And then a few days later, on what Clinton thought was a Friday, a couple of AM broadcast radio stations began operation. He could easily copy the station in Greensboro and another in Knoxville. These were serving up much needed information though it became apparent these weren’t live broadcasts, rather, they were recorded messages played in a long, continuous loop. He settled-in for what would be a nearly two hour listening session that did a good job of filling in the blanks and outlining the situation, though there wasn’t good news.
The United States had suffered military attacks from enemies outside the continent and simultaneous attacks from within, though no enemies were named. Washington, DC had been destroyed by a nuclear missile attack with more than a million people assumed dead there. Travel would not be permitted in that area for the foreseeable future. The federal government had been effectively liquidated and the nation was being divided into multiple regions though not along state lines. The message said this was being done to improve efficiencies in recovery efforts and to permit local areas to make their own decisions based on various situations.
It was believed that Washington, DC was the only area of the country to suffer a direct nuclear attack, though more than a dozen NEMP events had taken place. These “nuclear electromagnetic pulse” weapons were nuclear bombs detonated at high altitude over several regions at almost the same time. The impact of these were damaged or destroyed power lines and power generation equipment as well as the damage or destruction of most exposed solid-state electronics components. The results varied by region and was determined by the altitude of the detonation and the type of ground cover in the impacted areas. Some automobiles parked in underground garages were unaffected, though most autos manufactured after 2000 would have been damaged.
The message warned of additional food shortages as crops had not been planted in time this year to produce any significant yield and the provisional governments across the country would soon meet to discuss mandatory rationing of food.
Clint assumed this meant the distribution of food from either government warehouses or other storage facilities as his on-air conversations with hams around the area confirmed long ago that all the retail establishments had been looted and destroyed. There was no food to be rationed from the Piggly Wiggly and this made him curious about where the government might keep stockpiles of food as it was something he never even wondered about.
You go to the store every week and pick up groceries… Not anymore.
The news about the loss of life was as sobering for what it didn’t say. Losses weren’t being reported in numbers but in percentages. It was estimated that more than thirty-percent of the nation’s population was lost during the first 90 days following the event. That was staggering. If you assume the population was 300 million, then as many as 90 million Americans had died. And the news said fifty-percent loss was expected by the end of the first year. Damn. 150 million dead would make casualties from all US wars combined look like jack squat.
At that news, Clinton switched the radio off. He needed time to process what he had just learned. The destruction was stunning to consider, but he was more overwhelmed thinking about the necessary recovery efforts and suddenly lost all hope that the nation would ever recover from what had transpired. And then he began to think how things wouldn’t get back to any kind of normal in his remaining lifetime, even if he lived to be an old man in this cabin. Surely it would take a century to set things straight. After a long pause and a few tears he switched the radio back on in time to hear the Martial Law announcement.
There was a lot said about no travel zones and hours when citizens were permitted to be in the streets and there were a few new regulations related to dealing with dead bodies. Despite the macabre instructions, the most chilling thing he heard was that ownership of all private land had been rescinded and the entire territory claimed now to be government property. His hundred acre refuge on the side of the mountain, paid for in hard earned cash many years ago, was no longer his. It belonged to the provisional government. While this was the least of his worries, it badly bothered him. If they can do this, what can’t they do he wondered?
Wanting a more local update he was tuning around on 75 meters just after dusk that evening hoping to catch someone from the ham radio club in Asheville and wasn’t disappointed. The chatter was more upbeat than he expected it to be though having power, even on limited days was better than nothing. When the roundtable conversation got to him, he had a few comments about the apparent collapse of industrial farming and then he asked what was happening with the elderly population in nursing homes around the area. After a few seconds of silence his friend Lewis replied, “Uhh, Clinton, there aren’t any old people anymore. I don’t know anyone over 60 who is still alive down here. Sorry, I thought you knew?”
