Journal on Baumann Enkataleiptics

A Thousand People for a Month

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On my recent field trip to Croatia, I visited one of the country’s arguably most famous abandoned sites: Željava airbase. Built beneath Mount Plješevica on what is now the Croatian–Bosnian border, the former Yugoslav Air Force installation – codenamed Objekat 505 – combined several runways with roughly 3.5 kilometres of underground aircraft galleries (known as Klek 505), maintenance areas and command facilities. Completed in the late 1960s, it housed two fighter squadrons and a reconnaissance squadron, principally equipped with variants of the MiG-21. The complex was deliberately destroyed during the wars accompanying the breakup of Yugoslavia on May 16, 1992, leaving its runways cratered and almost all of the underground infrastructure burnt, blasted and stripped.

M1730 reactivated

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

M1730

In the last post, I wrote about the M1730 ammeters: Soviet measuring instruments originally manufactured, tested, and certified for nuclear power plant use around 35 years ago. They are ammeters, but with the right sort of magic, they can display pretty much anything.

After a rather improbable journey from Ukraine to Switzerland – including a brief detour through false accusations of transferring money to a sanctioned Russian politician – a box of Soviet nuclear-power-plant instruments ended up on my workbench. They had stayed in their packaging long enough. It was time for them to do some work.

Checked, Sealed, Forgotten

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Where do I put this…

I wasn’t sure whether to tag this post with “Biel”, “Leningrad” or “Slavutych”. All three places are referenced on the map – I will explain my choices below.

There were hundreds of these things!

One of the things that struck me during my 2018 visit to the Chornobyl NPP was the interface design of the control rooms. While there were some digital elements (several VFD displays of Skala parameters and the Pyatachok), many instruments were still analogue. And a lot of those analogue instruments looked similar - a long rectangle with a value and a scale behind glass, and a light beam indicating the current value on the scale.