Avionics and Instrumentation Online

weirdjim

weirdjim

Ejection Handle Pulled
Joined
Jul 8, 2008
Messages
4,171
Location
Grass Valley, CA (KGOO)
Display Name
Display name:
weirdjim
I've been using Distance Learning for my college classes for about thirty years. Back in the dark ages of chat rooms to today's Skype, Zoom, and a dozen different ways of delivering the information. And guess what? My ONLINE students do better than my classroom students.

I've got a few theories on what that is so, but I don't thing the state and national teacher unions want to hear about it. But it is so.

Be that as it may. A post today about a GPS splitter made me think that a regular "Online" forum may be supplemental to this forum. And I've got the equipment and training to do it.

But there must be a HUNDRED different platforms for online meetings and such. I'd like to start a thread here with those of you who KNOW what you are talking about when it comes to online meeting and/or information sharing methods.

Please, share your thoughts with me and it will be online by what should have been the start of Oshkosh. OR sooner. And gottabe, GOTTABE free for all participants.

Jim
 
Last edited:
I’ve been doing videoconferencing since the dark ages.

But I’ll need a better definition of your goals to suggest a service, and most free services will have number of participant limits or other problems.

Is the goal teaching or multi person meeting?

One presenter or multiple?

Any need to actually see participants? (It’s truly not necessary in 95% of cases.)

Any need for tracking participants or remaining in contact with them?

And then of course there’s “What’s the content and why would I join?” But that’s on you. :)

People have a lot of free time on their hands right now but most of the time, if something like this doesn’t fall both in the evening, and on specific weekdays, or a Sunday night, most folks won’t be around.
 
My goal, while not very well fleshed out, is to help people real time with their avionics questions. One presenter, although moderator would be a better definition. It would be NICE to have multiple people put a face to a name, but not ABSOLUTELY necessary. The reason I want to use video is that some problems are better identified by visual exam and I know from doing this for a while that the odds of me being able to describe a fix while the fix is just across my lab for a visual would be very useful.

I could also use some regular moderators (say, like, someone from Denver) to add expertise to the situation. Nobody would have to "join", no fees, free for all, and yes, a time and place certain with an option for some free time on a moment's notice would be useful.

Did that help?

Jim
 
Whatever it is, it would be great to (a) be browser/web based so an application wouldn’t have to be downloaded, and/or (b) able to be accessed via smartphone.

For work, Skype has been much better than Teams. My wife uses Zoom for fun and it’s seemed to work fine for her and easy to use.
 
The resurgence of Zoom, who was pretty much just the dead competitor to Skype when Microsoft bought Skype... has been entertaining. Their software is sloppy and their security claims of end to end encryption and such, just lies. But if one can live with their non-existent business model and no idea how they’ll pay for all this “free” stuff they’re giving away... it works ok. Many companies and DoD folk can’t install their software on anything that might touch work, I can’t. Instant security audit death. So ... there’s that.

Cisco WebEx is your go-to for large and free. They’ve expanded free tier in response to Zoom to 100 participants for now. Decent features. Big company with a real business model.

Skype is fine. Microsoft owner and they’re moving to Teams eventually. Smaller free tier and 30 day recordings.

Teams... meh. Not my cup of tea but getting a workout during these times which should get lots of bugs killed.

GoToMeeting is popular with the sales crowd. Solid tech and user interface controls. Free tier is very limited in size or non-existent.

Google Hangouts Meet is quite solid but no free tier so that probably kills it for you. Same with the other specialty companies like BlueJeans which is incredibly good, has receding and summary features nobody else has, but not free.

Anything without a bigger company making money with other products has to pay the video bills somehow, eventually. That’s probably important long term. This free tier stuff won’t last forever.

I realized I forgot the big question. If you want recordings your options drop to almost nothing in free tier or recordings that get dumped in essentially a month across the board.

Other more esoteric stuff is things like ability if presenter to only share a window and not a whole monitor (some people using two monitors to present don’t care, others need the windowing functionality when presenting from a laptop), closed captioning (probably not you but some need it), automatic background blurring (Skype only right now I believe), background replacement (a couple. zoom it’s popular right now with silly backgrounds), and another biggie — either free tier or paid access via landline/regular phone, which is rarely free.

Stuff I can’t speak to for more than a few is mobile app quality but it’s nearly mandatory these days. I rarely sit in front of a computer with a video camera setup unless presenting anymore. Have used Zoom (but not alllowed on work phone), WebEx, Skype, GoToMeeting, and Google Meet. All decent UI for a non-presenter.

Google integrates best with calendar requests on mobile for simplicity of click and join followed by GTM and WebEx, essentially a tie.

Will think about other possible features your stuff might need but that’s a fast overview.

Oh yeah. Multiple OS. Most are fine. Some can’t do Linux. Those that can’t usually have a mobile client. Usually.

I guess the exec summary for critical questions for you are:
- Must stay free forever?
- Recordings? How long?
- Standard phone access?
- Number of participants?
- Presenter on single monitor?

