While we have all witnessed the stunning loss of perceived wealth in the markets, followed by this government and others dumping supernatural amounts of cash into the bottomless pit of the credit markets, the next roadblock on the road to recovery will no doubt be a stunning acceleration of job losses.

Anyone who thinks they are completely immune from the pain to come doesn’t have a firm grasp on reality.

One head of this Medusa-like problem is that America no longer creates enough things of real value to permit us to manufacture our way out of the problem.

The great thinkers of two decades ago who decided that manufacturing was a dirty endeavor and should be exchanged for a “service economy” or worse an “information economy” - and those who supported these foolish notions deserve to be dispatched to the gallows for the good of the nation.

Lest we all forget Economics 101; real wealth is created by converting raw materials into finished goods. Simple as that. Our society has a need for plumbers, lawyers, doctors, and auto repairmen, but those disciplines don’t create one penny of new wealth; they simply cause currency to move from one hand to another.

An even bigger nugget of nonsense is believing that moving pixels around on a liquid crystal display somehow creates wealth in the economy. Google is undoubtedly one of the biggest Silicon Valley success stories of the last decade, but the income produced by Google simply flows from traditional marketing and advertising companies to the Google bank account – there’s no actual creation of new wealth derived from serving up advertisements on a Web page; compelling as that may seem to be.

So as we sit here awaiting further fallout from the financial tsunami, I’ve been going over the budget with a fine-tooth comb as I imagine you may have too. Some of the low-hanging fruit of opportunity to slash our expenses seems to be in the many small ticky-tacky fees that have attached themselves to our family economy like those little sucker fish on the belly of sharks.

You know what I’m talking about; all those “for just $10 more a month you can get unlimited text messaging on your phone”. Or the fifteen extra dollars a month for the HD Network on cable; or the twenty extra dollars a month for digital CATV, etc.

I’ve watched these small monthly add-on fees slowly grow into an impressive financial industry of their own. So in addition to waiting at least another year to buy a new car, I’ve been spending a lot of telephone time (most of it on hold) this week trying my best to cancel most of these little cancers before they metastasize.

One of the benefits of a bad economy is the lengths some of these operators will go to keep a customer. Want to slash your CATV bill? Call them and tell them you want to cancel your account. Next thing you know you will be wheeling and dealing your way to a better rate. Ditto for the cell phone company and the storage building I lease.

There’s nothing like a recession to magnify the value of the consumer even in this fuzzy new semi-socialist world in which we have been transported by the giant Ponzi scheme of American enterprise that formerly was known as capitalism.

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It’s a free download and something new to play with from Microsoft. Oh, and of course there is a blog.

I came to southern Georgia on July 12th and have been back home exactly one time (for a week) in the interim. While I do generally work on the road for half of each year this has been an extended adventure by any previous measure. I usually work in places where getting home on weekends is possible. But in this case, I almost feel like I’ve been away at boot camp or something like it.

Next Saturday morning I will load the car and head north. If memory serves me correctly, it’s about a 13 hour drive and I haven’t yet decided if I want to make that in a single day or split it into two. I keep thinking that after 19 weeks in a hotel what’s another night but then again, after 19 weeks in a hotel who wants one more night? I suppose that will be a game time decision.

Anyway, I will spend the rest of the year at home and off work so you will have to excuse me for beginning to feel a little like a lottery winner!

Once I get back home I plan to resume production of the Long Delayed Echoes podcast. I’m also kicking around the concept of launching a new program focusing on ham radio “off the grid”. Along the way I will be producing (and selling) book length audio CDs of previously published old short-wave radio adventures.

Those efforts will leave much less time for blogging and I wanted to let you know in advance to expect a decline in postings here by me. My server lease expires in a few weeks and I had seriously considered not renewing it. There are so many options for free Web space these days that it almost seems silly to pay annual fees for servers and bandwidth. But common sense has apparently taken a leave of absence and I have renewed the lease for another year – my seventh with this domain.

Going forward, all of the podcasts will continue to be available here, along with my occasional pontifications — and you can expect to find postings from a few very special guest bloggers in the coming days.

I figure we might as well stick together here as we watch the world-wide economy completely crater around us.

You bring the popcorn.

One day we will come to learn that the wholesale abandonment of this infrastructure will have been the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the hobby.

But even if that bold declaration doesn’t pan out, I don’t see how the casual observer can look back on what we had then and compare it with what we have now and not conclude that we indeed tossed the baby out with the bathwater. Just for reflection, spend a few minutes reading the article below.

