Backpacking Bargains

Article over at Backpacker.

It discusses the full spectrum of gear, which is useful.  The "backpacking on a budget" articles usually seen presuppose that you live in a Colorado trail town and can bargain shop for lightly-used gear down at the local thrift store.  Good luck with that on the Gulf coast!  No, this article covers only new gear, stuff you can actually get from the few local outfitters or the internet.  That is a new and useful take on things.

Anyway, enjoy.  Deer season is over and spring weather is almost upon us.  Get moving.

WFD Post-Analysis

Following up on last Sunday's WFD 2020 post, here are a few thoughts and notes.

• Section Hiker asks: Do you need a backpack rain cover?  Uh, last Sunday, yeah.
• Getting into a comfortable operating position in a tiny tent was an issue.  Laying on my left side, propped on left elbow, facing the door and radio worked best.  But even that messed with my shoulders.  I'm thinking an inflatable pillow to recline into, perhaps a half-inflated beach ball.  Will be experimenting with this before the next trip.
• Hooking a total-current meter between the charger and the 12AH LiFePO battery for the recharge showed that I only used 4AH total.  Coulda done the trip on the 4.5AH battery and saved 2.3 lbs pack weight.  But I didn't know that going in, so it's all good.  Conversely, I used the laptop battery up almost entirely (left just enough for a smooth shutdown), doing about 2/3 the operating on digital modes.  This means that the laptop's battery and the 4.5AH battery are well-matched, and just right for one day of operation.  It's a consideration when trying to minimize weight.  Maybe bring the Eneloop Pro batts for a reserve supply, but probably not.
• Total points have not been tabulated (been putting away tent, etc. first), but I'm down one band from last year and up 2x on the number of contacts.  Looking like close but slightly up this year.

Lessons learned, there're always lessons to be learned. 

As Seen Heading West of BSL

Mr. Ernie Runs through BSL on his way across the country, at The Shoofly Mag.

Interesting article.  Saw him, with entourage including police escort, about five miles west of Waveland this morning.  Interesting quest, and I wish him well.

WFD 2020 Wrapped Up

It was a good time, involving a very short overnight backpacking trip and a lot of radio operating.  The campsite was on the Tuxachanie Trail, near and a little north of Copeland Spring.  The hike out was pretty easy and the afternoon was nice.  Then the rain started, as completely expected, as was forecast, and as we'd prepared for.  Still, it was kind of a bummer trudging back to the truck with backpacks full of wet tents and damp gear.

Contacts... 24.  Not a bunch, but more than last year.  Most of them digital, all of them at either 5w (voice) or 2.5w (digital).  Mostly it was tough going, with a few patches of lucky breaks when a band opened up.  Still have to log and tabulate scores, but it was far more important to get the gear unpacked and drying first.

Backpacking details... Too much weight once again, but the hike was very short, only a mile or so from the Airey Lake trailhead.  Things stayed pretty dry until the pack-out got going during a soaking rain, but there aren't a lot of good options here with a double-wall tent.  At least the key things stayed dry, mostly by pre-bagging them.  Finally... it is amazing how small that one-man tent gets when it's raining.  It might be worth the extra weight to haul the old two-man tent, even with the 2x weight penalty.

Anyway, lots of fun, and here, have some pictures.

  

  

Clockwise from top left:  Nice operating outside on a sunny afternoon.  Base of W3EDP-mini hanging from a convenient pine; note the bag zip-tied over the unun transformer to ward off the expected rain.  Operating inside the tent this morning, 'cause it's raining outside.  Finally (bottom left), a zoom-in of the radio gear from the first picture.  All the usual stuff to make this go, including the speech compressor in-line on the mic cord, at the bottom of the pic.  That thing is pure magic.

Winter Field Day 2020: Better Get Moving

Starts at 1900z (1pm CST) this Saturday, wraps 24 hours later.  Read about it at https://www.winterfieldday.com (site does not play well w/ Safari; use Firefox or something similar) and catch up on how it all went here sometime late Sunday, maybe Monday.

