are there around us, all of them containing ‘electricity’ in some small amounts. So even the supposedly correct answer d) was also wrong on a technicality given the way the question was worded.
So what does any of this have to do with Amateur Radio videos? Well if we are going to go for the WoW factor in videos to attract new interest in the hobby, then we better, as amateurs, get the theory right and not pose ‘trick’ questions that have little basis in the real world. Just my two cents.
Larry Works says
Try reaching out to Scott Manley on Yotube. He’s already published one very cool video about European Amateur Radio Operators decoding telemetry and video streams from SpaceX in March of 2021. No clue if Elon Musk has ordered those data streams encrypted. Doesn’t really matter, watching the video you’ll see he 1) expresses interest in learning more about RF and 2) gives kudo’s to those operators who figured out how to see it using an SDR. His subscription count is 1.4M viewers and that particular video currently has around 630K views. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74_N163HyhA
Other pluses in my opinion, he’s ALWAYS enthusiastic, puts highly technical info into layman’s terms and he has an easily understood Scottish-American accent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Manley
I think it’s a great idea. Good luck!
73 Larry
KD8MZM