The Lunch Ride

Article over at Dirt Rag: The Lunch Ride  Here's a relevant paragraph from it:

Bike rides have rid me of hangovers, have loosened sore muscles, have given me windows of new creative thoughts, have opened up air passages when fighting a head cold, have taken depressing days and made them into something much better and have caused me to become a more patient human being. Sure, a bike ride can’t fix all of you problems, but when a day is smoldering into complacency and you’re feeling the need to shake it out, a bike ride is not a bad place to start.

Pretty much sums up why a lunchtime ride doubles my afternoon productivity.

Tuxachanie Trail Notes

Day hiked the easternmost section of the Tuxachanie Trail yesterday, from the POW Camp to Duck Pond and back.  That's the trickiest section, both in terms of terrain and possibilities for getting sidetracked onto horse trails.  I think I've got it down now though.

Noteworthy items learned along the way:
- Heads Up! and look for the white diamond blaze marks more.  They really are there, but some are not all that obvious, or maybe even a little melted.
- The new pack is remarkably comfortable and sweat-free.  All that mesh, it's a lot like an Aeron chair.
- The pack-mounted VHF whip worked well, reaching the Biloxi W5SGL repeater virtually the entire time.  The exceptions of course are were when I'd step down into large dips like the creek bottom.  The whip did snag a lot on branches in the bushier parts of the trail.   When I get a spare minute I'll cut down the PVC length to the minimum needed to get the bottom of the j-pole clear of the pack and my head, and not an inch more.  Also, the sharp edge on the top end's pipe cap acted almost like a barb, snagging any small branches that presented themselves.  Will have to sand it down to a beveled edge and add a wrap with a piece of duck tape to smooth it over.  The results won't be perfect but should be much better when walking through brush.
-The bridge situation isn't perfect, but given that we've just had a hurricane blow through this month, things were in pretty good shape.
-Things were a little brushy, but of course they are this time of year. 
-Saw three other hikers and two parties of horse people out there, and everybody wanted to know what was up with the antenna.  It was a friendly bunch.

Not much else to say, so I'll get going to work now.

ps: Obligatory picture of Tuxachanie Creek:

Who needs the spooky stuff?

Especially when reality so much better.  For example:

From today's NASA APOD.  Go over there and get the details of this otherworldly scene.

Off to the wood.  Perhaps more later.

Big Week for Pirate Shortwave Coming Up

With Halloween this Tuesday and the Global HF Pirate weekend on Nov. 3-5, it's going to be a banner week for ionospheric fun and games.  Remember, listening in is perfectly legal!

Here are some resources over at The SWLing Post: link  It has links to and discussions about the HF Underground's pirate board and to Andrew Yoder's HF pirate blog.  Also it helps to quickly review The SWLing Post's Pirate Radio Primer.

Shamelessly Pirated Graphic from The SWLing Post

How to be Scary

With Halloween coming up, the BBC published this simple how-to guide from an actor who specializes in these sorts of things.  Enjoy, but remember not to over-do it around the youngest ones.

Last off the Line

Today in 1962, the last B-52 and the last B-58 both rolled off their respective assembly lines.  You can read the extended stories here and here.  While the B-58 is long gone, it is strange to think that the USAF is still flying a fleet of 55+ year old B-52s.

Of course something much, much stranger had debuted the day before.  But we won't go into all that right now.

Here's a Spot on the Map

The headwaters of the Apalachicola River lie about a hundred yards north of the Appalachian Trail.  This is too good to pass up.

Where Stuff Comes From

From over at today's NASA APOD post:

If you're having to squint to make out the details, click on the image to embiggen.

Childhood's End

If you've never read Arthur C. Clarke's classic science fiction novel Childhood's End, you owe it to yourself.  It wraps up several sci-fi tropes – interstellar travel, first alien contact, ESP phenomena, and the destiny of mankind – into one 1953 masterwork of the genre.  Don't skip ahead, and for heaven's sake, don't read the Wikipedia summary of the novel.  It'll spoil the jaw-dropping big reveal a third of the way through when the aliens first show themselves to humanity, and you want to to save that for when it comes around.  No really, trust me on this, you want to save the moment and get the full jaw-drop experience for yourself.

