Day 6 of 21

An excellent start to the day – because we met at 8:30 AM and could sleep in late. (well, some of us, anyway.) Lemuel was fortunate enough to be awoken at 8:30 AM and his breakfast was half a packet of biscuits that he grabbed from the pantry on the way out. (but he was kind enough to share them with us scavengers anyway. what a guy. :)

The Physics students had a brief 'come to Southampton Uni to study' advertisement. After that, Professor Nicole began the lesson proper with the basic theory of radios and how they work

Prof. Nicole: do you take radios as a subject in the A-levels?
us: uhm no...

apparently radios is a subject here. :\ anyway, we received a watered-down version of first year Electronics notes, basically about, well, how radios work. FUNFACT: The AM/FM on your radio? That stands for Amplitude Modification and Frequency Modulation. Learn something new every day.

after that, we were given a circuit diagram of a model radio. to give you a rough idea of how it looks like, it's sort of a cross between this and this. (neither is very accurate though). we were also taught to solder, which basically means melting iron using a solder (like a penknife but with a tip heatable to 300+ deg C), then letting it cool, hardening the melted iron. in this way two pieces of iron (tips of two wires, the metal parts at the bottom of a circuit board) can be joined.

basically it's just a way of holding an electric circuit in place.

we experimented with a solder on some helpless wires until we felt comfortable, then pretty much spent the rest of our lab session fixing the radio together. just two things:

1. melted iron generates a HORRIBLE amount of fumes. Even with a fan to suck away most of the fumes, pretty much all of us inhaled about two years' worth of throat cancer.
2. Kin Chun can solder a 'joint' in 2 seconds. i'm not kidding. kowtow _____orz___

after that we had a chemistry tutorial - or supposed to, anyway - apparently the chem students were held up. (not sure what they did) so we pretty much had an ad hoc physics lesson without notes. um, yeah.

the day ended with free time, (plus sports, dinner, card games, sleep, all the usual stuff...we're going to Bath tomorrow - our first self-organized visit. everyone's already excited, and the I/Cs (yours truly) are nervous. it'll be quite a day tomorrow.