Today is an auspicious day, friends. After 22 years and change, my student loan is a nice, round zero. Done. Finished. Paid in full. For the first time in my adult life, I am debt-free. I owe nobody a god-damned thing. Slow and steady wins this race, sure, but I should never have gotten into …
Author Archives: Shawn
Dead Silent, Dead Battery, Dead Stupid
The 2m section of my Icom IC-706mkII has finally died. Unfortunately, it picked a wrong time to go out: the moment I hit the interstate to head up to the Belton Hamfest. Helluva time to be without a voice, but oh well. Luckily, I had my Baofeng UV-82HP on hand and a connector for the …
Dark Spots
A few weeks ago, a previously unknown-to-me solar observatory in Sunspot, AZ was shut down and evacuated by FBI action. Rumors circulated. Turns out their reason was that an Internet crime had happened at a related IP address. Something about child porn. Troublesome to hear, but whatever. That’s just an appendix. The backstory behind the …
Scattershot
Radiowise, yeah, I know I’m trying to do everything correctly to the best of my abilities, but really, I kinda suck at the radio thing. It’s terrible to look up from your sketchpad and realize you’re really not that good at your hobbies. But here I am. Maybe I should just throw a random wire …
Lost in Transit
So far, my hit ratio for making a successful Winlink connection over HF is 1 out of 20. My antenna just sucks that much, and my radio keeps overheating and turning off the output, and QRM/QRN causes any ongoing connections to fail. And then there’s the difficulty of burning an RMS node by failing the …