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Continuing our theme of "lazy, low-powered weekend," this evening I was chatting around via PSK31. Ran into a regular on the 20 meter band, and it was once again as if we had a piece of coax cable running 1200 miles from north of the Canadian border to the Gulf. We kept turning down the power until we got to 1 Watt and decided that was far enough – mainly because my output power meter wouldn't accurately measure any lower.
And it wasn't as if the ionosphere was even marginally cooperative this evening:
Sometimes fortune smiles. You just have to be ready to smile right back. PSK31's razor-sharp 37Hz bandwidth makes for a very bright smile.
According to an article at Engineering Radio, DTS, the theater sound people, have bought up iBiquity for the grand sum of $172M*. iBiquity is the holder of the rights to the U.S.'s hybrid digital radio broadcast standard format. Expect things to start moving on this front in the near future.
*update: article originally said "$172" and omitted the "M" but this has been corrected. Funny how a 10^6 increase makes things somewhat less dramatic.
You've seen these spikes in pictures of bright stars:
Thursday's Astronomy Picture Of the Day: link
Once again, if you're not hitting NASA's APOD site every day, you're missing out.
From the Wikipedia article:
Diffraction spikes are lines radiating from bright light sources in reflecting telescope images. They are artifacts caused by light diffracting around the support vanes of the secondary mirror. Refracting telescopes and their photographic images do not have the same problem.
Lots more there, including a discussion of why the spikes appear at 90deg relative to the mirror supports. Now you know.
And even as uncool as the dweeb over at Wired tends to make the whole article, his dork-factor is overcome by the amazing awesomeness of the 350R. Story here.
No stereo? That's a bonus. Who'd want to listen to canned music when you've got that flat plane V8 to listen to?
After Monday's triple shot of espresso, it seemed time to see what's up lately with Dick Dale. No really new news, but there have been a couple of articles about him, his health problems, and his sheer damn determination to keep playing:
Pittsburgh City Paper
Billboard mag
An upbeat article from 2009
And of course, the man's web site, where we see that his 62' yacht is for sale. Also see that I didn't make it to his April show at the Howlin' Wolf, and that I'd better pull out the stops to make it to see him the next time he's through the area.
Look on Dale's web site for tour dates. Even if surf rock is not your cup of tea, you don't want to miss him if he's playing nearby. He is the original, real deal.
I've seen worse talks than this one over at SMBC. May have even given a few, but I'm not saying. Don't be afraid to click the link, it's only to a web comic, not to an actual science talk or anything.
