You’re seeing this because this is the replacement for my contact form. I have filtering installed, but the spambots are persistent and flood with so much spam that the filter lets some through. I haven’t had a legitimate contact through this form in years, so it’s gone.
Bye, robots.
If you need to contact me, and you know me personally, use a different way.
Sonofabitch.
As it turns out, the 60-ish feet of 50ohm RG-8 coax feedline I “rescued” from the disused tower at my last office is actually 75ohm T-1253A. I should’ve looked at the silkscreen more closely. I’m a blind fool.
That might explain some of my inability to match my antennas on some bands. The SWR will never be better than 1.5:1, even if the line length is exactly a half wavelength. The velocity factor is different than I expected, and because of the worse SWR, my line losses are higher, even on short runs.
Yeah. This is the same “RG-8” that I have feeding the 2m/70cm antenna I just posted about. The losses on those two bands swings from 1.6db to 4.8db. A major mistake!
I mean, it’ll still work of I know what to expect. 75ohm cable is easier to source and cheaper to buy, so lots of hams use it with precaution. Until then, I should look at getting a reel of actual RG-8.
Radio is hard.
The store-bought 2m/70cm groundplane antenna I’ve had mounted on a broomstick inside my apartment now has a home outside where it can reach so many more places.
After some brainstorming sessions in the hardware store, thinking of methods to mount 3 sections of military surplus fiberglass poles to my balcony railing, I figured out how to lash a basic flagpole mount to the rail and use chains and safety ropes to keep it stable.
My biggest concern with this installation is safety. The absolute last thing I want to happen is for the pole, the mount, the railing, or anything else to fail and catastrophically hurt someone downstairs or cause any property damage. To that end, I’ve employed chains and safety ropes where possible so, hopefully, if one thing fails, not everything will fail.
For outdoors weather concerns, I’ve configured the poles and brackets so that water cannot run downward into any inverted joins. The PVC pipe at the top has a cap, and exterior walls sit on top of interior tabs. Water cannot ingress, and the bottoms are open so water can egress without issue.
The poles overlap enough that I shouldn’t need to worry about stiff winds making them walk upwards and off the tab ends; but we’ll know more once we get real weather that’s not 102°F Texas Summer. Maybe some pins drilled through will alleviate that issue, but will introduce water ingress points. I also have 3/4″ PVC jammed into the flagpole socket, and the base of the bottom pole section sits on top of that, so that way strong wind cannot make it rattle and bounce upwards off the mount.
The top end of the PL259 connector under the antenna is sealed with self-annealing rubber tape. The bottom end on the feedline is open so water can egress if there’s any capillary action. I’ll inspect the installation after the next major rain to check for ingress or worsened SWR. I’ve also added a “drip loop” in the feedline so water drips off over the balcony instead of travelling down the feedline into my window passthrough.
I’ve already tested the antenna and RG-8 feedline (essential for VHF/UHF where higher power loss in coax is a concern), and I can reach repeaters in Georgetown and Elgin. I can also hear the tower and ground control at Austin Bergstrom Airport across town. It’s better than the flexible J-Pole I have in the window. I hope to do lots of simplex and weak-signal modes soon.
All-in-all, even though I have safety concerns, it’s a functional installation.
29 years later, Queensrÿche’s “Empire” (1990) still impresses me with its deft audio engineering. It’s a cornerstone in the wall of sound.
James Barton (engineer) and Bob Ludwig (mastering) did a bang-up job on the album’s sound with the band’s source material.
It’s still fuckin’ loud with minimal compressor pumping, and the soundstage is still clean across ears. It’s as if they were first experimenting with multiband compression and discovered its secrets before there was a rackmount box to do it easily.
I remember remarking, after first listen on 105.1 KMJX’s “Side Show”, that this album was “busy” — there’s sound coming from everywhere, and that makes me extremely happy.
Sometimes, I just have to go back to the classics and drink them in.
Dreamed a movie of an invading gang of heroes in a truck going down guided stone hallways, taking the right turns at the forks, further into the stronghold to the goal of finding the unseen villains, fighting the evil, saving the day. Holding on to the memory of the track back out, running out of bread crumbs, fuel, film, time. More turns, more hallways, further and further down. No end until expiration. Infinite.
Lifting out, I enter an infinite valley, lined with vacation homes, side streets, campground grocers, tackle shops, carnivals, gift shops, cabins, everyone on holiday, costumes, camping, walking, calling each other on radios. To the left, to the right, across the unseen river in the valley, everything in repeating patterns. I discuss the movie with my nearest person. I imagine other selves discussing the infinite movie with other nearest people.
He talks of it being intense, mind-bending; I explain my theory of it being like descending into a hard drive full of folders, each descendant folder is a link to some ancestor folder above. You follow those links, you descend infinitely, never reaching the end until you run out of memory to trace your way back up. Infinity consumes finite resources.
Recursive, looped, iterative; Infinity has different shapes to greedily absorb our linear efforts.
Does f(∞) equal 0 or 1?