Having said "read the book already," I know that some people won't get around to it, or just aren't that big of science fiction fans.  For them, the story is available in two adaptations.

On screen, the Syfy Channel released it as a miniseries in 2015.  It's... not bad.  They certainly got the aliens right, to the degree that when the big reveal comes, even knowing what was coming, actually seeing it unfold on screen once again made my jaw drop.  They get bonus points there.  But a lot of the rest of this adaptation feels like a Hallmark Channel pot-boiler romance.  What's more they blew the crucial ouija board scene, turning it into a hack "overwrought woman screams and faints" moment, with lots and lots of CGI.  I mean, it's just a damn ouija board people.  Pick one up for a buck at a yard sale and film the scene right.

So, 2.5 out of 4 stars for the mini-series.  They did get the motion capture augmented costumes for the aliens exactly right, and at least the story pretty well progresses much along the same lines of the book.

The next option is to download and listen to the two hour radio play adaptation done by the BBC in 1997.  It's pretty good (hey, they worked the ouija board scene in), though the first half is pretty choppy in its storytelling.  The big reveal on the aliens comes at the very start of the second hour, so block out enough time to at least get that far.  The alien auto-translate is kind of corny and, well frankly, we have better tech for this today than these super-advanced aliens have in this radio play.  BTW, in the book the aliens are so smart that they just learn to speak human languages on the fly, so this should never have been a thing in the radio play at all.  For all that, it's a better adaptation than the job the Syfy Channel did eighteen years later, and it's a good two hours spent.  Call it... 3.5 out of 4 stars.  Here's a link to a free download site for the radio play.

And the book itself is of course 4 out of 4 stars.  It's one of those classics of science fiction, and if I had to write a "best of all time, forever" list, it would be in the top three.

Final note: Don't read ahead, don't look at clips from the Syfy miniseries, don't cheat yourself out of the big reveal when the head alien steps off the ship.  You want to save that moment for when you get there in the story.

It only rains on weekends.

Today's extended forecast:

Hm.  OTOH, at least there's this:

On balance, it's generally to the good side of things.

Central City BBQ, New Orleans

Oh man, I don't have to describe the place, just go look at their web site and do the slobbering for yourself.  Pretty much it's everything it's cracked up to be.

I had the burnt ends plate with slaw and a salad, a perfect intro to the restaurant's fare.  Also at the table we had ribs and chicken.  Everybody sampled around, and agreed that this is the BBQ joint.

Lawdog Discusses Crowds

Crowds, and what to do when things go all stampedey: Meditations on Crowds
In the wake of recent events, probably worth your five minutes.

New Book: Soonish

Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything.  Looks interesting.  Just released yesterday, and my copy's on the way.  Will post something after reading.  In the meantime... you can get some details over at the authors' promo page.  Yes, I'm sure it involves extensive cartoons, perhaps even humor.

Hurricanes just aren't supposed to hit Ireland.

But it looks like one has.  Photos at the Irish Times.

Hurricane Patterns

Here's a plot found over at Weather Underground's current discussion of Hurricane Ophelia (more on that in a minute):

If you have to squint, click to embiggen.  The original image is pretty large.

Ophelia is the one shown in red off the coast of Africa, but that's not what this post is about.  Look a the dark blue stripes that indicate repeatedly overlaid storm tracks, and where they tend to hit the U.S. mainland.  Mobile AL to Grand Isle LA are one of the major beam dumps here.  Apalachicola is on the eastern edge of this, but out of the main blast.  There's even a little clearing up around St. Marks.  (No, for you Southern Reach fans, it's not Area X.)  It's kind of nice to see this large-scale pattern plotted out with historical data.

Back to Hurricane Ophelia, it's going in on Ireland sometime in the next day or so.  That's pretty weird and I'm not sure what to say about it.  "Erin go board up."  ...?

