Back from Huntsville Hamfest

Busy unpacking at the moment, but here's a pic from the youtuber forum.  It was an interesting time.

Highlights from the forum (that I can remember):

• Kids who do ham radio often drop out, only to return 20-30 years later.  So be patient.
• 20, 30, & 40-somethings are kind of out on their own if they want to get into radio.  Online resources are a great help for them though.
• Boring club meetings that slavishly follow Robert's Rules of Order are b o r i n g and drive young people away.  Start off meetings with a tech presentation, preferably with gear instead of slides.  Have a business meeting another evening, if you must have one at all.
• "Weekdays at 6pm" (or similar) is prime-time for family and for people with jobs.  Don't try to schedule meetings then, because you'll lose out every time.  Instead, look at Saturdays.
• The successful path to a youtube channel is consistency.  Post a video every week, and you may (may!) start to gain traction after a year and a half.
• Ham radios and other gear do just fine in 14,000 foot falls, but don't do it on purpose.

Now my one question:

1. What is it with the beards?  Twelve of the seventeen YouTubers had beards, and that's including the one woman on the panel.  (Just to be clear, she's one of the four without.)  I have no idea.  Shoulda asked, but allergies were tearing my sinuses up at the session.
   

More – much more – tomorrow.  Or possibly later in the week.

ps: Link to the hamfest's web site.  Also, here's a pic of some of the panel, shamelessly swiped from the web site.  Six out of seven sporting at least a mustache.  I mean, what's up with that?

Trits Making a Comeback?

Maybe.  "Trits" – three-state logic, as opposed to the more familiar two-state logic bits, have a poor track record in practical development.  Of course, that was during the 1960's-70's in the USSR, where many good ideas got ground up by overwhelming bureaucracy, so maybe in the 21st Century we can finally get it to work.  Anyway, go read the Article at Quanta online magazine.

Onward to the image shamelessly swiped from the article:

Nah, those three wheels just aren't going to cut it.  Cute picture though.  I'll guessing that three-state logic won't work out this time either, though the jury is still out and the idea is very much worth looking into.

Deer Season, Tate's Hell, CB & VHF Radios, and Useable Ranges

While working Hurricane Debby at the Franklin County EOC this past week, I had a chance to talk with a deer hunter who's been bootlegging on the 2m ham band with his buddies.  Mostly, he was amazed that I could talk from Apalachicola to people in Pine Log and Alligator Point, 28 and 39 miles away respectively, when the best they could get was about 5 miles truck-to-truck.  I told him about the repeater in Carrabelle, said the deer hunters were welcome to use it, but they'd have to license up first, and that it would give them complete coverage of Tate's Hell Swamp and most of Franklin County for that matter.  And we both agreed that that last part, licensing up, would be a sticking point.  (it's pretty easy though, here's how)

Then I started thinking, they ought to be using CB.  Is CB all that bad?  With FM mode now allowed on CB, would that help?  Well, let's use the Egli model and find out.  First, solve this equation for d, the useable transmission distance for some given minimum reception level – use 2.87x10^-13 watts for PR, 3 dBi gain and 8' height on both antennas, and plug in 27 MHz & 4 watts for CB.  Try it for both AM and FM modes (adjust the net gain down by -13 dB for AM here, using results from this paper).  Then repeat again for 2m ham, at 145 MHz & 50 watts on FM mode.  (Don't forget the unit conversions.  We want miles for deer hunting, we're not playing some damn metric soccer game here.)  Got all that?  Want to do the math or just cut to the chase?  Right, I thought so.  Here's what we get:

CB, AM: 2.4 miles

CB, FM: 5.0 miles  <-- winner

VHF, FM: 4.1 miles

Those numbers look about right.  Things will vary a lot, but it's a starting point.  We can tweak up the VHF to 65 and 80 watts, two other common maximum powers.  That only gets us out to 4.4 and 4.6 miles.  That's not nothing, but not all that much either.  CB on FM still beats it out by a noticeable margin.  Why?  2m ham has a 5x shorter wavelength than 11m CB.  More wavelengths to cover the same distance, more loss.  It's just that simple.  I can see why deer hunters shifted to VHF years ago though.  It just about doubled their range over old-school AM CB, quadrupled their coverage.  Great.  The shift to FM CB changes all that.  Times change, technology changes; adapt or get fossilized.

Now look at the costs.  A basic AM/FM CB at this site is $54.  A similarly basic Yaesu 2m FM at this other site is $180.  Antennas for the same quality are about the same price, so that's a wash.

OK, the bottom line is CB has 20% better range for 1/3rd the cash.  And FM-capable CB radios can do AM as well, so you can still talk to friends who haven't upgraded.  Lots of advantages there.

I think I'll be buying a new CB soon.

ps 8/12: A friend asked today about how MURS (FM, 2 watts, 151 MHz) or GMRS (FM, 50 watts, 465 MHz) would perform in truck-to-truck: 1.8 and 2.3 miles, respectively.  CB FM still wins by a wide margin.

Funny, that looks famil....

Uh-oh, here's one from last week:

Hmm.  Chill fall weather can't get here soon enough.

Hurricane Debby: And that was the storm that was.

Sure, it's not over for the East Coast, but for those of us here on the Gulf it's over.  Probably.  I've actually seen a tropical system hit the Mississippi Coast, circle up through Alabama and Georgia then into the Atlantic, re-cycle over Florida, and hit us a second time.  Crazy times.  But that's not what this post is about, it's about this data buoy that was right in the path of the storm west-northwest of Tampa.  Take a look at this wave panorama:

And that was when the waves were only about 13' high.  Before it was over they were in the neighborhood of 16'.  Not a good day for snapper fishing, not at all.

I still have a few more notes about this storm, mainly about 2m repeater coverage of Franklin County.  However I'll save those for tomorrow or the next day.  In the meantime I'll be getting some needed sleep.

National Mead Day!

Read all about it at National Today.

Yeah, y'all know where I'll bee after 5.

I Heard It Through the Grapevine

Here, first put on a little mood music.  OK, now get on with reading the post.

While doing a "walk around the yard" check on the HF antennas at the Franklin County EOC last week, I saw this problem and *ahem* solution on the longwire antenna:

One one hand, somebody working in the yard had cut the lower anchor line on the longwire.  It's OK though, because a helpful grapevine using the antenna for support already had a strong grip and became the new bottom anchor line.  Worked out in the end.  We weren't using the longwire for much anyway these days, other than occasional WWL New Orleans broadcast reception.  I'll probably just leave it up this way until we move the entire EOC in a year or so.

Weird stuff happens around here.  As another song says, "In the tropics they come and they go."