Ripples in the Ether

Noah Milldrum

Born August 2, 2010

9 lb 7 oz

21.5 in

I just heard on the Practical Amateur Radio Podcast that special event station K7G will be QRV this weekend from Astoria, Oregon to commemorate the 25th anniversary of The Goonies. Man, does this bring back some fond memories. The Goonies was one of those pop culture memes that really impacted me as a kid. Here was a movie about a bunch of ordinary kids from a small town (in Oregon no less…my stomping grounds!) who stumble upon the clues to an improbable treasure, go alone on a fantastic adventure because they believe in this crazy idea, dodge doom and destruction numerous times, seemingly fail but then manage to save the day at the end. Not to mention that it had pirates, hidden treasure, mobsters, and a mutant. How could I, a boy just a few years younger than the main characters, not like this movie? Being the chubby kid in my group of friends, I certainly could relate to Chunk, but I also envied Data and all of the cool gadgets he brought along for their quest. No doubt that wise-ass Mouth also reminded me of a few of my close friends. I still enjoy watching the movie when I catch it on TV, although it’s funny that I don’t remember it being quite as cheesy when I first viewed it as a kid.

The Goonies still seems to be very popular, with fans making the trip to Astoria to visit many of the familiar settings from the film. If you ever come to my neck of the woods, you should take some time to visit Astoria, even if you don’t care for The Goonies. It’s a neat little small town with quite a bit of charm and is only a few miles from one of my favorite locations in the entire world, the Oregon Coast. I’m going to give a listen to 40 meters to see if I can snag them this weekend. It’s pretty close to Beaverton, but my antenna is low enough that I’m sure I have some energy going straight up and down on 40. I bet they’re going to have a great QSL for this one.

CME Filmed By Solar Dynamics Observatory

Check out these incredible photos and videos of a coronal mass ejection taken by the newly commissioned Solar Dynamics Observatory. The clarity and resolution of the images are absolutely stunning. When the CME erupts, you can clearly see the spiraling of the magnetic field lines as they spring up out of the surface of the sun, twist around until a filament breaks off, then collapse back into the surface. It gives you a really good intuitive feeling for the dynamics behind some events which are so important to us hams. I’ve embedded a YouTube version of the video below, but it’s best if you go and download the full resolution versions from the website linked above to see them in their true glory.

Over the last week or so, I’ve been coming home from work nearly every morning thinking about ways to tweak the Clackamas (FDIM 2010 QRP Challenge) rig. I’m sure that Jennifer is wondering if I have OCD at this point. This morning I was able to stamp out the last few bugs in project and get the parts count to 72. There was a nasty PA oscillation that I had to tame and I was having trouble pulling my carrier oscillator low enough to get the transmitted signal on the right sideband. Somewhat satisfied that the thing might actually work, I went to sleep with the hope that I could try a QSO this evening when 40 meters would give me a better chance of making a QSO.

After dinner I managed to slip into the shack after Jennifer laid down to rest and I bribed Baxter to leave me alone with a Kong full of treats. I thought about trying to self-spot in order to scare up a QSO, but that didn’t seem right. I wanted the first QSO to stand on the rig’s own merits, not because I asked someone to listen for me. So I parked somewhere near 7030 kHz and started banging out a straight key CQ with 1 watt output. After about 5 rounds of CQ, I started getting the sneaking suspicion that I had screwed something up, but I trusted that my pre-QSO checks on the rig were correct. So I kept at it.

After a few more CQs, I finally got my reward. A huge signal about blasted the phones off of my ears! And it was saying my callsign! I got a reply from W7MDK in Peck, ID. I was so excited that the QSO didn’t go so great, but we got all of the pertinent information across. He was going a bit faster than I normally copy, and I think my speed was impaired even further because of my extreme excitement. Dick gave my 1 watt a 579, while he was easily 40 dB over S9 here. I cut the QSO short to stop me from embarrassing myself further, but I got the first one in the log!

It’s said that there isn’t much better for the homebrewer than to turn on that newly created receiver and hearing signals off the air for the first time. It’s hard to argue with that, but I think that making a complete first QSO with a rig you designed and built yourself has to top even that experience. Sorry to toot my own horn so shamelessly, but I’m just thrilled with the love of radio right now.