Coffeeneuring Stop #1: Mockingbird Cafe

This madness had to start with the Mockingbird.  Here are the particulars:
1. where: Mockingbird Cafe, Bay St. Louis MS
2. date: 10/14/17
3. what: triple macchiato (the real kind)
4. ride details:  a nice September-ish day in mid-October; CX bike; more below
5. 4.4 miles round-trip
 (if you're wondering what all this is about, here's the intro page)

It's still a warm, damp day sandwiched between the hopefully last hurricane of summer and the first real cold front of fall.  After a lunch of spring rolls, it seemed like time for a cup of coffee and a catch-up with the local paper.  A casual ride there through the 4th Ward neighborhoods, then stopped by a friend's house (not in), and took the railroad yard gravel shortcut back.

An Interesting Travel Program

I sometime catch this on a New Orleans public radio station, early on Saturday mornings:

Travel with Rick Steves

He goes to interesting lands, meets interesting people, and has interesting conversations with them.  Because it's so all-over-the-place, it defies further description.  Just go to the link, it'll take you straight to the show's archive page, and scroll down the places and topics covered.  You can download and listen from there.

Huh.

Book Re-Review: Annihilation

Prior to seeing the upcoming movie in February, I had to re-read Annihilation.  If you'll recall from my first review, when I read it a couple of years ago I wasn't all that impressed.  On the second go-round however, it somehow worked better.  Maybe it was because I wasn't playing tourist in my old back yard, or maybe because I could get past the weirdness better to concentrate on the story.  Or maybe just diminished expectations, I dunno.  If all of that is too cryptic and you're still wondering what the book's about, just go read my original review.  Anyway, I'll probably go on and read at least the next book in the trilogy.

What We Do on 2 Meters

Every Tuesday evening at 7 pm, the local ham club has a net on the W5SGL repeater.  Sometimes it goes for all of 15 minutes and we're done.  Other times it rolls for an hour and a half.  That's pretty much what happened last night.  For bonus points, the guy who was scheduled to call the net called me fifteen minutes ahead of time and asked if I could run things for the evening.  Sure.  But what would be the tech topic?  Well we just had Hurricane Nate, so I winged it with "What did you do for last weekend's hurricane, as it relates to ham radio?"

The net starts with a few general announcements (club meeting times, etc.), and then launches into a check-in portion.  We don't call a roll of members, we just call for check-ins in four blocks of letters, by the beginning letter of a ham's call sign suffix, i.e., A-G, H-M, N-T, and U-Z.  For example, my call is W4ZNG, so I'd answer in the last group called.  Similarly, W5ABC would answer in the first block.  Easy.  BTW, I just don't get the roll-call business some nets use.  Every time I've heard that method, only about one in five "callees" answers back to the net controller, and it turns into a slow-moving waste of time.  Back to the block-of-letters method, we usually have ten to twenty participants, so that's approximately five per block.  Doubles sometime happen, but they're only a minor inconvenience.  If they ever becomes a real problem we can subdivide further.  Like I said, easy.  Fast too.  We can knock out those fifteen check-ins in about a quarter the time of a similar net using a roll-call.  It keeps things upbeat and moving, leaving time for the fun parts.  Speaking of which...

Then on to the Tech Topic discussion.  Here, the net controller throws out a question or topic for discussion, maybe giving an opening pre-ramble on the matter.  Again, last night I used the recent Hurricane Nate as a springboard, asked "what did you do ham-wise relating to the storm?", briefly gave my story (took down antennas on Saturday, put up the hiking j-pole using zip-ties Sunday morning to quickly get on the air, then got the proper antennas back up by that afternoon), and turned it over to the crowd from there.  That's all it took, and we were off and running for the next hour-plus.  One guy who'd lost internet access during the storm asked about backup land-line connections or anything else that would work.  The consensus response after a 20 minute discussion was to use your smartphone's wifi hotspot, because the cell towers are now so up-armored and backup-powered in this post-Katrina era.  Then the same guy had an abraded coax cable that would be difficult to replace; how to test and weather seal it?  Antenna analyzer and goopy wire sealant of your choice.  Finally there was a question about how resistant to voltage dips the Yaesu FT-100 transceiver's microprocessor is.  It's an important question if you're going to be operating one off a car battery after a storm.  A reply came back from a guy who owns and operates five (five!) of them: FT-100's are pretty sensitive, but you can get a $30 power regulator off eBay that'll make all right with the world.

