Six Dollars and Change
I got an early start on the weekend today when I left work a little before noon.
I made a quick run to the Books-A-Million where I paid $6.58 for the May edition of CQ Magazine. I don’t mean to sound like Grandpa complaining about prices — but Great Caesar’s ghost! Six dollars and fifty eight cents — the first ‘CQ’ I ever bought cost me 75 cents — but I digress…
I did my usual cursory first pass at the magazine over lunch at McCalisters Deli whose sandwiches and soups are all top-hole but you simply haven’t lived until you’ve had a huge glass of McCalisters Sweet Tea.
One of the main articles in this edition is a review of the TenTec Omni VII and it did little to quench my desire to pick up the telephone and place an order for one. But once again, I managed to talk myself out of it. For now.
Dick, K2RW and Joe Taylor, K1JT had a very interesting exchange in the “Our Readers Say” column. At issue was the effect of airplane enhancement on VHF/UHF signals — something that K2RW had apparently written about in a previous month. Taylor was commenting on how this phenomena can be visually observed using his own WJST software. He went on to explain that he could detect the effects while monitoring a 2m beacon some 150 miles distant with the Newark and Baltimore airports in between his station and the beacon.
This was particularly interesting because it’s a unique aspect of amateur radio that doesn’t require communication with another station. As I’ve come to learn, this kind of activity is a growing facet in our hobby and I intend to write more about it in the coming weeks.
By the way, K1JT is a Nobel prize winning physicist and Princeton University professor — drop that info bomb next time someone suggests that ham radio is something less than a stellar avocation.
Given that this is the May edition I’ll assume that the adverts reflect the proximity to Hamvention.
The Flex-5000 ad with the 24-inch monitor was as sexy as software defined radio gets and the Hiberling PT-8000 looks like it was taken from the engineering section of a star cruiser.
An advert from SteppIR showed off their new Dream Beam 36 that was introduced at the Visalia DX Convention last month and will no doubt be on display at Dayton.
The ‘What’s New’ columnist Anthony Luscre, K8ZT. When did that happen? Last I looked, Tony was channeling QRP regularly on the ARRLWeb. Goes to show what you miss when you only pick up the magazine from time to time.
I guess six dollars and fifty eight cents wasn’t such an awful price to pay. I’ll sit down with it again in the morning and begin taking notes on things I want to follow-up on at Hamvention.
TGIF!
73 de Jeff