ke9v.net

Lunch time conversation with co-workers yesterday fixated on the sputtering economy and all the related fallout. Typically gas prices headline these conversations but in recent days the chatter has turned decidedly more glum.

There’s a palpable feeling amongst working folks all across the land that things are seriously out of whack in the good old USA.

A day hardly passes when we don’t learn of another bank that’s gone belly up while the head honchos congratulate themselves with hundred million dollar bonuses for their performance. Taxpayers have become the favorite patsy for “big business” while the government inexorably looks the other way.

People I work with seem struck with how grandiose our problems have become and yet how lousy are our choices for a new leader to fix them. It’s almost as though both political parties had too much to drink and vomited McCain, Hillary and Obama onto our kitchen floor and are now asking us to “choose one” to take home for four years… “Never in my entire lifetime have I seen a weaker field of presidential candidates and sadly for America, one of them is going to win” said one fellow.

One fellow speculated on where we all thought the best place would be in order to “ride out” the coming bad times. He was talking about moving away to some backwoods location. The replies were well thought out and obviously have been discussed before. That fellow Americans are spending their lunch hour debating where they might move in order to escape an expected breakdown in civil order in the bigger cities was sobering.

Gang activity has pushed its way from Memphis into this area 75 miles to the east. There was a lot of conversation about this and the fact that most of it was “Mexican” gangs which spurred talk about the unwillingness of the government to stop illegal immigration. No one at the lunch table thought the government was unable to stop it — instead, all hands believed that the government was actually promoting more illegals as a way of providing ever more pools of cheap labor to benefit special interests.

And they pointed out one other frailty in the system that, so far as I can tell, has received no media attention and it doesn’t show up in any government “numbers” or statistics — at least not the ones we regularly see.

As the economy has stalled the demand for manufactured goods has followed suit and many plants are slashing overtime. You may think it foolish that folks would come to depend on overtime pay but before you condemn them you need to understand that many factories haven’t hired new workers in years — some of them in decades. Employee benefits are expensive and so many employers have simply ratcheted up the hours worked.

The guys I had lunch with yesterday have averaged 50 hours a week for a solid decade. Without those ten extra hours of time and a half pay, their take home play plunges and they have no disposable income and so the downward death spiral is reinforced on the economy.

Oh, and one other thing… nary a word was spoken about bin Laden or Iraq.

When you’re worried about making your mortgage, buying healthcare, buying groceries and filling the tank with enough gas to get to work and back for the week, it’s really difficult to give a flip about whether the Bush~Cheney Eternal War is making progress or not.

John McCain really should take note of that…

73 de Jeff

Zombies explained … you gotta love Bob.

73 de Jeff

It’s day number seven on the road and tonight will be my 8th straight in a hotel bed.

Travel, new things to see, new things to do and a change of pace can make life on the road seem a bit more glamorous than the stark reality. I’ve been working on the road at least six months of the year since 1983 and can honestly tell you that it has very few redeeming qualities.

I endured one of the indignities of life on the road this morning when I loaded up a week’s worth of dirty clothes and headed to a laundry. “Nice” laundromats simply don’t exist in any part of America where I’ve ever traveled. Fortunately, I can usually get in and get out pretty quick.

One almost never bumps into jet-setters or captains of industry while waiting for a washing machine in a coin operated laundromat. Without fail I’m usually always the only English speaking patron in the joint and I find that sad. Poor folks who can’t afford to buy a washing machine or who don’t live in a place with a washer/dryer hookup certainly cannot afford to spend $20 a week feeding quarters into a machine just to have clean clothes — and so some entrepreneur can profit from that situation.

With nothing better to do in the afternoon, I wandered into a Best Buy where I was immediately swarmed by “associates” and from the time I walked in until I walked out, they were all over me like stink on a monkey. I don’t know if that’s normal store policy or if perhaps being a yankee in a southern retail outlet marked me as a shoplifter, but it was powerful uncomfortable. I also couldn’t help but notice that there were three employees for every customer — that can’t bode well for the store or for the chain — can it?