And with a brief sign-off, that was it for the night.  I'm not going to regularly blog about what happens on this net, but hopefully this'll give some idea for the non-hams about what goes on.  There are worse ways to spend a chunk of Tuesday evening.

A Brief History of New Orleans' Pump System

Over at Atlas Obscura 

It seems somehow more relevant than usual this week, indeed, this entire summer.

It's like practical fusion reactors.

You know how practical commercial fusion reactors have been "only one to two decades away" for the last sixty or so years?  Yeah, that's like the fall cool-down this year: "only one to two weeks away" for the last month.

We could use a burst of cool fall weather about now.  If only to dry the window boards before putting them away.

After Nate Roundup

Really not a lot to tell here.  Exactly zero damage around the house, not even any yard debris to clean.  I do have a couple of hours' work taking down window boards and putting back antennas.  Here are two pictures from this mornings' bike ride / sightseeing tour.  The first is from Henderson Point, across the Bay Bridge in Pass Christian.  Notice the high water line on the concrete abutment.

East end of Hwy 90 Bay Bridge in Harrison County

I'm estimating that's about 6 feet over normal high tide.  Enough to get your attention, but that's about it.  Next up is the eastern beachfront in Bay St. Louis, taken from near the west end of the Bay Bridge:

BSL beachfront, from bridge

Again, nothing to get excited about.  The beach has a few new logs and a little more character, but I'm sure the Hancock County crews will be out to get rid if that ASAP.

The Sea Coast Echo has a page of pictures taken last night.  Go take a look.

Could've been a lot worse.

Goodbye Nate!

No obvious damage out in the yard and the storm's heading for parts northward.  It's been a day, and I am turning in.

St. Vincent Radio Wrap-Up

Following up on the post at this blog of last Saturday's activation of St. Vincent Island by the Panama City Amateur Radio club, they have posted a nice wrap-up article at their blog here.  Good pics, and a short video documenting the overall operation.

Buttoned up in The Bay

It's going to be a bumpy night.

Grains are a Racket

Go on and read The Case Against Civilization over at The New Yorker.

If you can't be bothered to read the whole thing, at least search on "tax" and get down to why grains are always pushed on anybody doing agriculture, no matter which millennium the farmer happens to live in.

Like I said, grains are a racket.

Coffeeneuring: Maybe Even Better than Gravel Grinding

The idea is to combine randonneuring with coffee shop destinations in mind.  Sounds good to me!  Naturally there's a little more to it than that, so I'll refer you to the article at Bicycle Times and the official Coffeeneuring site and leave you to read while I get on with the day.

No additional event points for steel frame and barcons, but they do merit style points.

Already making a list (of coffee shops) and checking it twice.  There may be a backpacking wood stove and an old aluminum espresso pot shoved into the camelbak before this is all over.  Stay tuned.

Jurassic Duck Mk II 2 meter Antenna

Weekend-before-last's success with this antenna has invited a few questions about how to build one, so here we go.  Some time ago I built a couple of bike & hike antennas based on WX2NJ's Jurassic Duck design.  They were... OK.  They certainly worked, but for whatever reason the dimensions given there were about 8" too short.  Maybe it was variation in the CPVC pipe plastic from what he used to what I could get locally.  The results were blogged about here, but the bottom line is that it was a pain to make and too fragile for backcountry use.  Also, the 1/2" CPVC whipped all over the place, even though it was solidly mounted on my pack or bike rack.  And one just flat broke during a hike.  But the Mk I was a good start, and I'm grateful to WX2NJ for designing and writing it up, and to KK4SNA for pointing it out.

OK, let's ditch the scrawny 300 ohm twin-lead and upsize to relatively rugged 450 ohm window line.  Window line will slip-fit into 3/4" SDR21 PVC pipe – that's the thin walled stuff, not the thicker Schedule 40.  Take a little piece of window line with you to the hardware store, make sure it'll fit.  The heavier components are key.