Probably in that order but up to you. If you have those items picked out, there will only be one to three that meet various mixes of those.
 
I really only need three things:

Free forever (what forever means in today's society)
Recordings so I can put it on line for same-question access
Ease of access for participants.

Jim
 
weirdjim said:
I really only need three things:

Free forever (what forever means in today's society)
Recordings so I can put it on line for same-question access
Ease of access for participants.

Jim
Click to expand...

Recordings “forever” or deleted within a month?

I think the only one with free recording is Skype, and deleted after one month.
 
Oh also Zoom probably. I don’t know.

With all of the major companies now banning its use for the security issues, I didn’t bother checking.

When Google, Apple, the Pentagon, SpaceX, Daimler, Siemens, the entire Taiwan and German governments....

... and a whole other raft of companies say no, and there’s FBI warnings against it...

I tend to avoid it for more professional offerings! :)

But... it’s popular! :)
 
weirdjim said:
I've been using Distance Learning for my college classes for about thirty years. Back in the dark ages of chat rooms to today's Skype, Zoom, and a dozen different ways of delivering the information. And guess what? My ONLINE students do better than my classroom students.

I've got a few theories on what that is so, but I don't thing the state and national teacher unions want to hear about it. But it is so.

Be that as it may. A post today about a GPS splitter made me think that a regular "Online" forum may be supplemental to this forum. And I've got the equipment and training to do it.

But there must be a HUNDRED different platforms for online meetings and such. I'd like to start a thread here with those of you who KNOW what you are talking about when it comes to online meeting and/or information sharing methods.

Please, share your thoughts with me and it will be online by what should have been the start of Oshkosh. OR sooner. And gottabe, GOTTABE free for all participants.

Jim
Click to expand...
Jim, no offense intended, but after your rant against someone earlier (for whom English is probably a second language), this post made me cringe multiple times. Besides the errors highlighted in red, your grammar is so bad I had to read most of it two or three times to figure out what the heck you were trying to say.

I recommend you be more accepting of others faults in the future, especially when they are minor errors, and the meaning easily interpreted (your meaning in this thread is often not easily understood). If you really care so much about perfection, you need to rewrite almost every sentence in that post.

We all make mistakes, even you. Try to be more tolerant.
 
Last edited:
Regardless of what conference/chat service you use, couldn't you just use a screencap program to take your own local recording? Then you'd be free to share/distribute however you want
 
We use Zoom at work, we record webinars and put them on a youtube channel.
Edit- I don't know if zoom would meet your needs, I was just suggesting a way of having the recordings available.
 
Last edited:
@weirdjim - Ditto on @Salty's comment. I almost typed it myself so I'm glad someone else did.

Now then,
denverpilot said:
Oh also Zoom probably. I don’t know.
Click to expand...

Zoom does recordings, but the free tier limits the LENGTH of the session. My Zoom account costs me $15/mo to get around that limitation with a 100 participant max. 500 participants is $69/mo. The pricing in this tier is per Host.

Not sure if there is ROI for you on the price point you'll need, but for me it was an easy choice.

My previous tool for this was Join.me It was good but it never got traction in the workplace and some IT shops wouldn't allow their end users to use it.
 
jrcox19 said:
Regardless of what conference/chat service you use, couldn't you just use a screencap program to take your own local recording? Then you'd be free to share/distribute however you want
Click to expand...

You can in most cases, just one more thing to manage and deal with. And then find someplace to host them, etc.
 
$60/yr (for host) with Microsoft Teams might meet all the parameters. Conference meeting up to 250 people (as on today), Online event (previously Skype meeting Broadcast) up to 10k people. Record the session, put it on OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online for storage. With 1 user, the storage is limited to 1.1 TB though.

Note: this will not let you publish to YouTube directly if thats the goal. There are ways to do it, mostly manual.

I am no expert on this particular technology, but I might know a few people who are :p , if further clarification is needed.
 
OK, after all considerations, here is what I'd like to do ...

One "host" per session, but the "host" may not always be the same person.
Somewhere between 5 and 10 participants per session.
All participants need a little window so that we can all see each other.
Host gets to pick which participant gets to speak, but some way of tracking "who has their hand up to speak next".
Session should be either real-time or downloadable immediately after each session. I would like to keep the sessions on my personal hard drives for later presentation or posting.
There will be no or very little connection to RST Engineering. THis is for the benefit of the profession. As such, minimal cash outlay from me is a goal.
Security is not an issue, other than I get to kick jackasses off of the session. Nothing of secrecy will be addressed.
What did I forget?

Jim
 
I've got it set up on my end, or at least I think I do. I'm going to have it do double duty ... avionics on an as-needed basis but an hour or two a day during what would have been Oshkosh week to see old friends and perhaps virtually share an adult beverage or two.

I'd like a couple of volunteers to help me chase the bugs out of the system. I doubt if it would take more than a couple of hours stretched over a week's time. If you would like to volunteer, just let me know in this ng and I'll post login credentials.

Thanks

Jim
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top