The next steps are to get going on the documentation for the judges, get the prototype into an enclosure, and start working on a second copy of the rig to make sure I can duplicate it from the schematic. I can’t wait to share the design details with everyone, but that’s going to have to wait for another month or so. In order to get the rig within the required parts count, I had to trim the receiver down to 34 parts. The transmitter ended up being 30 parts and the VXO came in at 8 parts. However, I was able to make the Clackamas a true transceiver, not just a trans-receiver.

Stay tuned for additional details as I can release them!

Update: Just worked JF2QNM in the JIDX contest. 1 watt spans the Pacific! Of course, all of the credit goes to the op on the other end, but it’s still really gratifying to have your HB 1 watt signal make a nice hop like that.

KC2UHB with EFHW Tuner

Our favorite fashion hacker/ham, Diana Eng, KC2UHB, has posted a new article on the Make Magazine blog with instructions on how to build an End-Fed Half Wave antenna tuner and deploy it with an antenna. (BTW, did you see that she was recently named to the ARRL Public Relations Committee? An excellent choice the League.)

Her BOM calls out an air variable cap from MFJ and a T94-2 ‘roid, so I suspect that her tuner could handle a bit more than QRP power. In typical ham fashion, it appears that she was too eager to get it on the air to worry about little things like putting it in an enclosure. FB with that Diana, I think most of us can relate.

It sounds like she had great success using this setup with her FT-817 for some SSB QRP fun:

Setting up my antenna for 20m the first time took about half an hour, and I was able to get very close to 1:1 SWR using the 9:1 input with a vertical wire supported by a tree. Over the next hour or so, operating from a park bench in Brooklyn, using 5 watts on sideband, I made contact with stations in the US, Europe, South America, the Caribbean, and Hawaii. The furthest station was about 5000 miles away, which means I was getting 1000 miles per watt out of this setup. I’m sure it was a big contest station and not another QRP operator sitting on a park bench with a wire antenna, but it was still fun.

I’ll take this opportunity to shamelessly promote my own EFHW tuner, which I’ve managed to get back up on my new website. Don’t forget to compare to AA5TB’s design, which features probably the best page on this subject matter which I’ve seen.

Hoover Dam Panorama - August 2009

When I was going through some files on my USB thumbdrive, I found a panorama of Hoover Dam that I made from some photos that I took on our honeymoon last August. There are some small blemishes in the rendering (some of the power lines have discontinuities and what not), but overall the results still came out pretty good. What’s really neat is that you can see the Mike O’Callaghan – Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge under construction down the river from the spillways. At this point, the arch was just being completed. Today (March 2010), it appears that the deck is almost in place.

I’m very pleased to report the first (to my knowledge) completed Willamette transceiver which was born in Europe. Vincenzo, IZ5GVP sent along to me a couple of photos of his very nicely constructed Willamette. He reports that it works well and that he’s considering modifying it to operate on the 30 meter band. Three cheers for Vincenzo!

I got a bit of cash for my birthday last month and it was burning a hole in my pocket for a few weeks. I decided I needed a good set of CW paddles for my station, since the only keying devices that I have (that work) are all straight keys. It was a bit of a toss-up to decide what brand of key to get until I saw the Begali name mentioned; then I remembered lots of hams saying good stuff about their keys. There was enough goodwill on the Internet that I figured I would take the plunge and give the base model Simplex (with a palladium finish) a try. It took about 3 weeks for the paddles to get here, but it was well worth it. Here’s a little visual tour of my Begali unboxing experience.

Yes, I know, an “unboxing” blog post makes me an even greater geek. I’m at peace with that. Anyway, on with the show…

Let’s open the box…

Now to open it up

Some extras included

Christmas wishes

Two different sets of aluminum finger pieces sent along, although I only ordered one. A nice extra!

First peek at the key

The key together with the dust cover

Here it is unwrapped and with the stock finger pieces installed

Now to add the nice blue aluminum finger pieces…

I’m blinded! The palladium finish with gold accents is incredible.

