scott_sanford

After finding a power supply at Rickreall, as related here, I didn’t have much excuse to not get the old Kenwood working. So this morning I drove down to Ham Radio Outlet for the antenna and base that I’d picked out online. (I’d worked out a scenic route to Rickreall that took me past Ham Radio Outlet, but I missed that exit on the way down. I didn’t need to go there anyhow.) I’d been dithering a week or so about this but realized having the radio not working but very close would bug me until I did something about it.
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As some may know, there was a ham radio event in Rickreall on Saturday the 15th.

Getting down there was interesting, as my whim to drive down via McMinnville did not take me by the fastest possible route, but I saw parts of rural Oregon I’d never seen before and drove past the Evergreen Air Museum.

This is basically a large garage sale or flea market, only pretty much everything in the building is obsolete specialty electronics. Want vacuum tubes? They got those. Want back issues of QST? They got those. Want a gigantic radio that the seller assures you worked when his grandfather bought it off some other ham? You have come to the right place.

Among other things I was after a power supply of specific parameters, and I found many that were too small and a few too powerful. (Frustratingly, I was hardly in the door when I spotted a box with the right amp and volt ratings - but it was a battery charger.) There was a lot of other junk. I did find something that I’m pretty sure will work, literally as the dealers were packing up their table to go; they were willing to knock off five dollars to avoid hauling another heavy thing home with them, so lucky me. This was near the end of the event, so by the time I realized that I had everything I needed to get on the air except an antenna it was too late to cruise around for a two meter antenna that would let me test the radio I could now power.

Along with the junk dealers were some Girl Scouts with cookies; this was a good cause and I bought some Thin Mints. I also dropped five dollars into the prize drawing, for the heck of it.

That gave me reason to hang around until the drawing, so I was nearby when they had trouble with the ticket rolling barrel. One got on the PA to announce, “Does anyone here have a Leatherman tool or a pair of pliers?” He started to explain the problem but by then I was at the table with my Swisschamp out, unfolding the pliers. It turned out they just needed to pull out a wooden dowel that locked the barrel rotation.

For the drawing itself tickets were pulled out by the most obviously trustworthy people in the building, a pair of Girl Scouts.

And then something happened that I’d made no plans to handle: I actually won something! I now have a Yaesu VX-6R triple band handy-talkie. Honestly, I have no idea yet what I’ll do with it; my collection of radios is expanding past any plausible need for radios. (I am aware this happens a lot.) I am looking forward to trying it out; my cheap Baofeng often loses reception even in town and I suspect that it’s not all the fault of the tiny rubber duckie antenna.

While I have a CB radio in my car I almost never transmit, only rarely having anything to say. So it came as a shock when I tapped the push to talk key and watched the SWR meter light up to about 3.5 - yikes!

I wasn’t going to let that continue without trying to fix it and over the next few days considered various things that could cause a bad SWR reading. So I started with the simplest option; I found the manual and read up on recalibrating the radio. Once I got that far it took, oh, sixty seconds to run through the recalibration routine. The new SWR? About 1.2, a fine number!

I’m guessing some control got tapped at some point, and since I transmit so rarely it might have happened some time back.

(I'm posting this story to DreamWidth for a friend who's temporarily out of touch via phone.)

My car has a radio. Neepery below...( Read more... )

A while back I noted here that a company called Neuroware (in Japan, naturally) had come out with brainwave controlled cat ears. Now I discover that an American hobbyist has made his own. Apparently there's a real demand for this, at least among some people. I am aware that I know some of these people.

Among other things, this tells me that some SF authors have been much too conservative about what people will get up to as soon as easy cybernetics and/or genetic modifications become available. Once we have a technology, we'll play with it.

So I happen to be re-reading Charles Stross's Halting State at the moment; no big deal, except that this was brought to my attention.

Most of you can skip the URL; it's a proposal to expand the old Multi-User Dungeon text based virtual reality concept onto a multi-platform multi-world system. Among other things, that would let player avatars move from one world to another, and move objects between various servers. It would be modular and expandable. Open source code so anyone with a net connection could run a server. Clients would not need to be desktop computers but would run on celphones – gaming anywhere, any time, connecting to any world.

Aside from the absolutely crappy keyboards of celphones these days, a MUD is absolutely perfect for the smartphone environment; the database size, CPU load, and bandwidth requirements are all tiny by today's standards. (I played on and wrote content for MUCKs on a dumb terminal and a 300 baud modem; I speak from experience.) So what? Two points.

It's really just nerds wanking at each other about software that doesn't even exist yet. But...

It's also the multi-node dynamic VR concept Charles Stross described in Halting State - and instead of a bazillion-euro megacorp doing it, these hobbyists want to write it for kicks.

In my city shabbily dressed people can often be seen standing at street corners holding carboard signs, apparently as an alternative to panhandling from pedestrians. For a long time my friends and I have wondered how practical this really is. So I finally ran the experiment.

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A friend of mine pointed out that in Japan you can now buy cat ears. No, not just costume pieces (nor real cat's ears, yuck), but robotic brainwave-reading ears.

Apparently the headband electronics picks up something it can interpret and moves the ears in response. The company, Neurowear claims this is just the first in a line of, um, something. Their website also has this lovely quote:

"People think that our body has limitation, however just imagine if we have organs that doesn’t exist, moreover we can control that new body?"

Is this not the prelude to SF-nal body upgrades?

For a friend (she knows who she is): a trip to HAARP! ( Read more... )

Apparently this is an actual object.

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