It is was written by ZL5BA, whose packet-radio station was located at the Greenpeace base in Antarctica. It appeared in the November 18, 1988 edition of ‘Gateway’ – the ARRL Packet-Radio Newsletter. Compare it to the fledgling D-star system or Echolink and tell me that ham radio hasn’t taken a few steps back from where we once were:

Outside is a roaring blizzard, gusting to more than 80 knots, the temperature rises form -35 degrees C to a “balmy” -10 degrees C when the wind is still. But that still makes the experience to exposed flesh, corrected with the wind chill factor, the equivalent of lower than -36 degrees C. But, who cares? As long as the antennas survive, one just puts one’s feet on the linear amplifier and calls “CQ OSCAR.” That is the scene of the southern-most Amateur Radio station with packet-radio DCE gateway capabilities.

When Greenpeace was organizing its base in the Antarctic a few years ago, it seemed a good idea to fit it with ham radio gear for emergency and social communications purposes. This would be in addition to the commercial satellite system (Inmarsat) and the commercial HF telex system (SITOR). The geostationary satellite used by Inmarsat is a bit hard to access as the southern location of “World Park Base” at 77 degrees, 38.1 minutes South and 166 degrees, 24.6 minutes East, so the obvious alternative was to experiment with polar orbiting satellites, and Amateur Radio’s UoSats came to mind.

The first year of operating (1987), we experienced some hardware problems and it turned out that the antenna rotator could not stand up to the conditions found at the site. During 1988, upgrades were gradually implemented to an almost self-running OSCAR station. I gingerly downloaded the first message from the satellite at 0835 UTC on July 29, 1988. After getting the hang of things, I uploaded the “hurray!” message to G0/K8KA at 1723 UTC.

The wide spread between these two accesses indicates the interesting effect of being located near the poles. Theoretically, we can “see” the satellite on each and every orbit and the visibility varies from 11 to 16 minutes. However, the surrounding mountainous terrain, covered with reflective snow and ice layers, limits the practical access periods during the lower elevation passes. Anything below 20 degrees elevation is severely affected by multipath fadings. And then we have this monster of an obstruction to our northeast: Mount Erebus.

We do make use of Mount Erebus, though, as a passive VHF/UHF repeater for QSOs with nearby Scott Base, New Zealand’s research station. We are lucky to have a number of active hams there this year. Even though they are only 25 km SSE from us, we have no line-of-sight path and the VHF handheld transceiver access is almost impossible. We have discovered that if both of us beam towards Mount Erebus, we can get S9+ signals. Interestingly, the bounce is very frequency dependent and it changes after a fresh snow build-up. The signal varies from S1 to S9+ just by QSying 100 khz. In any case, ZL5BA is also a DCE gateway to Alan, ZL5BKM; Paul, ZL5CCV; Malcolm, ZL5TFM; and Stan, ZL5AP. Pity they take their VHF/UHF and packet-radio gear with them when they go home next October. Let us hope for hams in their replacement team!

Getting back to our DCE station: it is very well-equipped, much better than I could afford at my QTH. The VHF rig is an ICOM IC-271H and the UHF rig is an ICOM IC-471H. To run the DCE operation, two industry-compatible computers are used, one for control of the antenna rotator and one to command the UoSat, for uploading and downloading messages and for control of the PTTs. The software used for the satellite pass prediction with EGA-colored footprint display and real-time rotator control calculations is Graftrak II, which required an 8087 co-processor.

The grease in the Kenpro KR-5600B azimuth/elevation rotator was replaced with low-temperature silicon grease, which should bring the moment that it ceases from the original -25 degrees C to -73 degrees C. We were also limited in the length of the VHF cross-Yagi antenna to 2X7 elements to reduce the effects of wind-loading. The UHF cross-Yagi is 2X9 elements. The rotator/computer RS-232-C interface is Mirage’s MTI.

Well, that is about it from us down here. Just keep those messages rolling in! I am sending fortnightly journals of our personal experiences of the four of us down here via the DCE to GB3UP’s PBBS and you are welcome to read them and send up any comments. Of course, this article was also sent by DCE.

From Sjoerd “SoJo”, ZL5BA via Jeff Ward, G0/K8KA

I found it fascinating given that broadcasting was a mere decade old at the time it was written, yet it was more than obvious that radio had already changed the world in more ways than Marconi and the fathers could have possibly imagined.