All for now.  Gotta get packing.

Name the Mars 2020 Rover

Link to the NASA voting site here: https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/participate/name-the-rover/

It's a culled, ahem, curated list, taken from numerous suggestions from schoolchildren.  (So sorry, no "Rover MacRoverface" entries here).  Anyway, take a shot.  My favorite?  "Vision," because, you know, 2020.  Opinions may vary, but none of the contenders would be bad.

New Camp Mat R-Value Standard Released

Read all about it over at Section Hiker.  This is great news for those of us who like to sleep on the ground.

That is all... for now.

This Could End Badly

First, caves under Antartica were found.

Then, giant penguin fossils were discovered.

Now, rudimentary blobular biological robots are being developed.  "Xenobots" my foot.  Can you say shoggoth?  OK, so they're really small shoggoths now.  I don't care, these things have a way of growing out of hand.

Time to read up on H.P. Lovecraft again.

Escapees from the Early Days of Punk Rock

The Chats are new, but they have the raw 1976 punk sound.  Here, look at their site, scroll down, and listen to Pub Feed:  https://www.thechatslovebeer.com

See what I mean?  Good stuff.

Here, look at their wikipedia page if you want more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chats

Also it looks like they're putting together a spring/early summer tour of the U.S.  Will see if they make it to NOLA.  Stay tuned.

Know Your Coffees

A pictorial guide over at SMBC.

Movie Review: 1917

This is a very good if not quite great film.  It is well made in all the usual technical aspects: acting, costumes, sets, action, effects, etc.  The story's pretty good too.  In a nutshell, two corporals are picked to carry a message from a General to a Colonel in order to call off a British attack before it rushes into the teeth of a German trap.  To ensure motivation, one of the corporals has a brother in the attacking unit.  The route is through a recently German-held area, which is a nightmare-scape of ruined lands, shattered bodies, and brutal pitfalls.  This is a natural set-up for all kinds of action as well as cause for reflection.  Things are frequently not as they seem, and in this upside-down world, the outcomes sometimes do not match the obvious intent.  A simple act of human decency is repaid with butchery; a cow munches peacefully on the one patch of grass seemingly left in the entire shelled-out county; an ominously left-behind bucket later becomes a lifesaver – and that's just from one scene.  More of this sort of thing abounds throughout the film.

The two downsides to all this are that the storyline feels somehow too thin, and that the action sometimes devolves into almost video game-like sequences of improbable events.  Also in a video game-like way, the movie steps through well-delineated action sets: now we're in the trench level, next we go to the no-man's-land level, now we're in the abandoned German trench level, etc.

Finally, I'd be remiss if I didn't comment on the one-continuous-take camera point of view.  It works here.  It gives an immersive feel to the proceedings, and in this way it adds to the film.  I don't know that it adds all that much however, but it is something a little different.  Gimmick?  No, not really, it's better than that.  The only other major continuous sequence that comes to mind was the two hit men's banter-filled walk from their car to their victims' apartment in Pulp Fiction.  There as here, it was used to give a can't-look-away feel.  So yeah, I'd say it works.

But setting all the video gaminess aside, this is still a very good movie.  If you enjoyed (perhaps not exactly the right word here, but go with it) 2018's documentary They Shall Not Grow Old (reviewed here), you'll get something out of this film too.

Three out of Four Stars.

postscript:  It is unusual that three WWI-centered movies have popped up this year, this one, the afore-mentioned They Shall Not Grow Old, and the recently reviewed Tolkien.  Maybe the movie industry is on a WWI roll.  There are some interesting films to be made showing the beginnings of tank warfare, the nightmare and gut-wrenching decisions around poison gas use, and perhaps most importantly of all, the rise of infiltration tactics, the resistance to their use, as well as some downstream effects.  Lots of plot line material to be found here.