Later, I visited an antique shop and browsed a lot of books. I chuckled when I realized that I already owned most of the titles that caught my eye. Brenda would kill me if I brought another stack of musty old books home so I kept my money in my pocket. Well, except for one. I found a first edition of ‘North of Fifty-Three‘ written by Bertrand Sinclair and published in 1914. This one isn’t at all rare (you can download the text online from here) but I collect books published by Grosset & Dunlap and this was a good looking specimen and for a mere six dollars, Brenda will probably forgive me.

I stopped at the store on the way back to the hotel and acquired a few essentials. My room has a microwave and refrigerator so I picked up some bottled water, microwavable popcorn, a bag of apples and a carton of Earl Grey tea. Water from the vending machine is $1.25 a bottle so I figure I’m saving enough on water to pay for another trip to the antique store.

Ah, life on the road — it’s just like being a famous rock star on a world tour, don’t you think?

73 de Jeff

While there will always be something new to be discovered about our physical universe, HF radio enthusiasts have come to understand (at least in part) the impact that solar activity has on radio propagation. While we regularly suffer through generally poor conditions at the bottom of each cycle, we can now take solace in the knowledge that the process is cyclical — and given some time, things will very likely improve.

Now consider for a moment that you’re a radio amateur experiencing the conditions of being at the bottom of a cycle — but it just happens to be the first “bottom” since HF was pioneered. Just a few years earlier your shortwave signals were easily received across the Atlantic and around the world but now HF communication wasn’t comporting to what had been previously observed.

It’s a good thing for us that this was observed at that particular moment in the slipstream of time.

Five hundred years earlier and yet another ‘religion’ would likely have been created in order to appease the solar gods. Seventy years later and some silly, multi-millionaire televangelist would likely have blamed the drop-off in HF propagation on one sin or another and we might never have arrived at the truth.

Kenneth B. Warner, then Secretary of the ARRL wrote about this in the February 1931 edition of QST magazine. Read his words and take note that he seemed to understand that the problem was related to solar activity even if he was unable to write with authority on the subject since it was mostly theoretical at that point:

The whole high-frequency world realizes now that, in addition to daily and seasonal changes in the performance of a certain frequency, account must be taken of a long-time change in atmospheric conditions seemingly dependent upon solar activity and therefore believed to be a cycle of approximately eleven years duration. Elaborate transmission measurement made last year are of little value in predicting performance next year. The whole story of course isn’t yet known, for high-frequency transmission is not yet eleven years old.

The bottoming out of long-distance radio signals wasn’t just a concern for the amateur since the advent of radio ushered in the era of broadcast and commercial radio as well. Old Sol also played tricks with these commercial interests:

In the meantime more than one expensive station has been planned and built only to find that the change in atmospheric conditions between the original tests and the completion of the station was enough to upset all calculations, making rebuilding necessary.

With much research and study science has been able to lift the veil on many of the mysteries surrounding the impact of the Sun and its activities with regards to the electromagnetic spectrum that we’ve come to enjoy here on Earth and those early radio amateurs who helped pioneer HF communication should get much of the credit. Their tools were somewhat crude but effective:

Draw yourself a sine curve, one cycle of which represents the sun-spot cycle of 11.1 years. Mark one “positive” loop Summer 1923, the date of the last sun-spot minimum. The next “positive” loop is then Summer 1934, when the next minimum occurs. The intervening “negative” loop is then seen to be the End of 1928, at which time it is known that there was a maximum of solar activity. It is apparent that we are entering the region of most rapid change, crossing the “node” this coming autumn. That is to say, while there will be irregularities, to be sure, it is reasonable to predict that we approach in 1934 a duplication of the conditions in 1923, that for the next several years the DX value of 7mc and 14mc will steadily decline and that by about next winter we should be able to resume trans-ocean two-way communication in the 3500-4000 band!

We’ve since learned that the cycles themselves can widely vary with regards to their intensity and duration, but overall, I’d say KB Warner and the radio hams of 1931 had a pretty good handle on prognostication — wouldn’t you?

73 de Jeff

You might have noticed that there’s been less ham radio content here lately than in previous times. I don’t really consider the blog to be off-track as much as it just accurately reflects my own activity. Radio has become a less integral part of my life over the last few months and my chronicle portrays that fairly well.

Scanning the blogosphere for ham radio related content one quickly discovers that there are personal journals authored by ham radio enthusiasts and then there are info blogs.