There was even a none-too-flattering reference to the lowly radio amateur tossed in for good measure but more on that later…

The author detailed the way that radio had quickly become recognized as an effective tool for government propaganda – and in the process, uncovered the naïveté of those who underestimated the power of the medium at their own peril.

Radio waves have absolutely no respect for national boundaries and where one nation installed a powerful new transmitter, a neighboring state would counter in a sort of Cold-War like escalation. The motto of the British Broadcasting Company may have been “Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation” but the truth was that radio was broadcasting more war than peace.

In Europe, radio transmitters appeared along frontiers, facing one another as border fortresses used to do.

“Along the boundaries of Silesia four rival stations now stand within 40 miles of one another. It is hardly likely that these locations are the evidence of a pacifistic policy. When Germany set up the Muhlacker station on the Alsace border and France countered with the powerful Strasbourg transmitter, a sigh of relief went up in international radio circles because the French refrained from broadcasting the “Marseillaise” during their station’s inaugural ceremonies last Armistice Day.”

It seemed obvious that these nations weren’t just speaking to other nations, but were beginning to shout. In Europe a technological race was underway to build the most powerful transmitter – three times the (then) American limit on transmitter input power. 50,000 watts soon became 120,000 and then 200,000. Not to be outdone, the Russians soon pledged $45 million dollars for the creation of their own 500,000 watt “super station” from which they would broadcast to the world.

Governments were becoming more and more particular about words. Propaganda was a recognized sin, deadlier than the old seven. Governments, that after a century of printed journalism had hardly learned to tolerate freedom of comment in a foreign press and were similarly aghast over a single phrase in a foreign broadcast.

The world of international broadcasting also had to discover what radio amateurs had long since figured out: the world exists in a variety of seasons and time zones!

“The simplest problem of international broadcasting is time: a concert sent from New York at one o’clock Thursday on a spring night is heard in San Francisco on Wednesday night, in Poland on Thursday afternoon, in New Zealand on Friday, and in the Argentine in the autumn – all within one second.”

Beyond the differences in nations that can and often do lead to war, there were cultural conflicts enough to fill volumes.

“The argument of technical difficulties is coupled with the broadcasters’ belief in the superior quality of the home program. Asking at a New York broadcasting headquarters “why so little Europe?” you are told “Americans are so accustomed to good programs that they will not stand for the inferior quality of European broadcasts.” If you travel to London and ask broadcasters there why they have so few American or Continental rebroadcasts, you are told that the standard of British broadcasting is so far ahead that “we doubt our people do much listening now to foreign stations.”

And the message wasn’t the only thing that brought conflict; there was no unanimous acknowledgement of the invention of the very medium itself!

“American listeners heard, after a nod to Marconi, principal credit (for the invention of radio) was confined to the research laboratories of the large American electrical companies. A British history of wireless contains mostly English names and the Marconi Company, Ltd. A French encyclopedia emphatically ascribes all the blessings of “le broadcasting” to a savant, modeste autant qui’illustre, un Francais, don’t le nom brille d’une gloire mondiale. German books hark back as firmly to Hertz.”

American tourists were disturbed to find in three or four European countries bronze monuments to the inventor of the telegraph and telephone, all bearing foreign names. As if any American schoolboy could not name the Americans who invented those things, forgetting perhaps that Bell was born and trained in Scotland and Morse first designed his instrument on the ship home after a long stay in Europe.

Shortwave listeners will appreciate the whimsical description of the sounds from that age gone by and it should be no wonder that most radio amateurs baptism into the brotherhood began at the altar of shortwave radio:

“With a good set you can make fascinating journeys by radio, though you find the air surprisingly crowded and ripped with government stations’ code messages to fleets and colonies. You can pick up the music box signal of Budapest, the nightingale note used by Italian stations, the shrill bell of Fecamp, or the deep boom of Strasbourg, the “Give akt” of Baltic stations, the “Hier sind” of German, the Dublin “Radio Ath Cliath e seo” and the “A-ah-hota see-a-ta” of Madrid.”

Little has changed in the world when it comes to government mistrust of mediums of change like radio or more recently, the Internet. At the start government laid hands on the radio to control it, as in the past they also took charge of telegraphs and telephones, and frequently of railways, all “elements of the national defense.”

Consider how the power of radio fanned the flames of revolution and stuck cold daggers of fear into the heart of the status quo.

“Fear was widespread last spring when the Spanish revolution succeeded. Not only were Mediterranean dictatorships opposed to broadcasting from Madrid, but in South America a panic of radio fears arose. That first exuberant broadcast of President Zamora to the United States was relayed also to the Argentine at the insistence of a Buenos Aires newspaper. In Madrid you could hear, relayed back, the cheers of the appreciative throngs in Buenos Aires. The Argentine government immediately suppressed the offending newspaper, and there were no more broadcasts there.”

