A Good Way To End The Month

 With a successful fishing trip, and...

Has It Really Been Five Years?

 

Yeah, I guess it has.  Retirement, I highly recommend it.

Finally Some Word from Jamaica

 'Everything's gone', BBC finally able to access one of Jamaica's worst-hit areas

Jamaica's 'ground zero' – Assessing hurricane damage in Black River

Before and after Satellite photos

A few minutes of video showing a glimpse of the destruction.  It's always this way – an 80 mph Cat 1 roughs up a US urban area and it's all stop the presses because it's the end of the world, but a 185 mph monster smashes a hard-to-reach less-than-glamorous area and it's... meh.

Anyway, good if brief reporting.  As news trickles out, do what you can to help these folks.

Look'em In The Eye

 Nice footage from a Hurricane Hunter of the eye of Hurricane Melissa today, over at the BBC.

I've been directly in the eye of a storm twice – Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and TS Mindy in 2021.  Neither time was a particularly clear sky situation as seen in that video, though the wind did die down spookily for a bit in each case.  Avoid whenever possible.

The Six Haunted Channels

Not really haunted, but it is now late October after all so the term was bound to come up.  It seems to refer these six AM channels, set aside for hundreds of little stations to do low-watt local broadcasts, as being "crowded together as a graveyard."  Anyway, an article at The SWLing Post pointed to this article over at Radio World about these – and I hate to say it – legacy stations.  There's also a pretty cool zoomable & clickable locator map here for you to scope out your local area.

Best I could dig up here on the northern Gulf coast was WTAN 1340 out of Clearwater.  You can see its yellowish broadcast pattern fanning out northwest from the Tampa Bay area in the figure below.  A straight shot over salt water makes for decent daytime listening; a little static-y here in downtown Apalach, but perfectly listenable on my drive between Eastpoint and Carrabelle today.  I'll bet it'd be crystal clear on a good radio out on St. George Island or parts nearby.

The only other graveyard station I've regularly listened to was WGCN 1240, "Home of the Biloxi Shuckers" minor league baseball team.  But that was when I lived over that way.

Anyway, interesting stuff abounds when you go looking in the obscure corners of the real world.

The Local Graveyard Scene

Nah, Not My Thing

Over at Singletracks online mountain bike mag, here's an article about the latest Red Bull Rampage:

8 mountain bikers brutally injured.  Are the injuries worth it?  Many of the competitors seem to think so.

Eh, you do you, but I don't want to be in the same insurance pool.  This has so little to do with the kind of biking that I do that it is effectively a completely different sport.  BTW, note that this is a recurring question, not just here, but all over the mountain bike press.

Hiking Over 60: The Talk

I reviewed Philip Werner's book Hiking After 60 last April (link).  Now he's on a New England-area library speaking tour.  If that's too far for you to walk, here's a video of a recent talk he gave.  About 50 minutes, so pour another cup of coffee and settle in.

Good talk, good information, good presentation.

Now if we can just get the daily high temperatures down into the mid-70's, we'll be all set.

Watchin' the TV

Slow-Scan TV, that is.  Don't worry, this blog isn't going to be all about documenting these contacts, but this still is something new, so here's a prime example on how these things go.

Translation: "Anybody out there?  Dr. C calling...."

"Yep, N3CHX here.  Decent but not perfect copy."

"Good but not quite perfect copy here too.  Thanks & best regards, Dr. C."

"So long, and best regards from N3CHX."

And that's how it goes.  Here's a sampling of some other items that came in while I was listening.  Er, watching.  Um, both.  Peering.  Squinting.  Something.

Those are some of the better ones.  But then there are a lot of ones that come in something like this:

Fortunately, listening and saving images is automated.  It's kind of interesting to see what comes over the transom over the course of an hour or so, and once set up it's essentially no effort.

OK, SSTV mastered and now there's another tool in the toolbox for rainy day fun.  On to other projects.

So Far So Good

Presented without further comment, because there's really nothing that says it better than these hundred-mile high letters out in the middle of the Atlantic.

Gah, spoke too soon.  Mostly Harmless, but you never know:

All About the NATO Phonetic Alphabet

Short article and medium-length video (23 minutes) over at The SWLing Post.  Both informative, and you get to see the well-worn reasoning behind the word choices.

Bonus, here's what NATO has to say on the matter.  It doesn't get more official than that.

About all I can add is that I can't see any reason to use anything other than this phonetic spelling alphabet.  Perhaps if you're on the local repeater where there's no chance of being misunderstood and there's maybe a little good humor involved, sure, go ahead.  For example, a friend now passed had a call that ended in "ILR."  Often he would often say it as "I Love Radio," rather than "India Lima Romeo."  We all understood both the call sign and the small jest; it was appropriate in the context.  Beyond these sorts of special cases, other alphabet systems are just an invitation to confusion.

Sci-Fi Rotten Egg? Maybe.