A macro shot of the engraved logo

Finally, here’s the key with my cable installed, sitting next to the AA0ZZ EZKeyer

I hope you got a little vicarious enjoyment out of that! I haven’t made a QSO with it yet, but just from using it on the keyer with sidetone, I can tell that it has an incredible feel. This one will be a keeper for the rest of my ham radio days.

I realize that this has very little to do with my normal blog content, but I hope that you will indulge me for a moment and check out this post.

As many of you probably know, I work 3rd shift, which can get pretty lonely at times. In order to keep myself from going insane listening to nothing but the air conditioning, I lean pretty heavily on my iPod to provide some entertainment. There’s a pretty decent sized music library on there, but I usually get tired of listening to music all night, so at least 50% of the time I listen to podcasts.

One of my favorite podcast genres is serialized fiction; it kind of reminds me of the old-timey radio shows. When I first stumbled upon podcasting, the very first fiction podcast I discovered back in 2006 was 7th Son by author J.C. Hutchins. 7th Son is a lightning-fast, kick-ass, potboiler of a techno-thriller, delivered free of charge as a podcast novel. I can’t give you a better synopsis than the official web page, so I’ll defer to it:

The president of the United States is dead. He was murdered in the morning sunlight by a four-year-old boy…

So begins 7th Son: Descent, the technothriller novel by J.C. Hutchins. Originally released as a free audiobook podcast, Descent will be in bookstores in late October. 7th Son has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time.com, Wired.com UK, and on the cover of Blogger & Podcaster magazine.

As America reels from the bizarre presidential assassination committed by a child, seven men are abducted from their normal lives and delivered to a secret government facility. Each man has his own career, his own specialty. All are identical in appearance. The seven strangers were not born, but grown — unwitting human clones — as part of a project called 7th Son.

The government now wants something from these “John Michael Smiths.” They share the flesh as well as the implanted memories of the psychopath responsible for the president’s murder. The killer has bigger plans, and only these seven have the unique qualifications to track and stop him. But when their progenitor makes the battle personal, it becomes clear John Alpha may know the seven better than they know themselves…

Although the techno-geekery is a guilty pleasure, the characters are not relegated to the back burner. In fact, I think that Hutchins has done a wonderful job creating fully fleshed-out, three dimensional characters that you really connect with (and a few that you despise). I’m no professional literature reviewer, but I can tell you that entire story was immensely enjoyable. Listen to the audio promo to get a taste of it for yourself.

7th Son is composed of three acts: Descent, Deceit, and Destruction. J.C. Hutchins managed to leverage his dedicated podcast following (tens of thousands of listeners if I remember correctly) into a print book deal for the first act, Descent. The other two books are contingent on the success of the first. Besides the enjoyment of the story, I greatly admire the way that Hutchins was able to use the “DIY ethic” to do an end-run around the traditional gatekeepers of book publishing and snag his first major book deal. To give you some idea of the creative ways in which he is promoting his book and blurring the lines between fiction and reality, he has also released a 6-song EP from a character in the story! I believe that’s what the kids call a “transmedia” experience.

You can preorder the book from Amazon.com, or if you’re still undecided you can go to J.C.’s site to download serialized PDF files of the story and subscribe to the all-new reboot of the podcast; all for free.

You might wonder why I’m posting this promo on my ham radio blog?

• As you can tell, I really enjoyed the story and personally vouch for it.
• J.C.’s DIY ethic is something that is closely related to the way in which we also do things in the homebrewer world.
• In a former life, I was a hardcore game geek, and I know that’s something we have in common.
• J.C. is an all-around cool dude for working his butt off to provide a ton of great, free content. I feel like I owe him one for all of the hours of enjoyment he has provided to help get me through the tedium of work.

So if you made it this far, it just might intrigue you a bit. Get yerself over to the 7th Son website and start reading or listening. If you enjoy the story, tell your friends and consider buying the book so you can help out someone working hard to put the “DIY ethic” to great use.

I just updated the shack PC to Ubuntu Karmic beta and I’m impressed. Nothing earth-shattering, but lots more polish compared to Jaunty, and seems quite a bit snappier. I think it’s worth the upgrade if you’re already an Ubuntu user. If you are not, then download the ISO and try it in live CD mode. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.