Of the medium’s power, governments knew enough to fear deeply. A revolution in Brazil was prompted by radio broadcasts unsympathetic to the government causing the president of that nation to attempt to censor radio – going so far as to send police to all the radio shops to get the names of purchasers of sets; the police then went to the homes of radio owners and took away the tubes!

When the revolution succeeded many vengeful listeners smashed and burned the shops of radio dealers who had “betrayed them”.

Jamming undesirable broadcast propaganda was one tactic employed by governments and by radio amateurs with some success.

Europe probably had more reservations about Russia’s broadcasting practices than the United States in 1931 simply owing to proximity. Russian stations were famous for plopping down on any frequency, occupied or not, and broadcasting their own propaganda. You can’t really blame them – Russia wasn’t even invited to the first world conference in Washington where radio wavelengths were coordinated.

And in Great Britain, the life-saving ring of radio marine signal stations around England (on which ships rely to steer) just so happened to transmit on a frequency that effectively jammed Moscow from being easily received in the United Kingdom.

Now here is the part you may have been waiting to read — the radio amateur is indicted as an effective “jammer” of propaganda:

“Finally there’s another element being heard from: the amateur. Hitherto he has constituted in every country much the most international element in broadcasting. But he, too, helped turn what might have been the most peaceful of occasions – the opening of the Vatican radio station by the Pope – into a bellicose affair. Deliberate interference was so widespread that the papal message was ordered repeated for a dozen countries, while Moscow was indicted as the marauder by a righteous world.

But it seems the interferences were various. Paris listeners, for example, found the Vatican wave jammed first by some distant northeastern station, second by a French station, and third by a French amateur (repeating the Morse letter “b” with good power) – all of which cleared out as the papal words ceased.”

The article concludes with a prophetic warning from the author. Just two years after putting these words to paper, Adolph Hitler would begin his ascendency to power and before two more decades would pass, “science” would discover even more horrendous methods to distribute death and destruction to the masses:

“Radio in the hands of a dictator and the bureaucrat may become a means of oppression and a source of inflammatory propaganda. Threats and fears, hostile radio barriers and controversies promise little for human kind. “Science”, which made for peace, devised the horrors, the gas, and liquid fires of the last war. The throttling of radio may bring about a result quite as hideous.”

1. Hams don’t build anything anymore?
2. Most ham radio conversations are boring?

You might have even have read something like that here a time or two. But what you will see below, taken from an Uncle Wayne (Green) editorial lament penned exactly fifty years ago (November 1958) sounds awfully similar.

I suppose we could say that if ham radio is truly going to hell, it  must be an incredibly long and arduous journey…

From CQ Magazine November, 1958 by Editor Wayne Green, W2NSD:

“Two things worry me about ham radio. They worry me not just because I can see them happening, but because I see them happening and don’t know what to do about it.

1) We don’t build any more. The number of hams who build any of their own gear is dwindling into one over infinity squared. And don’t you try to count kit assembling as building either… it isn’t and you know it. As our ranks of home constructors thin we also fall to a lower technical level as a group. In this our own growth is annihilating us by providing a large enough market for our commercial exploitation. It just isn’t economically sound to buy anything but commercial equipment anymore.

2) Most QSO’s are a crashing bore. This theme has been played for years in the letters (to the editor) column. The result of all the attention lavished on it is that things are getting worse than ever. Thank heavens for sideband and the remaining stand of old timers who have sought refuge there from the rig describers who VFO up and down the bands looking for some hapless station so they can again repeat their well rehearsed station description”.

Hmmm… the more things change, the more they stay the same…

Accordingly, I’ve unsubscribed from several of the programs that have been mainstays until recently:

• This Week in Tech – I still like Leo Laporte and his posse, but the program seems to have become poorly organized and much less informational than in days gone by and I just don’t have time to follow the wandering dialogue.
• MacBreak Weekly – This one is even more random than TWiT and besides, my interest in all things Mac has plummeted since buying another PC.
• Tekzilla – This was the last video Podcast I had been trying to follow. I enjoy the content but as with all video, it demands focused attention making it unsuitable to follow along while I am walking, driving or doing anything else.

