All my friendships are telemediated, because talking in person isn’t so great. The whole thing’s unrewarding.
Everybody else’s voice is more important.
Only time I can speak truth is on the bathroom walls. But that’s just a bullhorn with a remote mic. No recourse, no defense, but no audience feedback. Just scribbles on paint.
Kilroy was here.
Oh how I love
My Instagram girl
Her pictures are seen
All over the world
With makeup on point
She’s making me scream
And loves only me
With her Patreon stream
It’s not going to win any beauty contests, but with my slapped-together Small Magnetic Loop Antenna (small MLA), I just worked two stations in the San Francisco Bay area with 20 Watts on FT8! (11pm CDT, 20-meters, antenna in living room.) By comparison, it takes me over 40 Watts to do the same on my 20m dipoles hanging outside. Huh.
Also, I heard a station in Hawaii and another further out in the Pacific, though they couldn’t hear me to log a contact. That’s a first for me.
The antenna matches with low-enough SWR on 20m (still have to use a tuner), and the capacitor isn’t high enough in value to get a good match on the low end of 40m (my band of interest), but it works better than expected. It’s a difficult, complex thing to fidget with, and is very fickle and easy to disturb because everything’s floppy. But…it works.
A nice feature of small MLAs (“small” meaning the outer loop is less than 1/10 wavelength of your intended frequency) is that they are selective and have strong nulls perpendicular to the loop plane. This allows you to rotate it to find and cancel nearby sources of radio noise. I’ve identified a few noises around the apartment complex, and want to take the rig outside (after some rework) to see if I can do better location of the noises.
I’m glad I put so little work into it; the cost of failure is lower this way. I was frustrated with it Sunday night when I built it, but tonight, even after sunset (with California in gray-zone), I managed to log a few contacts.
Research and more reworks are in the future. Potential improvements:
So let me say this: MLAs are interesting.
The PERTURBATOR show on Thursday was everything I had hoped for.
Everything.
The music was phenomenal, and the light show was mind blowing. James Kent definitely takes after the Pink Floyd school of stagecraft: if what you do is mostly pretracked in the studio, then on stage you just have to dazzle ’em with a great light show.
Kudos to the lighting engineer for recognizing that there are more colors in the rainbow than red, green, and blue.
I think I’m naturally wired to quickly get bored.
The moment I learn a thing, do a thing, go somewhere, get settled in, I look up and around for the next nugget of interest, sifting through the chaos. My hobbies and lifestyle reflect this.
When it comes to supporting myself, I’m definitely a factory-worker kind of guy, pulling levers, getting a paycheck; a farmer, tilling the soil, sowing within the lines, reaping the grains when it’s time. But I have a hunter-gatherer heart, and I don’t trust in it to get me from season to season. I’ve never had faith in the future. And there’s the conflict.
I learn a thing, I know a thing, then I move on. I’m no expert at it, not by a long shot. But there I am, bored, looking for something new. It gets me into lots of interesting things and puts me in places of happenstance and serendipity, but I don’t feel like I profit from my finds. I end up sharing and telling people about the new thing I found, and they take it from there. That makes me a ranger, a rover, a muse.
To profit for myself, I need grit, tenacity, expediency, to finish before boredom takes over again.
A muse is someone who inspires others to achieve greatness without achieving any greatness of their own. Is that a bad thing? Is it a good thing?
