Bill,
Since a blind cane is considered a "tool" for the blind person, would you mind explaining to us how you use an antenna as a cane???? _____ From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, July 31, 2008 4:10 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [SPAM][BlindHandyMan] A possible mobility aid All: Hopefully Tom or one of you electrician types can answer this, or laugh or whatever. I have a friend who occasionally sends me posts from one of the O&M Lists he's on. Yesterday he sent one dealing with the necessity of always pressing the activation button on traffic signals that cycle based on the presence of vehicles as opposed to a fixed time increment. The problem is that at least here, there's no way to tell for certain what actually causes a given traffic light or signal to cycle. So, presumably, the safest course would be to always press a button when one was present (they usually are BTW). The difficulty is then, to find the buttons to press where there's no audible signal, (which is of course generally the case. I work a dog, so naturally, the dog's going to treat a pole with a button just the same as it would treat any other obstacle, and avoid it. I understand there are "sonic guide" type devices that you could perhaps use that would beep or vibrate when they passed a pole, but that would probably give too many hits, since it would see trees, sign posts etc. as well as light poles. Flailing around with a cane or in my case, a whip antenna isn't really a satisfactory way to do this either. Finally, I've been told there are devices which emit a sound when they're locked on to an electrical current, presumably this is because of the presence of a magnetic field. Would it be possible to modify such a device so that it would beep or vibrate or whatever when it "saw" poles with electric current present inside them? My thought is that you probably wouldn't carry something like this around all the time, but it would be useful for finding poles and then knowing where they are, I could certainly train my dog to find them again. Any thoughts? Bill Stephan Kansas Citty MO Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:wstephan%40everestkc.net> net Phone: (816)803-2469 [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