I haven’t subscribed to the ham radio news sources (ARRL, TWIAR, Newsline) for quite awhile as these consist mostly of old news. “Old” being relative – if you follow ham news online daily and the ham blogs, then these weekly audio programs are not much more than a rehash of information that is no longer “news”.

What remains have become my favorites and I wouldn’t want to be without them:

• Are We Alone - a weekly hour-long radio program features top scientists talking about the latest in genetics, paleontology, technology, physics, and evolutionary biology - as well as cosmology and astronomy. Top-notch production with high-value content.
• Inside Europe – The international German broadcast service, Deutsche Welle produces many exceptional programs including those for an English speaking audience. The weekly “Inside Europe” provides a unique perspective on happenings in Europe not available in US news.
• Beethovenfest - Deutsche Welle presents 11 free live performances from this year’s Beethovenfest. Renowned conductor Kurt Masur leads the Orchestre National de France in all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies at the festival.
• Kunstlercast - a weekly audio program about the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl with author James Howard Kunstler.
• Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures - Founded in 1999, the Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures are presented on six Wednesday evenings during each school year at Foothill College, in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley.

And that’s all of the Podcasts that I’m following at the moment. Like I said, I have really paired things down as my commute time has all but disappeared.

Oh, by the way, while I frequently lament that no decent music has been created since at least 1979, I have become a secret fan of Jack Johnson and his smooth, laid-back original sound and now have all his albums on my iPod.

So what about you – what’s on your iPod?

Let me take a few minutes to explain as I want to get this in writing for future reference.

The Long Emergency is the title of a book written by James Kunstler and published in 2005.

In it, the author details what he sees as a protracted and very difficult period that will occur as our civilization is forced to move from carbon based fuels to whatever may come next. Kunstler has been a highly regarded commentator on the issue of “Peak Oil” and all that it entails. His analysis covers a much wider range of topics than simply running out of oil – he also presents the social disorder that such an adjustment would likely bring about.

It’s sobering in the extreme.

I highly recommend the book but you can get a good feel for where he is going by reading his article with the same title that was published in Rolling Stone magazine about the time the book hit the stands. Reading the nearly four year-old article now seems a bit like prophecy given where we have seen the price of a barrel of oil go this year and the resulting impact that has had on our economic condition.

Now I won’t regurgitate the entire thing here (and rob you of the chance to read it for yourself), but suffice it to say that I have accepted Kunstler’s premise as a matter of fact.

I believe that over the next decade or even two, life in these United States is going to be adversely impacted by the upheaval caused by the systems we have become accustomed to failing in spectacular fashion. I think we will reach a point where it will be a struggle to even feed ourselves – let alone dream about putting 40,000 miles a year on a Hummer powered by used French-fry oil…

I think it’s quite possible that things like the Internet and cell phones will become obsolete for one reason or another. There is certainly historical precedence for rolling blackouts when energy becomes scarce in regions all over the planet. Having power to your home for only one day a week, or perhaps for only a few hours each day would certainly put an end to cell phones, Internet and television. At least as we know them now.

And while that may seem laughably incredible to you right now, consider that maybe the power remains available but the economic conditions are such that only a few can afford to pay for it – or to pay for cell phone service. Most of those who lived through the Great Depression certainly wouldn’t have had an extra $50 a month for a cell phone account or Internet access – even had it been available back then.

Any way that you cut it, cell phones, the Internet and cable TV are really “luxury” items that we all lived easily (and well) without just a few decades ago. In an era of forced austerity, these would likely be among the first things to be tossed overboard by the general public, especially if they were forced to choose between being able to afford food and shelter or having a cell phone.

It’s against this backdrop that I constantly consider the usefulness of amateur radio.

That is why I have spent time writing about bringing back the amateur packet radio system. That’s why I often write about solar and wind powered rechargeable systems. That’s why I’ve always preferred simple equipment and antennas. That’s why I think we need to continue to practice sending messages via the National Traffic System despite the fact that email has seemingly made it obsolete, etc.

It is important because even in the most dire of circumstances, radio communication could be an essential tool for survival.

Ten years into the Long Emergency when your commercial transceiver has long since quit working and replacement parts are no longer available because the manufacturer went out of business years earlier, will you have the skills necessary to homebrew a simple transmitter and receiver without looking it up on Google?

Will any of us? And if we do, will we have a means of powering it?

These kinds of questions and the related observations are the real narrative behind most of what you will find here. I’m chronicling a future that will be neither pleasant, fun, or easy. A world where survival will be more of a challenge than it has been for the last hundred years.

And I’m doing it now because I don’t think it will be possible to do later…