The info-content blogs provide much higher bandwidth. These usually take the form of “how-to” articles and in-depth commentary about recent amateur radio news and happenings.

The contest blogs are a good example — these often focus on tips for improving your scores or methodologies for mounting a single op, two radio operation, etc. You’ll find this type of content to be generally less personal and more informational — much of it could just as easily appear in QST or CQ magazine (except for the fact that these publishers look with disdain on ham bloggers).

My blog definitely falls outside the realm of info-content. Despite having been licensed for an eternity and being a certified Old Fart, I’m the last person you want telling you how to build an antenna, or use a grid dip meter, etc. I’ve seen it all and done it all but I remember precious little of it so I almost never write technical articles.

I simply throw a few thousand words a week on the wall here and keep my fingers crossed that some of it will stick. I’d be perfectly content being known as that guy who writes about nothing in particular but folks still want to stop by to read about that “nothing” every day with their morning coffee for reasons that can’t quite be explained.

Besides, it’s not like I didn’t warn you — from the about page:

Our hobby is a strange mixture of technical and social and I don’t feel constrained in commenting about things not directly related. Consider this blog to be a lot like tuning 40 meters on a crisp, cool, Saturday morning. Anything and everything is open for discussion.

Life is all that stuff that happens when you’re not in the shack or on the air — which is why I write about that too.

73 de Jeff

I’ve added a few new blogs to my feed reader in recent days and thought I’d share them. Some are brand new blogs and some are just new to me. All are worth a look:

• Kjell, SM0FOB blogs about his interest in operating on 50 MHz and above, EME (Earth-Moon-Earth communications), digital operating modes and APRS in his Amateur Radio Station blog.
• Brendan, EI6IZ has a new Elecraft K3 and a ham radio Weblog.
• Luigi, IV3YER blogs about contests and DXpeditions and his own preference for CW, RTTY and PSK31.
• Don, AC7FA is a fellow member of the Straight Key Century Club and I just stumbled on his blog for the first time a few days ago. I’m not sure how I could have missed it for so long…

Remember the Ham Band? They just finished another new song/video that describes the whole process of building a modern amateur radio station and at the same time enables the listener/viewer to learn Morse code. It’s quirky but hey, take a look at this introduction in the video below and you’ll get the idea:

73 de Jeff

It’s been a strange and sad week, and not just because I’m 500 miles from home and holed-up in a hotel. Don’t feel sorry for me — Jackson, Tennessee is a great place with lovely weather, friendly people, and I’m staying in a very nice hotel. On top of that, I just polished off a delectable lemon grilled salmon dinner so all things considered, life on this road trip has been pretty good.

But earlier this week brought the news of the untimely passing of LB Cebik, W4RNL. About a day later, access to his Web site was limited by (presumably) the new owner of that content. I make no inference about that move — I saw numerous email messages on various ham radio lists suggesting that folks download the entire site en masse as a way of preserving the body of reference left by Cebik. That probably spooked the domain holder into limiting downloads, but still, it just doesn’t feel right if you know what I mean.

Just for the record, if I drop dead one night please feel free to launch a massive search and download mission on all the data left behind and don’t forget to snag the audio files.

As the week continued we got a fairly stunning view of what the future holds for America and the rest of the world. Does even a day go by anymore without oil hitting a new high while the dollar hits a new low? One report out of Canada sees oil at $250 a barrel just four years hence. That will drive the price of a gallon of gasoline over seven dollars…

These kinds of painful realities tend to get drowned out by ‘American Idol, and ‘Dancing With Stars’.

When it comes to dire circumstances, Americans seem to draw on some mysterious, collective static that can drown out bad news. NASCAR, baseball and football have similar sedative qualities.

Another wake-up call will soon be manifest in the form of shortages and rationing. By mid-summer spot gasoline shortages will become problematic and we’re already beginning to see rationing of certain food staples in select areas of the country — something that two American generations have never witnessed.

A year ago who would have guessed that a Wall Street Journal columnist would be recommending that Americans hoard food as a way of hedging against rapidly rising prices?

But hey — why worry — next week Americans will begin receiving their $600 tax rebate checks which means the cash registers at Costco will be ringing up plenty of new wide-screen television sales so those dollars can make their way back to China post-haste.

w00t!

73 de Jeff