Posted on 04/05/2014 5:12:29 AM PDT by SilvieWaldorfMD
(CNN) -- A Chinese patrol ship looking for signs of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the southern Indian Ocean discovered Saturday a pulse signal with a frequency of 37.5 kHz, state news agency Xinhua reported. "That is the standard beacon frequency" for both so-called black boxes -- the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder, said Anish Patel, president of pinger manufacturer Dukane Seacom. "They're identical." But experts cautioned that no confirmation had been made that the signal was linked to the missing plane. "This could be a variety of things," said oceanographer Simon Boxall, who said the frequency is used by a variety of instruments. "We've had a lot of red herrings, hyperbole on this whole search," the lecturer in ocean and earth science at the University of Southampton told CNN. "I'd really like to see this data confirmed." He added, "It could be a false signal."
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Not sure about this whole battery thing.
I have a 10 yr old car with battery powered tire pressure sensors that still work.
Yes the black box is probably with major pieces of the plane. I am not just sure if they know exactly where the ping is coming from in such a deep ocean. If not they had been hurry
Here is some info on saltwater tags used on sharks and the battery life.
Some of the tags have a battery life span in salt water of 10 YEARS.
It may be a problem in getting them to transmit a signal a long distance like a mile or two, but I am sure you could do it and get a battery life measured in YEARS and not a month. -Tom
It’s 30 days. I used to work on the older systems. The batteries are a time change item. if your maintenance program sucks them they may have a shorter life than that.
You would think they they would increase the battery life but most aircraft are found in a few days.
I was just cleaning out my closet and found some things that look like they could have been on the flight. Now, I don’t want to say for certain until CNN can get a crew out out here soon to confirm my findings.
Yabbut I think “crackerbox” is taken, and cracker head box, if you’ve any naval bent would just be “the outhouse”.
“Look! They have electricity there!”
Not worth it, and different conditions. As the other poster said, mostly the wrecks are found within days. You don’t presume it will be virtually unknown where it went.
I believe they know exactly where that plane is. But to tell the world they know would be telling the world just how closely they can watch you.
Indeed. What is needed is some sort of underwater transponder.
A better pinger design would be not to transmit at all unless a page from a search vessel is heard. And only wake up to listen for pages for a second every minute. A page would be broadcast from a search vessel on 37.5khz and would include a serial number unique to each ping. A page message should only last a fraction of a second, so waking up for a second every minute should enable to pinger to hear at least one page if there is a search vessel within range.
Search vessels would be broadcasting page messages on 37.5khz continuously, while listening for replies on 8khz. If a pinger happened to hear a page during its wakeful second, it would reply on 8khz with the airplane's serial number and the serial number of the page that it received.
At that point, the search vessel would have two timestamps: when it sent the page, and when it received a reply with the matching serial number. That would establish the distance from the vessel to the wreck. As the vessel moves, additional page replies would be received, allowing the exact position of the wreck to be calculated from the different vessel positions and different ranges.
Then, it would be time to call in the deep-water robot (and a press conference).
What is odd? A large plane vanishes with hundreds of people, with no known cause. People fly on these planes every day. It would be nice to know what happened so as to protect others.
I have thought about the missing FLT 370. Why couldn’t the airline companies place a GPS device that would transmit and record the path data of all their air line flights. Transmitting signals and data to satellites is done daily. A recorder could acquire data and if it stopped acquiring data, the last transmission would locate the plane by longitude & latitude data. Once the plane landed at its flight plans destination the data could be dumped to keep from loading the recorder up... Truck line do this now..!! Just a thought..!!
There are brilliant and devious ‘techies’ in every country and of every motivation. I watch “Bait Car” occasionally. As you know, LE can activate a ‘kill switch’ which connects to electronic equipment they have attached to the car.
Could such equipment have been loaded on 370 in the cargo hold and activated by operators in Malaysia or Indonesia - shutting down the electronics, transponders etc., in the plane and directing it remotely??? Not a techie -just suspicious.
Nah. Most stuff on aircraft need a direct connection to work. Almost all the electronic uses some type of data bus with built in redundancy. The only thing that can control remotely would be the un-interruptible autopilot if installed.
I believe they know exactly where that plane is. But to tell the world they know would be telling the world just how closely they can watch you.
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general McInerny certainly knows..he just ain’t sayin’
“Why couldn’t the airline companies place a GPS device that would transmit and record the path data of all their air line flights”
I can track them now with my cell phone!
I’m surprised China would announce this. Why not do a recovery and then announce?
Expense for one. It takes a lot of satellite bandwidth to do that. It’s not like passenger airline go missing like this one.
Trucks are terrestrial based and can use cell towers or radios. Aircraft, once they get away from land based radios will have to use satellites. Not sure if they can send the info by HF radio.
Your cell phone trackers only uses ATC data. Lose the transponders and your tracker is useless.
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