The 2019 "A" Storm is in the books, already.

BTW, it was "Andrea" and if you blinked you missed it.  Thankfully.  Link to Weather Underground's tropical/Andrea page.

It's going to be a long, hot summer.

Weird Art on QSL Cards

Just received this week:

Look familiar?  Don't think too hard, but give it a try.  If it doesn't come to you momentarily, here's the source material.  Also, if you need "uff da" translated, here's that.  Oh brother.

Look, I think it's pretty cool, but what the hell do I know?  My QSL card is an old picture of me throwing a castnet, and fairly soon I'm going to re-work that into a take-off of The Clash's London Calling album cover.  Stay tuned.

When it comes to stuff like this, the weirder and more obscure, the better.  Don't ask why.

a small weekend of small concerns

Oh, I'm still here, there just hasn't been much blogable activity these last few days.  Well, Grumpy Cat died, but you probably knew about that already.   As for the rest: 

Fast trip into New Orleans after work to fetch the mountain bike back from Bayou Bicycles – right into the teeth of rush hour traffic plus the Bayou Boogaloo festival going on all around the bike shop.  Both are on (or at least very near) Bayou St. John, which has a rich and interesting history.

But I did get to go mountain biking on Saturday, and that was good to get out there ahead of the rain.  Not a long ride, but still a good ride.  Sorry, no pics.  New water pack was tried out too (an Osprey Syncro 5 in bright red).  Expect a full review after I get in at least one more ride with it.  

Trimmed the new UHF antenna – literally, trimmed it down 0.8 cm on each element to bring its resonant frequency into the center of the band.  It's working much better now, with vanishingly small SWR across the 70 cm band.  (There's something cool about knocking together a home-brew antenna from junk that's laying around the house.  Like with fishing, it's free if you have the expertise and tools.)  Then I trimmed the grass, or at least got a good start on it.

Today was, as expected, rainy, so laundry was done, naps were taken, bills were done, radios were twiddled, magazines were read, all that rainy day stuff.  Then the rain stopped and the Formosan termites swarmed, so now the lights are out.  Time to read – by the light of a very small reading lamp, so as not to attract termites.

Sometimes it's good to take it easy on a weekend.  Just don't make a habit of it.

Every May is "Dark Sky Month" Around Here

UNESCO has designated today the "International Day of Light" to demonstrate the value of dark skies to astronomers and to regular folks who just want to look at the sky and see the Universe.  APOD has a piece on it today, with a cool mouse-over picture to demonstrate the effect.

Here though, we have an even stronger motive.  Fortunately the termite swarms seem to be abating.

NOMA Expands the Sculpture Garden

Article and interview at WGNO's site.  Hat tip to The Darling Daughter for pointing this out.  Will have to make the pilgrimage soon.

Bonus: another article at WGNO featuring eight photos from the new expansion.  OK, it sort of reminds me of some scenes from Annihilation.

Tour of Homes Follow-Up

Article in the Apalachicola Times: Fewer homes, leisurely views

They've really dialed this thing in.  Read the whole article.

It Gets Even Uglier

Following up on last week's antenna construction post It's Not Pretty, here's the finished product silhouetted against a cloudy sky.  Not exactly up to HOA standards, but then I don't live under an HOA.

Construction notes: 11' section of chainlink fence toprail fitted to a 4' section of PVC.  The top of the PVC pipe is "castled" out for the ground plane legs, and the antenna simply rests in the end of the pipe.  The coax cable runs through the PVC and through a cut-out on its side, above the joint with the steel pipe.  It's tied with bank line to where the edge purlin is nailed to a roof rafter, just outside of the ham shack, so only a 25' length of coax is needed.  I would have preferred to have it around back off the porch, but that would have meant a 50 or perhaps even 75 foot length of coax, and you just don't want to use something that long at 440 MHz.  As it is with LMR-240 coax (pretty good stuff) over a 25' run, it's losing 26% of power in the coax.  (coax loss calculator)

It's a good between-the-rain-showers project.  Initial pinging of the Diamondhead repeater gets a response back that's about 6 dB better than in the back porch tests.  That jibes with the Egli equation, which has gain going as antenna height squared.  More later, as soon as one of the other area hams happens to be on the repeater to answer.