He had a hunting rifle and a shotgun along with with a supply of ammo, but most of his hunting was done with a bow. Clint wanted to conserve his ammo for as long as possible. He brought a handgun with a box of bullets for it from his home in Asheville, but he considered this only for personal protection. He really enjoyed fishing and even the time spent hunting for night crawlers to use for bait. His property included a spring-fed pond about a thirty-minute hike from the cabin where he had been taking crappie and catfish without much effort.
To help occupy his time he spent hours taking meticulous inventory of every resource available to him. For instance, he knew exactly how much ammunition was available for each weapon, and he knew he had 53 commercial arrows on hand. While a few had been lost, most were recovered and re-used. The only thing actually in short-supply was paper. He started with a decent supply of notepads and pencils, but keeping a detailed written inventory, radio logbook, and personal journal was burning through his supply faster than he wanted and he wasn’t sure what he might substitute for paper.
His small supply of propane had been exhausted in the first week. Clint hated that because he really enjoyed his propane cooking stove that he used inside the cabin for cooking and heating water. Without it, he had to use his wood stove which often made the cabin too hot, or move his cooking outside to the fire pit. This worked well of course and wood was plentiful, but a few times he had smelled smoke from wood fires and assumed this indicated the presence of other humans on the mountain and was loathe to give away his location in the same way. But fire was necessary.
Monitoring the power generation was another daily chore. The two solar panels continuously charged a bank of batteries via a charge controller. These all appeared healthy though not wanting to take chances, the panels were wiped clean every few days. Consumption didn’t amount to much, the only real loads being lighting in the cabin, a small exhaust fan used sparingly, his ham radio equipment, and a few display panels that reported the health of these systems. While he had several low-powered HF transceivers available, he used only his Elecraft KX2 at ten watts RF output. The radio consumed very little current on receive, the way he spent most of his time on the air.
The antennas were all constructed from wire and supported by the many tall pine trees surrounding the cabin. Starting with a 1000-foot spool of 18 gage wire, about 800 feet of it remained available. These wires had been knocked down several times. Once during a violent storm and a few more times when some of the elevated radials were broken by what he assumed was deer or other critters. These were repaired by splicing the broken wires as this was another limited, not to be wasted, essential resource.
The lack of weather forecasting caused the most grief. Life would be better planned with some idea of what the atmosphere might deliver over the next 48 hours, a simple convenience taken for granted in better times.
As he considered all this one especially beautiful evening while dining on fresh caught catfish fried with wild leeks, sautéed fiddleheads, and hot sassafras tea, he couldn’t help but feel guilty. The last few months here on the mountain had been more like a getaway vacation than the end of the world. Outside this secluded bubble human suffering must be unbearable and reaching new depths with each passing day. Of course, he had no way to find out just how bad things had become. At least not without descending the mountain and reconnoitering the misery of city life, something he wasn’t yet willing to do.
That would change as news from near and far will soon be received via radio revealing just how bad things had become and dashing any hopes for a quick end to the evil that was tightening its grip on the entire planet.
He told him he was on his way to Boone, North Carolina, and the old-timer said he was going only so far as Blowing Rock and was welcome to come along. Clint thanked him and told him he would be grateful for the ride in that direction and in less than a minute the unlikely pair were on their way. Blowing Rock was just a stone’s throw from his property and Clint was amazed at his good luck. The two talked very little as they rode up the mountain. The power was out at home for both of them, and this was the only vehicle the older fellow could get to start. He had a son in Blowing Rock and just wanted to be closer to family until this ended.
Roughly 90 minutes after he had got into the truck, Clint was climbing out with his backpack and thanking the fellow for his kindness. It wasn’t until the tail lights were disappearing from view he realized he didn’t get the fellows name.
He never saw another human that evening and once it was completely dark, he took a long and circuitous route up to his cabin, hopefully unnoticed. The place looked exactly as he had last left it. He closed the blinds tightly and turned on a single DC lamp. He was exhausted, but too agitated for sleep and decided on a cup of tea. One of the many reasons he wanted to be at the cabin was access to fresh, cold, mountain spring water easily drawn with a hand pump. He had boiling water in two minutes using his Jetboil with a propane heat source and the tea worked as intended. The night air was crisp and cool and he would liked to have had a fire, but didn’t want to draw any unwanted attention so he pulled on an extra blanket, and despite all that had transpired, fell into a deep sleep.
