Upon This Last Day Of Hurricane Season 2025...

Some good news:

Tomorrow winter begins. (no, don't give me any of that 'not until the solstice next month!' business; no, just no)  What the hell happened to fall?

Reminder: Grand Ole Opry's 100th Tonight

Link to earlier blog post here.

ps, the next day Saturday 29th: Pretty amazing show.  It started with Ricky Skaggs whipping out a tune on "Uncle Jimmy" Thompson's first fiddle used on the Grand Ole Opry a century earlier, and then finished up an extra half-hour over the allotted two and a half hour time slot.  Not that anybody complained about that!

pps: Sounded great on AM.

Winter Field Day Approaches

OK, January 24th & 25th are still two months away, but it's never too early to begin planning.  As usual there are a few minor tweaks to the rules, so read and heed.  Here are the links:

• Main WFD page
• Rules page

The weather's been so hot this fall that I haven't had any chances for practice trips, but things are finally cooling off and it's looking good for the next few weeks.  Expect related postings soon.

More Grant Blight

 Waveland to Open Bids for Pier Repairs; article at the Sea Coast Echo

Five years after Hurricane Zeta... and Waveland's just getting around to fixing up the municipal pier.  See an earlier post for the definition of grant blight.

Think of all the tweenagers and teenagers who missed out on good times fishing there.  Those five-plus years are now mostly lost to a fog of video games, cheap beer, and worse.  If you neglect these amenities, the kids will find something else to do.  Getting these hang-outs back up and running after a storm should be a high priority, not something left to DC's mañana-go-round.

The ugly reality of grant blight.

Grand Ole Opry Marks 100 Next Friday

As a reminder (mostly to self), the Grand Ole Opry will have its 100th anniversary show on November 28th – that's next Friday, the day after Thanksgiving.  Don't forget to tune in.  I have no idea who's on the schedule, but I'm guessing that it'll be all over the WSM web site by this time next week.

Remember, just as with classical music being performed on period instruments (see Academy of Ancient Music), it's far better to listen to the Grand Ole Opry on AM radio.  Fortunately this is fairly simple across most of the eastern half of the United States during dark evening hours: tune to 650 AM just before 8pm EST and you ought to have a listenable signal.  You may have to physically turn a portable radio to point it toward Nashville; their internal antennas are somewhat directional.  Of course, being out of a city center (this is country music after all) and having a good radio will help considerably, but on the whole it's a pretty easy exercise.  If the ionosphere doesn't cooperate (or worse, you're stuck in a city), streaming from the above-linked web site is a lesser but tolerable substitute.

Anyway, don't let this one slide.  Tune in for a little piece of history as it happens.

Meanwhile, Down Home at the Apalachicola Airport...

 The Forgotten Coast Freedom Festival Air Show was held today.  Pretty fun!  Here's the schedule:

And here's one of the highlights, a fly-over by two F-35's out of Tyndall AFB:

Lots, lots more going on there.  Two of the major performances involved T-6 Texan trainers.  The main air show part ran from just before 1pm to 3pm, but there was plenty to do from gate opening at 10am to close at 4pm.  Short and sweet.  Also... the weather was perfect!  So, yeah, again next year.

And Then There Were Two

Two successful commercial space launch companies with reusable first stages, that is.  Blue Origin gets one off of and back onto the ground in one piece: Video at the BBC  It's short, under two minutes.  Go and watch the whole thing.

Congrats to Blue Origin!  This is very good news.  SpaceX was the first, but with them there was only one company with this capability.  One is a special number because it shows that a thing can be done.  However, it's also only one corporate failure away from none.  With two, we have some redundancy.  I'm reasonably sure that companies three and four are about to spring into the spotlight.  Exciting times!

Quick Hike

With the cool snap today, on the way back from Carrabelle I took a (very) short hike on the High Bluff Trail.  Mostly it was to confirm that the picnic table near the east trailhead is still there and useable.  It is, so it looks like we're good to go for more hiking-with-radio adventures in this cooler weather.

Hits the Carrabelle repeater very easily, especially with the upgraded antenna.

The Oystering Rules Announced

 Article in The Times.  I'll need a little time to re-re-read this.  That is all.

"Toward the Unknown" – Surprisingly Good!

I'd heard good things about the 1956 film Toward the Unknown, but face it, I had fairly low expectations.  However, it turns out that it's pretty good in a Top Gun–meets–The Right Stuff way.  Made with the full cooperation and assistance of the USAF, the flight scenes are well done, the few special effects (mostly a practical mock-up of the X-2 rocket plane) hold up to modern viewing, and the tacked-on melodrama isn't too melodramatic.  At least, no worse than either of the Top Gun movies.  And while the historical details of the X-2 program are somewhat different than what is portrayed in this film, in several scenes it's close enough to echo some of the actual tragedies of the real program.

So, what's it about?  Here's the one-line summary from IMDB: A shaken Korean War veteran tests the X-2 rocket plane.  OK, that's the plot summary you get – no spoilers.  Let's move on to my summary:  Did you like Top Gun and The Right Stuff?  Then you'll like this one too.

Next Round: Space via X-15.

Just An Earbud

 On one hand, it's just an earbud.  On the other... "Wait, don't you mean earbudS?"  No, and that's what makes this one special.  It blends both stereo channels – if present; if mono output, well, it's still mono – and pipes it through one earbud, leaving your other ear free.  That's perfect for listening to podcasts or when out radio operating in the great outdoors where there are lions and tigers and bears and etc.  It's optimized for clear speech, not music, so be forewarned that this is its focus.  Results with music are... eh, don't even bother.  You probably have a good pair of music-focused buds laying around anyway.

Well, over at the SWLing Post blog, this simple thing has caused quite a favorable fuss, enough to warrant three articles and a raffle over the past six years:

• Review of the C.Crane CC Buds Solo (2019)
• Checking out CCrane's Solo Earbud (2023)
• CC Buds Solo: Two years into the mission... (2025)

This is one of those good little things that's easily overlooked.  Here's a link to the CCrane page.

See that big notch cutting out most high frequencies?  That's voice optimization.

Ground Wave Madness

 In recent months a question has arisen in local ham radio circles, most definitely including FCEM:

What if we have a real lulu of a storm that breaks the Carrabelle repeater antenna off the tower?

Now, on one hand, we see a significant impact about once a decade, and only a quarter of those have winds that exceed the antenna's wind rating (112 mph).  Multiplying through, and we have a 1-in-40 chance of an antenna knock-out any given year.  On the other hand, if we have such a hurricane, then that is exactly when we'll really-really need that repeater.  Putting up a tougher antenna with a 135 mph wind rating would improve our odds by a factor of five (at the cost of about 2 dB gain, plus begging our tower guy to go up there one... more... time...); 1-in-200 are odds I can live with.  Even so, things happen.  We need a fall-back plan.  I smell a project coming on:

GWEN  |  A 160m Band 'Rubber Duckie' Antenna

Coincidentally(?) I'm finally reading Mary Shelly's Frankenstein.  Inspiration comes from the strangest places.  In other news, our run of good luck continues: