Hej kapten! Welcome to the wonderful world of VX! This is mainly a place for hobbyists to share their adventures in home encabulation, but we also welcome news from the professional side of the field.

You could absolutely use an encabulator to study (or affect) weather patterns, and some people do! pretty sure there is a VX subgroup in the blitzortung community, for example. Most people doing VX as a hobby tend to just push deltas for the thrill of it, though. It's a bit like getting really good at a video game; perfectly balancing an electrodyne is its own reward.

I've had less time to curate the past week due to starting a new job so i'll paste a response from a thread last week to the question "what is VX?":

oh boy what isn’t it

jokes aside it stands for Volt-Xoccula, one of the major manufacturers of encabulators and related peripherals up until the mid 60’s when they were integrated into Dynac (then Dymec). their brand recognition meant that the logo was on basically every device sold up until the 90’s. it’s become sort of a pet name for the entire field for hobbyists, but of course the original VX-branded machines are still highly sought after.

Basically the purpose is stabilise phase variations in local crepuscular radiation patterns by using an electromechanical-chemical process known as encabulation, ramping up a plasmatic field by exciting a transfer medium such as argon into a toroidal state. the closer you can get to the tangent of the pattern, (which means the phase variance approaches zero) the higher the inverse rate of change, or “delta”. Since many of the big manufacturers have gone out of business, it’s became more of a niche field mostly kept alive by hobbyists strapping together whatever equipment they can scavenge. Shed science, basically.

If you want to be mean you can liken the community to audiophiles; like obviously the cleaner your ramp-up the higher you can get your delta before the pattern dissipates, but there are people who go nuts about these sorts of things, building weird-ass contraptions that they swear “filters the gaseous flux to upper-bound the side-fumbling problem” or whatever but don’t really do anything. It’s gone so far as to become a bit of an in-joke in the community, throwing in random nonsense with the jargon to see who catches on. it’s a force of habit really, we can’t help it.

but anyway, i’ve mostly been uploading older but relevant stuff from The Bad Site and photos i’ve taken. i’m not much of a VXer (i live in an apartment) but i still want a place to discuss it because i find fascinating to work with.