Hunting the Nulls

To spread life, a mindset that looks for what is possible is useful where a mindset that looks for what is impossible is not.

Yet, to find what is possible, it is often faster to first figure what is impossible.

This is starkly presented in the art of radio direction finding, but can be found in tracking, honing physical skills, and understanding biology.

We are entering an era full of problems that are like finding hay in a haystack.

You see this with microbrial life, the cataloging of viruses, and so forth.

We're going to need to be quick about hunting the Nulls.

One of the earliest ways to find a radio transmission was a loop.

Literally looping a wire.

Though it was bigger.

Back then longwaves were used more, as they can go further.

The antenna has to match the size of the wave, so longwave means bigger antenna.

For comparison, the radios I model most often today are millimeter-wave.

Very short!

So the antennas can be tiny.

Anyway, to use the loop to find a radio, you first find the Peak.

The Peak is where the received signal is strongest.

Then, you turn the antenna until there's a sharp dropoff in the signal.

This is the Null: the direction where the received signal is weakest.

A loops goes in two directions because it's a loop, so it reduces the space but doesn't collapse it completely.

Peaks have a broad signal.

Nulls, however, are sharp drops.

So this drop in signal, being sharp, is actually what's most useful to find a transmitter.

Loops are confounded by multipath- when signals arrive from more than one direction, which is what happens when signals travel around and through trees, buildings, mountains, and so on.

Though people can use that interference itself, combined with awareness of terrain, to aid in their hunt.

I remember looking for people in the rainforests of my childhood.

Tracking, like so many other things, was easy there!

Unlike a swamp.

The density of brush and life, the ubiquity of soft soil and mud, these things meant everything left an easy track.

The Peak was ever-present.

Yet, reading accounts of Plains Indians always startled me.

How do you track someone in a perpetually windswept sea of grass?

It all looks the same!

Consider where they're definitely not.

This is one of fundamentals behind the Ecological Approach to improving physical skills.

Let's say I want to put someone on the ground, without weapons or striking.

There's only so many ways that we would fit in that shape.

Most instructors give you very specific Peaks- a set of static shapes.

"Moves" like a double-leg takedown, a outer leg foot sweep, and so on.

Yet there's a fuzziness to these, in actual opposition.

Much clearer is to define all the ways you won't be able to take a determined someone down.

This is the Constraints-Led Approach.

You define what won't work.

You block that out.

Then you play in the space remaining.

For example, make sure you separate three of: their two hips, their two feet, from the ground.

Whatever you come up with will fit that moment.