What a Bunch of Goofballs!

Oh damn, but that was a fun mountain bike ride this morning.  Had a good bunch out.

Yes, it was hot, but I think acclimation is pretty much complete for this summer.  Some proud few of us rode through to a little after noon, and it just wasn't all that bad today.  Sure wasn't cooler, so it must be acclimation.  Yes, nature fixes were gotten today!

Get Your Nature Fix

Two hours a week is key dose of nature for health and wellbeing, according to a new study.

Hm, sounds plausible.  Certainly sounds about right from personal experience.  Maybe the weather will be nice this weekend.  Forecast seems to be improving.

5 Lessons from Apollo

Article over at Politico: Five Lessons from Apollo for the New Space Age. TLDR version:

1. "Innovation on demand" works but is unpredictable.
2. Incentives matter.
3. Rivalry matters.
4. NASA is good at development but bad at operations.
5. Public cheerleading is overrated.

I don't agree 100% here, especially on item #4, but it is a good quick read with some significant ideas to ponder.  No matter the few flaws at the article, learning from past lessons is always cheaper than re-discovering.

A Busy Week of Many Small Items

There hasn't been a lot to post lately, so here are some micro-posts to fill in the week:

• Nice MTB ride last Sunday.  Bugs were vicious, so there are no pictures.  Got 27 miles in.
• Looks like the Morganza Spillway may not be opened after all.  link at nola
• Attended a colloquium today about the 50,000+ year old cypress tree stumps on the bottom of the Gulf off of Alabama.  Nothing really new that wasn't blogged about here last year.  The speaker btw, DeLong, is one of the diver/scientists in the video at the link.  Again, nothing new, but I did get to hold a piece of recovered wood.  How often do you get to hold something from a current investigation that's about 10x older than the Egyptian pyramids?  So that part was cool.
• Speaking of cool, we had a little front blow through yesterday.  Days are still hot, but this morning the house thermometer read 67F on the back porch.  That's a cold, dry arctic blast by June standards.
• Looks like rain this weekend though.
• Still plugging away at #3 in John Ringo's Black Tide Rising zombie novel series.  Probably won't bother reviewing here beyond saying that they're a glorious waste of time, completely indefensible as works of literature, and are compulsive page turners.  Just when I'm sick of the improbable action and am leaning toward swearing off the series, an interesting twist happens and I'm down for the next installment.  Trapped like a rat.

More later.  I'm not going anywhere, but there may be a little bit of summer slowdown.

Something New and Unexpected

News of this new radio popped over the transom this evening:



Apart from a minimal and cryptic non-story at qrznow, a single youtube demo video, and a Spanish club page with the same pictures, there's no real info out there about the device.  It looks like the slick little ultra-portable QRP radio everyone wants.  On the other hand, it really has popped up out of nowhere and it vaguely smells of vaporware.  On the third hand, those pics of circuit boards at qrznow are awfully convincing.  Time will tell.

If this turns out to be for real, expect a review here in the medium-near future.

60 Years Ago Today: X-15 First Flight

Today marks the 60th anniversary of the first unpowered drop flight of the X-15.  Here's a nice summary at This Day in Aviation.  Since then we have developed a whole gamut of manned spaceflight technologies, been to the Moon, successfully built a small fleet of spaceplanes, and built a series of space stations.  Robotic exploration of the solar system is 100% on track, and next up will be a systematic search for traces of life on Mars.  There now exists a constellation of satellites for communications, weather observation, and research applications.  Space telescopes have literally opened our eyes to previously-unguessed behaviors of the universe.  Moreover, we are currently seeing the dawn of reusable commercial launch systems, for both manned and unmanned flights, as well as – face it, we all want to go – space tourism.

It is easy to say "but we haven't been back to the Moon, and what about Mars?" and be all down in the dumps.  And, true, events have not unfolded in the dramatic ways that the golden age of sci-fi predicted.  But realistically, we're not doing badly with getting out into and staying in space.  It is a hard project, probably harder than anything else humanity has ever done.  Hard to do technically, sure, but even harder to fund and harder yet to keep pushing out toward some poorly-defined yet clearly worthwhile goals.  But we are making progress.

In the meantime, it is good to reflect on the fact that more time stands between us and that first X-15 flight than between then and the Wright brothers' first flight.  Also, at $0.99 for the kindle version or about $8 in paperback, it's a good time to pick up and read Scott Crossfield's autobiographical account of the X-15's development.  For a review of it at this blog last fall, click here.

More New Antenna

A while back I built a 2m monoband slim jim from 450 ohm window line (notes here).  Works great, and I've used it many times while backpacking and camping.  But I thought it'd be cool to have 70cm capability too.  Those get a little complicated, so I ordered one from N9TAX's place.  Arrived yesterday and the rain let up enough that I could hang and test it today (more on that in a minute).  Ten feet of attached RG-58 cable, straight to an SMA connector: no fuss, no muss, no adapters, and minimum weight, 0.48 lbs in fact.  Perfect to use with the FT-60 HT, it gets the antenna up about 15'.  That's out of most ground clutter, gives a little extra range, and is an easy height to hang.  There's a 16' cable option, but that just seems like extra weight for how I intend to use this thing.  Nicely made, as sturdy as the monobander I built but with a helping of "we've built thousands of these things" polish.  And, of course, it'll work on 70cm.

So... how well's it work in real life?  Reached the Biloxi 2m repeater (25 miles) and the Diamondhead 70cm repeater (6.7 miles), with good reports from other hams on each, all at 5 watts.  That's about all I could expect it to do.  This is that easy solution when you need a little more range than an aftermarket whip antenna can give, without going to a full-on base setup.  Perfect for taking along hiking or biking.  It's not so much a mobile solution as a portable solution, but it for this level of performance it doesn't get much easier.