Breakfast was dried fruit and trail-mix that he carried from home. He had some provisions stored at the cabin, all of it MRE’s, no fresh food. That wasn’t a problem, he was a skilled hunter and fisherman and there would be fresh meat soon enough. The first order of business was getting on the air and establishing contact with the hams back in Asheville. The short distance is problematic. It’s too close for HF on most bands as radio signals often skip over local areas. So the immediate task was building and installing an NVIS antenna for 75/80 meters. The Near Vertical Incident Skywave antenna is designed to squirt RF energy straight up so that the reflected component is mostly concentrated over a 100 km to 200 km area. He had brought along printed instructions for such an antenna.
He also wanted to tune around on the higher frequencies to see what news he could glean about the situation. There was a little more amateur radio activity this afternoon, though all he heard was speculation. Actual news was difficult to find as the amateur traffic had nothing definitive. It wasn’t lost on him that just two days ago he was doing everything he could do to avoid main stream news, while right this minute he’d trade a paycheck for it. Life was weird.
After sunset, at the appointed time and frequency, he established contact with others in Asheville. The NVIS antenna seemed to be working well and he relaxed a little knowing that he was safe, fed, and once again in contact with other resourceful radio enthusiasts. He knew this was only the beginning. He needed to keep all this working and feed himself for at least 90 days until the government could get a handle on the situation and things would return to normal. His bank of batteries had just been replaced as were the solar panels. The wind generator was fairly new too. Barring major problems, he should have enough renewable 12 volt power to last at least a year, probably more if he was careful.
But humans rarely get what they want, they more often get what they deserve. The political meltdown that precipitated this ordeal wasn’t an accident, it was purposeful and now would play out to a horrible conclusion. Americans will finally get a much deserved break from the constant bickering and deception of politicians. The next time Americans will go to the polls will be decades from now…
The four nuclear power plants in North Carolina were still online, but idling for a couple of reasons. First, there had been some electronic damage to switchgear and primary substations from the pulse and these would require repair. The more ominous consideration was whether or not sufficient power plant employees would come to work to safely bring these back online. That wasn’t guaranteed as nearly the entire state workforce was staying home waiting to find out what was going on. This was exacerbated by the fact that there was no internet, telephone service, no television, radio or newspapers being delivered.
In all reality, this was the day the earth stood still.
As this new information was being discussed, the two guys who had visited the State Police station earlier had plenty more to add. The governor and his entire staff were attempting to get organized in Raleigh, but they expected it to be three full days before they would get a couple of broadcast radio stations transmitting again. Until then, Martial Law had been declared though with almost no impact given there was no way to announce that news and local law enforcement around the state was hit and miss. The city of Asheville had just purchased a new fleet of police cars the previous year and none of these were working. Best guess was that the pulse event disabled the ignition module or computer in most newer automobiles. This was just an educated guess supported only by the fact that older vehicles were now being seen on the roads.
Immediate problems were medicine, food, and communication. People could survive days without food. But there were no medical facilities open and no way to call for an ambulance if emergency service was required. These items were being read from the government’s Emergency Response Manual, three copies of which returned from the State Police station visit. It was a rather long treatise with 80 chapters that offered no discernible reason for hope. According to the manual, the first to perish would be those requiring daily medical attention, like kidney dialysis patients. Diabetics requiring injectable insulin would likely be next to go as it has a shortened shelf life at room temperature.
In addition to the lack of medical services, medicine would also be in short-supply. With trains, trucks, and automobiles unable to transport and deliver goods, the availability of medicines will quickly create an urgent need. Soon after, access to food would become problematic. The manual went on to detail all manner of bad news and grim scenarios that could only be averted if the crisis ended quickly, an unlikely outcome given what was known to have transpired.