By the way, if you're not familiar with j-pole antennas, that's what we're building here so go familiarize yourself over at Wikipedia.  The ladder line section forms the "j" matching stub.  The rest is just a length of wire.

Also, you'll need an antenna analyzer that works on the 2 meter band.  If you cut to exactly the described dimensions, it'll probably still work, but you'll be risking burning out a transceiver.  If you don't have one, get a friend with one to help tune it before you put any power through the antenna.

With the basic design down, here's the shopping list:
- 3/4" SDR21 PVC pipe.  It comes in 10' lengths.  The antenna part will take up about 4.5', but you'll want at least 3' for a mounting stub below that.  Cut it off to whatever you feel like, I chopped mine at 8.5'.  That's a good compromise between "too long" and "too short to mount on a pack."
- cap for top of pipe.
- 17-1/4" 450 ohm window line.  Wait!  Cut it an inch longer at the bottom so you can short out its two legs, and make the "hot" leg an inch long so you can fold it over to form an eye to attach the radiating wire.
- 37" of any wire you have handy, in the 12 to 20 gauge range.  Wait!  Cut it 6" too long, so that you'll have some to trim back when you tune it.
- about 10' of 50 ohm coax cable, with your favorite connector on one end, bare wires at the other.
- a couple of small zip-ties.
- about 10' of thin string of almost any sort.  Paracord is too thick, but one of the inner strands would be about right.  Light fishing line would be perfect.  Use whatever you have laying around.

If you've modeled this out with an online j-pole program, those dimensions will seem a little short.  That's because they're not accounting for the PVC enclosure.  Don't worry, I've done the cut-and try part, so you can just start building.  Here are the steps:

(1) Strip the bottom inch of the window line, short the ends together, solder them.

(2) Strip tap spots on the window line 2-1/4" from the bottom.

(3) Solder the loose ends of the coax onto the window line.  Be sure to have the "hot" center connector soldered to the side with the extra length where the radiator wire will be attached.

(4) Loop over the bare loose "hot" leg on the window line, and attach & solder the radiator wire as you see fit.  Maybe slip some shrink-wrap over the solder joint to give some strain relief, or wrap it with electrical tape.  This isn't critical, it's just some reinforcement to take the bend off the solder joint.

(5) Loop over the top inch or so of the radiator wire and loosely zip-tie it down.  Tie the string through this loop, and snake it up through the PVC pipe, gently pulling the whole thing up to the top. Slip the cap on to pinch the string and hold it all from falling back through.

(6) Hold it vertically somewhere clear outside and apply the analyzer.  It should resonate at a frequency a little too low.  Trim the radiator wire back a 1/2" at a time, repeating step #5, until it resonates in the middle of the band.  It should cover the entire 2 meter band.

(7) Clean it up.  The antenna part is only about 4.5'.  You may want to trim out some of the excess PVC on the bottom end.  I cut mine at 8.5', which leaves a 4' stub to zip-tie to a pack frame or a bike rack rack.  Remember, you don't want the bottom end of the antenna anywhere near, well, anything.  Especially not a metal frame or rack.  Zip-tie the coax coming out of the end of the pipe about 6" back up on the pipe, both to give strain relief for the soldered tap points inside and to make a drip loop.

Ta-da!  Done.  Spray paint it if you want.  I didn't, but may eventually.  Here's mine, zip-tied with unlockable ties, to my backpacking pack:

How's it work?  It easily reached the W5SGL repeater 20 miles away from the Big Biloxi campground, and 25 miles away from my back porch.  The old Mk I antenna barely reached W5SGL from 15 miles away, so this is way better all around: easier to build, more rugged, and better performance.  Call it a success, call it a day.

Whew!

Here it is October first, and all of us living near the water just got a little present:

Oh sure, anything can and will happen.  For one example, I've been clobbered by a hurricane a week before Thanksgiving.  But still, this is the first break we've had in a couple of months, and I am glad for it.