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: Descent Promo7th 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?
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.
OK, I admit that I don’t care for a lot of these goofy Internet neologisms like “blogiversary”, but I needed something to get your attention for a boring post like this. I don’t normally pay attention to these things, but I happened to notice during my last post that my first posting to this blog was in June of 2008. This post will be number 90, and most of them have been fairly original content, not just a rehash of something else I found on the web. I hope that you’ve enjoyed the content that I’ve posted and I appreciate all of those who have taken the time to visit the site and subscribe to my RSS feed.
Here’s to another good year of blogging, I think that things are going to pick up in the ham radio world!
I used to really like Make Magazine when it first launched, but lately they have been drifting off into areas that seem a bit thinly stretched to be labeled “Maker” activity. However, I’m happy to report that I got a pleasant surprise from Make in my feed reader this morning: a blog post about Dayton Hamvention 2009! Even better, it was written by a younger ham, and a YL to boot: Diana Eng, KC2UHB. Diana goes by the the pen name of Fashion Nerd on her blog, which as you might imagine, is primarily about fashion hacking, or integrating electronics into clothing. It appears that Diana recently got into ham radio, has an interest in satellite ops (not surprising given that she is a resident of NYC) and has already been on a DXpedition.
Fashion Nerd at Dayton 2009
She gives a shout out to some popular names in ham radio and QRP, including a couple near and dear to my heart. My new employer, Buddipole, is mentioned as a popular destination at the con for portable antenna gear. She also singles out one of my favorite QRPers, Steve “Goathiker” WG0AT.
Neat to see that the great-grandaddy of the Maker movement is still getting some love from the new generation. Also great to see some more people near my age getting into the hobby.
A few photos from our trip to Cannon Beach this weekend. The subject of most of my photos was Haystack Rock. (BTW, Jennifer and I are now engaged!)
Dave W8NF has been kind enough to post a short video demonstrating the effect that RF clipping has on a SSB transmission. You can see that peak voltage isn’t affected, but that the power density of the output waveform is increased as the amount of RF clipping is increased. The trade-off is in the sound quality, but that extra bit of processing is helpful for getting more intelligibility into your signal without increasing your output power.
On qrp-l.org and Twitter, I’ve had the pleasure of running across Jeremy Chase, N1JER. He’s just getting into operating HF CW, kitbuilding, and homebrewing, and it’s always a treat to get the perspective of a younger guy who is just getting into ham radio. I guess I’m interested because there’s not a ton of us in the under-40 crowd getting into ham radio. Anyway, Jeremy has been having a lot of fun learning this stuff, and has been cool enough to make some videos documenting his progress. I’ve embedded a few of them below for your viewing pleasure. Be sure to check out his blog for more interesting stuff. A little birdie told me that more videos might be on the way!
I concur with Bill at SolderSmoke: MAKE Magazine was skirting way too much over into the “knitting needle” side of things. Thankfully, they have redeemed themselves with their recent videos on the LED, and now the lowly resistor. This video probably won’t teach any of you something new about resistors, but it’s great to see them get back to this type of content.
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