It was the next section in the manual that made everyone in the radio room go silent. The chapter was on the social breakdown of law and order. Three days was the expected amount of time that most would wait before things started to turn ugly. After that, looting and general mayhem should be expected. No place would be completely safe, especially not public buildings that would be difficult or impossible to protect. Like this university building.
Now the conversation in the radio room turned to going home. These hams were used to meeting here in the face of every emergency they had faced. Until now. Suddenly no one thought it a good idea to stick around the club station for long. Better they retreat to their homes and use their own ham radio equipment to help organize the… the what? What could they do to help? This wasn’t like calling for help from the Red Cross in Charlotte after a tornado.
Besides, there was no point in remaining at this station while the power was out. They had generators and 200 gallons of fuel on hand, but that would be exhausted in a few days without guarantee of resupply. Then there was the matter of obtaining food and protecting their own families. They all agreed it would be best to hunker down for the duration in their own homes. They agreed on certain frequencies and times to meet on the air so they could remain in constant contact. But even that sparked a fairly useless conversation about how they would know what time it was without some sort of electronic tools…
It was settled. They would all leave the facility.
Clinton had been giving his own survival a lot of thought too. He had been born and raised in Boone, North Carolina about 90 miles away. His parents had both taught at Appalachian State University, though both had died several years ago. When he settled their estate he purchased a hundred acres in that mountainous region and constructed a small hunting cabin that he visited often. It was well-hidden and off-grid. He had solar and wind power available there and he desperately wanted to believe if he could get there he might survive this ordeal. The problem was the 90 miles. He was a strong hiker, but that would still be a three day hike in good weather and along paved roadways. It could take a week to hike there over less populated, rougher terrain. He figured if he had any chance of making that long journey unmolested, he needed to leave right away.
One day of that “three day” window of peaceful opportunity had already passed and the last thing he wanted was to be caught out on some lonesome byway in the dark of night with desperate, lawless marauders and black bears his only company.
“The badge readers are all down this morning, I’ll need to see your ID”.
As he fumbled with his wallet to retrieve his identification card Clint asked the guard, “many people here today?” The answer was “not many” but there were more people inside the building than he expected. Quickly walking past the main offices, he headed directly to the ham radio club room in the basement. The elevators were down of course, but the emergency lighting in the stairwell provided some comfort as it was the first powered devices he had seen work since leaving his pick-up truck.
When he entered the large area used by the college radio club he noticed dim lighting and could hear at least one of the generators running. As he entered the primary operating area he quickly counted five other faces and none of them were smiling. One of his closest friends, Lewis Dinsmore, was first to greet him, “glad you could make it”. Without wasting words Clint asked, “what’s going on?”
“We don’t know just yet, but it’s big. Something happened in the atmosphere over North Carolina a little more than an hour ago. In addition to a lot of dead electronics the power is down over a wide area. Internet and phones too. None of the normal info channels, radio, TV, or CATV are broadcasting. The HF bands were impacted, but these seem to be snapping back now. We’re copying some radio signals and trying to piece it together. So far as we can tell VHF and higher frequencies are working as usual, there’s just nothing being transmitted.”
“The public weather station at Fort Liberty isn’t transmitting. Eddie is preparing to launch a radiosonde so we can take a few readings. That should be in the air in the next 30 minutes. The oddest thing is that we are seeing scattered LoRa activity that are probably autonomous data gathering and mesh relay stations powered by solar. A lot of these have been deployed by hams and non-hams alike in this area over the last couple of years.”
Clint was getting a decent SITREP from his friend, but what he really wanted to know was what these fellows couldn’t tell him. What the hell was going on? Was the United States at war and if so, was it nuclear?
“We haven’t been able to make contact with any authorities yet. A couple of the guys hopped on mopeds and headed for the State Police outpost out on the Interstate, but we haven’t heard back from them yet. Maybe in a couple hours we can all sit down to discuss what we do next, but I’m at a loss. We never trained for anything like this…”
Clinton thought that might be the greatest understatement of all time. There wasn’t a training manual for amateur radio operators in the event of global thermonuclear war, if that’s what this was. While waiting for more information to trickle into the datacenter he sat down in front of one of the many available transceivers and switched it on, nothing happened.
