The Goldilocks Band for Summer PSK31

40 meters doesn't cover much of the CONUS these July evenings:

It's kind of noisy too, mostly from lightning.  PSK31 can slice through the noise though, and 40m gives good Gulf, Florida, and Bahamas coverage.

Meanwhile, 20 meters is a badly fading long-range zoo:

Kind of exciting, but also kind of a crap shoot for where you reach.  LOTS of traffic on 20m, the antennas aren't too big, and it's probably the single most-used ham band.  West Africa is even a possibility – hey Cape Verde Islands, got any storms brewing up for us this week?  Maybe I'll start targeting calls there this weekend.

But 30 meters is juuuust right to cover the CONUS and mostly keep things there.

Had a solid contact out to Colorado this evening, but beyond that there was not a lot of traffic.  That's a shame, because 30m really is the Goldilocks band for CW and digital modes: it's both stable and gives good coverage of likely places.  If you don't have an antenna sized for it, a 40m antenna readily tunes to this band.  It is a pretty user-friendly band with good propagation properties, even if it's restricted to CW and digital modes only.

BTW, simulations courtesy of VOACAP.com

Got to call them something

Discussion about the naming of various newly discovered features on Pluto at io9, including obligatory link to today's xkcd installment.

I think that Sleepy, Dopey, Doc, Grumpy, etc. would be appropriate for a dwarf planet.  After those seven, we could move on to Balin, Gimli, Thorin, and company.

Cthulhu?  Sure, why not.

Return of the Sticky Foot

Except that the new owners sound determined to make it into a nice theater.  The old Choctaw Cinema is readying to re-open sometime around late August, according to this article in the Sea Coast Echo.  Sounds like nice place, maybe we'll have to come up with a better nickname than "The Sticky Foot" for this place.  Brother, did that name ever fit before.  I think the only time the floor in that place ever got washed was when it was flooded by Katrina.  But that's all in the past now, and the new owners seem committed to having a more upscale theater.

I wish them well, and they'll definitely be getting some of my movie ticket dollars.  Not having to drive to Gulfport to see a first-run movie will be a real treat, and doubly so on those rainy afternoons that seem to be made for moviegoing.  A nice theater less than a mile away, that is a real step up.

New Horizons meets What If?

Sure, the success of the New Horizons spacecraft has been all over the news these last few days, but only one site has the guts and physics knowledge to ask – and answer – the burning question:

What if New Horizons hits my car?

It's not pretty.

ps: Wrong url in the above link!  Fixed it on Saturday, it now correctly goes to the what-if? site.  So give it another try, it's much funnier this time around.

It's a Great Picture...

The New Horizons launch in 2006 was pretty dramatic, especially from this camera view. But that's not nearly as great as the pictures we're about to get of Pluto from the New Horizons probe itself.  Early Tuesday morning (~7am CST) will be the closest approach on its flyby mission.  Exciting week coming up!

Movie Review: Terminator V, Lost in Time

It was... alright.  More of a reboot than a continuation of the last two movies, it pushed the plot debris aside by establishing a new time line where different stuff happens.  Happened.  Is going to happen.  Something.  For all that, it's getting into the time travel paradox cheat, where anything can happen because "oh, The Machines must've sent back another robot even before then."  And when will then be now?  Soon.

So the plot of the whole thing is a mess, and John Connor looks like the armored-up love-child of Robin Williams and Sean Penn.  Ugh, creepy.  So, what were the good parts?  Some of the re-creation of the 1984 original movie from the viewpoint of coming in from the future was pretty good.  The digital mapping of Young Ahnuld into the action along with subsequent fights with Old Ahnuld was interesting.  The fights, chase scenes, and special effects, even though we've seen these all before, were top-notch.  And the campy humor, the comfortable laughs at the T800's efforts to be more human, extending on the second movie's similar plays, those were a welcome relief.  Finally, the acting was uniformly up to par for this sort of action movie.

Again, it was.... alright.  The time travel paradoxes and how they were used in the plot were pretty amateurish in comparison to two recent efforts, Primer and Predestination.  Whoever wrote this thing really doesn't have a clue about plotting these things out in such a way that you get a coherent, interesting story.  If you're really desperate for a summertime robot rock'em-sock'em, it'll do, but.... well, it was alright.

Bottom line: 2 out of 4 stars.

More Adventures in PSK31

Being stuck at home with a gently swelling left side of my face – it's supposed to do that after a trip to the oral surgeon; all is well – it was a good day to work PSK31 digital mode contacts on ham radio.  Snagged the Whiskey Rebellion Festival special event station.  I like history and I like whiskey, so that was a home run.  (By the way, "special event stations" are something ham clubs set up at festivals, on historic occasions, etc.  It's kind of like how running clubs will put on a 5K for nearly any excuse.)  Anyway, I also had a handful of other digital conversations in the US, but I got started a little late in the day for Europe.  Maybe get some of those this morning.

The real coup though getting on the air to a friend in Biloxi, all of 25 miles away.  Coordinating through the club's repeater, we managed to get his Windows magic elf box sorted out and able to do the encode/decode.  We were sending on 40 meters, bouncing NVIS signals off the ionosphere to beat the curvature of the Earth.  Worked like a charm.

NVIS conceptual drawing.  Some assembly required.  Mountains not included.

Then we started turning down the power, and still maintained effortless contact at 1 Watt.  That was the cool part.  Of course, it was the +26 dB advantage PSK31 brings to the table relative to voice communications that did the trick here.  Well, I've said it before but here it is again.  PSK31:

It's kind of like The Matrix, only much, much nerdier.