Campfires Mean a Lot

Found: The Charred Remains of a 170,000-Year-Old Meal in a South African Cave
at Atlas Obscura.  A key passage from the article:

Besides being a great source of carbohydrates, the plant would also have served a community-building function for the residents of Border cave.  "I consider the sharing process at the cave an important social factor," Wadley says.  "The rhizomes could easily have been cooked an eaten in the field where they were collected, but the gatherers took the trouble to return them to the home base."

To this day, we humans save up vacation time to go sit around campfires and char food.  Some things never change.  Of course, the big advance is that when the weather is bad or we're sick, a dry house and a microwave oven are options close at hand.

Digital Signals Coming to the AM Broadcast Band

The full scoop is at the Federal Register, but here's the summary:

The Federal Communications Commission proposes to amend its rules to allow AM broadcasters to use all-digital transmissions.  All-digital AM broadcasting has the potential to provide a more reliable and robust radio signal than analog, as well as auxiliary digital services.

Reading further down the (very long) page, it looks like the proposal is to take the analog core out of the existing hybrid IBOC signal, and squeeze the digital portions in closer to the carrier frequency.  But it's hard to tell exactly what digital standard is being proposed.  Doesn't look like it Digital Radio Mondial however.

Even so, this is a big move in the right direction, and about on schedule with what I'd predicted just over five years ago: five to ten years, give or take.  Glad to see the wheels turning with this.

For more discussion and speculation, here's a related article at The SWLing Post (nice pic with cool clouds too, btw), and some previous commentary here dating to 2013, 2014, last April, and last November.

Battery Workshop

The Coast's general-purpose amateur radio club held another workshop this past Saturday, and the topic this time was batteries.  There's an amazing plethora of batteries out there these days: the familiar lead-acid deep-cycle ones, the zippy new-ish lithium-ion 18650 cells that seem to come in everything these days, nickel metal hydrides that have taken over the AA and AAA rechargeable markets, and the rockstar LiFePO4's that make backpacking with significant power possible, just to name some of the more prominent denizens of the battery zoo.  They all have their quirks and strengths, and it was good to have an overview.  The accompanying handout from our host was 47(!) pages.  Won't recount it all here, but much of the information came from Battery University.

By the way, the Mississippi Coast Amateur Radio Association has an impressive array of these sorts of activities.  Workshops, yes, monthly meetings, yes – what club doesn't have meetings? – but we also offer FCC ham license testing, keep a repeater on the air (you can even listen over the internet, here), host a Tuesday night ARES and technical net on the repeater, sponsor several camp-outs over the cooler weather months (news of the latest one here), and manage to host a summer Field Day event as well.  For such a laid-back group, we have a surprising number of things going on.

Two Movies from the 2010's

It seems that every decade has a movie or two that sums it up.  They may not have been the best movies of the decade, but they somehow capture the spirit of the time.  Here are my two nominations for the decade just past.  The links are to old blog postings here about them; plenty to read there and no sense repeating it all here.

The Martian  Never, ever, ever give up.  It was a lot of fun to watch too.

Eye in the Sky  Deep considerations here, if you care to dig them out.

The year-end wrap-ups may have all been wrapped up, but evaluating an entire decade of movies took a few more days.  Thank you for your patience.

New Year, New Chain

Another deer season Sunday, another day not on the mountain bike trails.  Rode the CX bike on the seawall instead.  That's always pretty good, especially when the day's in the high 50s and sunny.

Before heading out I checked the chain for wear.  It was 90% gone, meaning time to change it before it devoured the rest of the drivetrain.  The process went smoothly, taking 15 minutes tops.  The beach road sand here is murder on chains, they last perhaps 500 miles.  Just the cost of doing business.

Two to Kick Off the 20's

They fit some of conversations I'll probably have today.

permalink to xkcd.com

Woo, look at the time.  Got to get rolling out.