“Forgot to mention that some of the gear is working, some of it isn’t. We don’t know why the selective outages, but try this one, it still works” Lewis said, pointing to a vintage Drake transceiver. Sure enough, it fired right up and Clint slapped on a headset and went to work. Tuning around on 40 meters was fruitless. He heard nothing. Not even the religious shortwave broadcast stations were sharing any good news on this day. Switching to 20 meters he heard some activity, but it was very light. He thought if power was out across a wide region, hams would probably be running lower power to conserve whatever energy was available.
He quickly scribbled down the call signs he heard, but these meant almost nothing as the FCC no longer required ham radio calls to be associated with call areas and with the computers and Internet being down, he couldn’t look these up to find the location of the stations he heard. He noticed something else, there was practically no band noise. This was often noted during widespread power outages when all the “noisy” electric devices of modern life powered down. It provided a rare moment of quiet radio signal clarity that wasn’t appreciated this time.
It took considerable effort to fight off the panic attacks that were coming in waves as he allowed himself to consider what was going on around him. He knew this was a horrible situation, but he felt a little better being in the company of friends. They would soon have to make some critical decisions, and at least they would make these together. This was definitely not the time to be alone.
Being alone would come soon enough.
Clint had been a licensed radio amateur for thirty years.
On this day he avoided the car radio again, wanting to ignore the news and opting instead to listen to an audio book. The last few months had been highly contentious with a presidential election that was still undecided months after the voting had ended. Anger was rising across America as the highly divided nation was livid that this thing seemed an unending soap opera with no resolution in sight. What was worse, the instability in Washington was creating pockets of instability around the globe with skirmishes breaking on the borders of several nations while threats of terrorist activities flooded the news outlets.
Even more, Clint had noticed a significant uptick in activity around the military base just ten miles to the west. Jets were scrambled several times a day and there was no way for him to know if these were training missions, or if they were dealing with potential threats.
It was all very disturbing and like most people, he decided to just tune it out and let it resolve itself. Things would return to normal eventually, they always did. Still, his mind was wandering, considering these present troubles as he drove toward the University to begin another day.
Then suddenly, his 2021 Ford pick-up truck came to a screeching halt. He tried to restart the engine without luck. He couldn’t understand what was happening. There was no rough idle or anything, the truck simply died. And worse, the information panel didn’t tell him a thing. It was dead too. Dead like an electrical failure. The battery was fairly new, but clearly there had been some problem with the truck and now he would have to deal with that too. Reaching into his pocket he fished out his cell phone only to see it was dead too.
He stood outside his truck, glancing around the small neighborhood that was on his daily commute and everything looked completely normal. At least it did until some of those who lived there walked out their doors looking bewildered as it dawned on them that there had been a power outage. This wasn’t rare, storms took out the power here frequently, though it was unusual now given the nice weather. A car must have hit a power pole. Sure. That was it. It would be inconvenient, but the power company would have it fixed in no time.
Clint didn’t count, but there must have been a dozen people including himself standing in the street without anyone saying a word. The silence was deafening. Why were there no sirens, no sounds of emergency vehicles headed in their direction? Why was it so beautiful yet so quiet. Silence covered them like a thick blanket. Until suddenly the silence was shattered. A woman in a housecoat was standing in her driveway, not far from Clint, pointing at an odd looking thing in the sky that elicited her scream.
They all looked up, in the direction the woman was pointing, to see an odd looking cloud-like formation that was large, but it appeared so far off it could have been on the edge of space. The people standing on University Boulevard moved closer together and began to murmur about what it might be. The professor was standing with them now as a strange foreboding fell over the observers. Clinton had an idea, though he kept it to himself. Given the current political problems in the homeland and unrest around the world, and given the power problem that killed his vehicle and phone, he wondered if this could be the result of an Electromagnetic Pulse triggered high in the atmosphere. Surely not. That’s science fiction and X-files stuff. Isn’t it?
