Fun Stuff

Yesterday I managed a feat of Amateur Radio par excellence. I usually wake up pretty early even on my days off. Yesterday was no exception as I awoke at 05:00. As my habit is, I came in the shack and turned on the radios and booted up the computer. I was kind of playing around not really paying attention on 40 meters. That is, 7.035 MHz for those that don't know anything about radio. Forty meters is one of the longer wavelengths and can at time perform exceptionally well in the evenings, nighttime and other low sunlight conditions. I use a computer soundcard interface to work digital modes a lot. I was looking at an RTTY, Radio Teletype or Teletype signal on the waterfall. Jargon Alert, waterfall is a display that slowly scrolls down the screen like a waterfall. I put the cursor on this signal adjusted it to the correct parameters and found it was a special event station. BT1ON, the 2008 Beijing Olympics Special Event Station! Wow! I tried probably a dozen times before they actually heard me and we made a contact. My first ever mainland red Chinese contact. To put this into perspective, we are in the middle of the lowest point on the 11 year solar cycle. Jargon alert, the solar cycle is the engine that drives everything in radio. It is the number of sunspots that appear on the sun's surface. More sunspots, better radio propagation, fewer sunspots less propagation. We've been in the middle of a long period now with very little or absolutely no sunspots. So you can see how it's exciting to get a once-in-a-lifetime contact. Boy, was I stoked. I couldn't wait to tell Tammy then my radio buddies about the accomplishment.

As often happens in my life, I have a negative event occur on the heels of a positive one. I was leaving to have coffee with my radio friends and tell them of my success on 40 meters. I walked out of the house promptly stepped in a hole in the driveway, twisted my ankle, fell down, scraped a 3 inch patch of skin off my left knee and writhed in pain for a half hour. Now I have a weak left ankle. It has the elasticity of a piece of worn out rubber. I have sprained it many times. This time it was the right ankle and guess what? Yep, I scraped the flesh off my left knee. It couldn't be the same leg of course, now I'm hobbling around like an old cowpoke. Fun... NOT! Now I'm discovering another old guy thing. I wonder if anyone has made a study of how age directly correlates to how quickly we heal? Or how age directly correlates to how many body parts are injured in an accident like this? Somebody could surely put something together. Then we could be more careful... Well, not really. I usually have my mind on other things. Another old guy thing... my concentration is going back to where it was when I was about 5 years old! Oh well, I'm not experiencing anything that my forefathers haven't. I guess I'll just keep on keeping on as Churchill said.

Anyone recognize these photos?




They sure are cute, too bad they grow up. I scanned these from some slides I took a long time ago. Thanks to the kids for the slide scanner for Father's Day. I'll post some more at a later date. Believe me, there are a lot of them. Maybe now we can all see them. These were all taken when I was learning how to use a 35 mm totally manual camera. A Pentax K1000. What a great camera that was. Sara has it now, I hope she uses it some.

Until next time,

ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR Me Hearties!!!


OLD GUYS RULE!