The upcoming movie The Astronaut – trailer clip here – looks like an adaptation of the rotten old sci-fi novel The Space Egg.  Here, read a synopsis and watch the clip, and decide for yourself.  I wonder if it is in fact an adaptation, or a re-invention of an old hack plot?

With so many good and classic sci-fi stories out there just waiting for adaptation, why bother with this junk?  Ah well, decide for yourself.  Looks pretty rank to me though.

ps: On a better note, looking around for mentions of The Space Egg on the web lead me to the site Stranger Than SF, which of course has a scathing and spoilerific review of that particular book here.  StrangerThanSF seems to be a passion project of a voracious SF reader, and there's a lot there spread around in good, bad, ugly, and indifferent.  Worth your time to poke around.

Slow Scanned, Finally

After a couple of weeks of getting things ready (new machine, etc.; part 1, part 2), finally a SSTV contact:

Sent:

Translation: Anybody out there?  Dr. C calling...

Reply received:

Translation: Yep Dr. C, my name is Ian and here is the image you sent.  Thanks for contact and Best Wishes, bye.

Final reply sent:

Translation: Ian, your signal is rough but useable.  Thanks & Best Wishes, bye, - Dr. C

Sure, clunky interface, low-res results, and a whole lot of random ionospheric goings-on.  But let's see you send images to and from North Carolina without any intervening infrastructure.  No cell service, no internet, no satellites; just a few tens of watts out of transmitter and some wire for an antenna.

So, why?  Because it's there, mostly.  Also, it'll still work just as well after a bad hurricane.  Here, have an eyeful of what I might have sent a few years ago.

Cool Down Scheduled for Tomorrow

With highs in the low 80's, it's still not quite prime hiking weather.  One more front though should push us  into the 75 | 55 range, and that will be quite satisfactory.  Gear ready, getting small tasks cleared presently.

SSTV, Slowly

Following up on last week's SSTV post, we're just about there.  Picked up a refurb MacBook Air for pocket change (more on this below).  Sideloaded Black Cat SSTV along with fldigi, and chirp-next onto it via dipstick drive, and again tested all on the FT-817nd & dummy load.  Went live with fldigi (a digital texting program) and made a few contacts to the usual easy places like TN, NC, & TX.  Then... started pulling a few images off the air.  Here's about the best of the bunch:

Live!  From New York!  (state)

The ionosphere is a noisy place, and it shows in this image.  Not bad at all for less than 100 watts and 3 kHz bandwidth.  You can look at lots of other images people have received and auto-posted at HF Underground.

Great, so that's all working now.  The question arises though, how good can the image quality be, ultimately?  That is to say, what does the scanning process do to the resolution?  Here are two images from my practicing on the image editor, then sending as audio from computer speaker to phone microphone:

input

output

Not terrible, maybe just a tad worse than the old 110 film cameras.  (I used that stuff extensively in an Astrocam rocket; no great surprise.)  A little more practice with the image editor and I'll do some actual transmissions later today.

Now a few notes on that MacBook Air and how it all interfaces with the radios.  It's an early 2020 Intel i3 processor from mac of all trades for 1/3rd the cost of new.  That's plenty of compute power for intended use.  The important thing is that the SSTV software requires OSX v13 or higher, and this is about the minimum machine that checks that particular box.  After that, this laptop only has USB-C ports.  The SignaLink radio interface box I'm using has a USB-A cable, but a $10 adapter sidestepped the problem seamlessly.  In fact, everything worked out about as well as I'd hoped.  The only downside so far is that the i3 is a power hog, and can chew through half its battery in about an hours' use (and that's after applying the full-on daemon killin' cron incantation to matters).  All the more reason to bring a solar panel into the field.

Now on to a few Linux notes.  One of the above-mentioned fldigi texting contacts reported that he'd just upgraded from an old Debian Linux distro to a new Mac M4, just because he couldn't get the Linux machine to talk to his Icom IC-7300 radio.  Linux man, it's a whole 'nother hobby unto itself.

Finally, I may have mentioned that my old Linux laptop's battery charging control system had died, which finally spurred me on to this upgrade.  In the midst of all the goings-on documented above, it mysteriously began working again.  Because how do you get a broken laptop to work?  You buy another one of course.  Eh, I'll keep it around for muddy days in the field.

CB Day, Again, Already?

Time flies when you're modulatin' the aether.  Onward, perhaps have some actual content later this weekend.

Un-Sticking Physics

A modest proposal at SMBC.

Personally I find bike rides better than long country hikes, but whatever floats your boat.

Blogging's been light lately, but it's been a busy week.  Making good progress on the SSTV project with the new laptop in and 90% configured.  Lots going on at FCEM this week: replacing the lock on the Carrabelle tower (grumble), tuning another volunteer's car antenna, sorting out the pile of FRS radios at the EOC (two dozen and counting), and cleaning out the radio desk there as well.