While the others continued to stand and watch, Clint grabbed the backpack with his portable HF gear from his truck, and began walking toward the university. He worried about leaving his pick-up truck in the middle of the busy road although that was needless worry. His truck would be heavily vandalized though it wouldn’t move again for six years when the New Northern Federal Army of the Sixth Region (NNFA6) finally began clearing the roadways around Asheville.
Anyone who spends time and treasure preparing for painfully sustained emergencies reveals at least some pessimism about the manner in which we have organized our world. You have enough concern about existing means of communication to at least think about it. Good for you! There is ample evidence that we’ve built a world with far too much tech to maintain without inevitable failures.
Bitcoin has been getting a lot of press recently as it exploded in value having exceeded $70,000 per coin. Cryptocurrencies can be scary as they don’t really exist. They reside inside the digital realm where nothing really exists except bits. It’s not like a bar of gold or a jar of silver coins in your attic. It ceases to exist whenever the server is turned off. Or as James Howard Kunstler wrote this morning on his blog:
“Imagine: Bitcoin shoots up to a million dollars. You’re a zillionaire! Uh Oh. . . somewhere outside Zanseville, Ohio, a squirrel takes a final chaw through some old insulation on a wire coming out of a transformer. His head blows up in a blue arc flash, and in a few seconds all the electricity goes out from Chicago to Boston. It turns out that seventeen substations in ten states have blown relays, transformers, and switchgear. Some of those components were forty years old and are now manufactured twelve thousand miles away in a country that doesn’t like us anymore. The replacement parts get held up in a Chinese port. The power doesn’t come back on for weeks. Nobody who lives in the eastern USA can get to his Bitcoin wallet, which is just a virtual entity made of computer code residing in a digital “cloud,” i.e., nowhere real.”
The aging power grid in the US will quickly become a major problem in any SHTF scenario that can be conjured. The cost to replace it is enormous and I’m not even certain with $34 trillion of debt the US could afford to revamp the entire power grid system even if it really, really wanted to.
Even if the grid doesn’t technically fail, control of it may fall into the hands of jack-booted thugs who could benefit from pulling the plug on select regions. However that turns out, assuming that power will always be available is a terrible assumption. And the lack of basic power impacts everything…
In 2005 Central Indiana experienced a once in a lifetime ice storm. Power lines were down everywhere and power wouldn’t be restored at my house for eight long, agonizing days. But that was the least of our problems during the first 72 hours. With power off the internet was down. Gas stations had fuel and kerosene in their tanks but without electricity, no way to pump it out of the ground. Portable generators got those pumps running by the 3rd day of the crisis, but with no internet connectivity anywhere in town gas stations and other retail outlets (grocery stores) couldn’t take a credit card. And since power was down on a broad scale, ATM’s were out of service. You got a suitcase full of cash at home and you might do okay, you got ten bucks in your pocket, and you were effectively “broke”.
I’m an engineer, I know how a lot of things work. But that ice storm experience gave me a different perspective about the way things work and believe me, we’ve built most things wrong. I mean, unless you believe in magic, miracles, and a lot of good luck, then just over the hilltop lies an ominous future.
Access to power is the number one concern for surviving the zombie apocalypse. You may disagree, but power generation needs to be very high on your list. Remember, if the power and internet are out broadly, no one will be able to let QRZ know you’ve become a Silent Key. Best you solve the power problem first, long before worrying about stockpiling ammo and MRE’s.
Beyond that, it permits me to properly dispose of the hardware. I have a stack of non-Apple laptops in the garage that I don’t know what to do with. In the “old” days I would remove the hard drive and drill holes thru them before pitching it all in the dumpster. It gave me a sense that I was deleting my old data. But with the advent of solid-state drives and chips that store biometric data, etc. I don’t trust just putting these in the landfill.
For the hardware I return to Apple (iPhones, iPads, Watch, and Mac’s), I wipe these clean electronically then they are supposed to be further scrubbed of my personal data before being re-sold in China. I trust Apple to get that done. At least I trust them more than every other Fortune 500 company who contacts me monthly to let me know of yet another data breach that includes my personal data.
Life in the modern age has plenty of drawbacks and what self-respecting person doesn’t, sometimes frequently, but at least on occasion, long to get off the grid and out of the system? When I was a kid a social security number wasn’t a requirement until you got your first job. But a bunch of us got ours before then because of a particular 5th grade teacher who, as a class project, had us all sign-up for a social security card in an effort to show us how government works. (Hah!) I still have mine, with my 5th grade handwritten cursive signature scrawled across it. We had them laminated because this was an important document that needed to be preserved. Printed in bold text on mine says, “NEVER GIVE THIS NUMBER TO ANYONE”.
Then a few years later, when I went to the bank for my first auto-loan, the lender demanded to know my social security number and people have been asking for it for everything ever since. I don’t know why - why did Radio Shack need my telephone number to sell me batteries? Privacy is a dead concept in this modern world where a trillion dollars a year in fraud and stolen identities is considered chump change and not worthy of a serious fix.
It’s enough to make me want to go all Thoreau and build my own lonely cabin on Walden except then how would I recharge my lovely new laptop?
]]>GNU Radio Conference (GRCon) is the annual conference for the GNU Radio project and community, and has established itself as one of the premier industry events for Software Radio. It is a week-long conference that includes high-quality technical content and valuable networking opportunities. GRCon24 will take place in Knoxville, TN from Sept 16-20.
GPS Antenna Mods Make Starlink Termina Immune to Jammers - Starlink receivers need positioning and precise timing information to function, and currently the best way to get that information is to use a global navigation satellite system (GNSS) such as GPS. Unfortunately, the antenna used for this secondary satellite connection leaves something to be desired…
Year of Linux on the desktop creeps closer as market share rises a little. 25% increase in seven months… But it depends how you count it.
Receiving SSTV From the Russian UMKA-1/RS40S CubeSat - YouTuber ‘saveitforparts’ was recently contacted by the ground controller of the Russian UmKA-1/RS40S cubesat asking if he’d like to try and receive an SSTV image from the satellite.
Become a NASA Astronaut - now recruiting for our next class of NASA astronauts. Selected candidates could fly on Artemis missions to the Moon and, eventually, Mars. Will you be one of them?
Sci-fi and Hi-fi - the microstory of a storyteller who delivers both. Many a technologist has been inspired by science fiction. Some have even built, or rebuilt, entire companies around an idea introduced in a story they read, as the founders of Second Life and Meta did, working from the metaverse as imagined by Neal Stephenson in his seminal 1992 novel Snow Crash.
I’ll explain my plans for this hardware next week.
KiwiSDR s a 14-bit wideband RX only HF software defined radio created by John Seamons (ZL/KF6VO). The KiwiSDR has up to 32 MHz of bandwidth, so it can receive the entire 10 kHz - 30 MHz VLF/LF/MW/HF spectrum all at once. Other than the specifications, the main interesting feature about the KiwiSDR is that it is designed to be operated entirely as an online web based SDR which is accessed over a network connection. Owners can optionally share their KiwiSDRs online with anyone who wants to access it, which also allows for interesting distributed applications.
Production run #2 now sold out. Thanks everyone. We'll get these to you as soon as possible.
— KiwiSDR (@Kiwi_SDR) March 7, 2024
Run #3 is in production. Available in April or May depending on the parts situation. Building more this time..
While rooting around for additional details on the KiwiSDR I stumbled across several new (to me) MW DX radio blogs from the Nordic region:
Interesting tidbit, I placed the order for the KiwiSDR’s using a credit card which was rejected by the issuer in less than 15 seconds. I got a text message telling me about unusual activity on my card as a charge appeared from a New Zealand company and the name on the charge was just “KiwiSDR NZ”. Having been quickly flagged, I was able to confirm it was a legitimate transaction and make it right, but, wow, that all happened in 60 seconds or less.
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