Ripples in the Ether

Perhaps that’s a bit melodramatic, but my time for operating and homebrewing is going to be severely curtailed very soon. Baby Boy Milldrum will be arriving any day now (the estimated due date is July 22) and we’re in full-blown panic mode as we finish the last minute preparations to get the baby’s room ready, make sure we have all of the assorted baby stuff that’s needed, and take care of those homeowner chores that need to be done for the summer. So I figured that I should take some free moments to enjoy the hobby while I can. Sometimes I feel like every blog post here should have some really meaty and meaningful content, but perhaps that inhibits me from posting more than a few times a month. So prepare for this post and many of my future posts to cater a bit more to the short attention span crowd. I’ll have to get my ham radio in small doses whenever I can, so expect a bit of ADD to set into the blog for a while.

Anyway, my inbox has been blowing up with DX Sherlock alerts telling me that 6 meters has been open most evenings over the last few weeks. I finally broke down and dug out the Buddipole components on Friday so I could try to snag a few QSOs on 50 MHz. I managed to grab a few SSB QRP QSOs with the FT-817 into VE4 and VE6-land on Friday night using the Buddipole in a simple dipole configuration. The band was in great shape that night, as I could hear a lot of East Coast stations coming in quite strong via multihop Es. On Saturday, I tried to work CW QRP on 50.096 MHz but had zero success even after calling CQ many, many times. The band was open and there was still plenty of activity on the SSB portion of the band, but CW was a bust. Come on CW ops, we’ve got to do better than this.

I still managed to make it a interesting ham radio night. After packing in the gear from the back deck, I went into the shack, flipped on the HF rig, and checked 20 meters (just around sunset local time). Very soon I stumbled upon the legendary Martti, OH2BH calling US West Coast stations. After a quick tune-up, I was able to snag him within about 4 calls. He was absolutely booming into Beaverton (by the sounds of it, he was booming into the entire western portion of the US). This was my first QSO with Martti and was memorable to be sure.

Moving on to a more unpleasant topic, am I the only one who things that most of the ham mailing lists are dying of a creeping mediocrity and groupthink mentality? The big two QRP-Ls are mostly a joke as far as getting an interesting, topical discussion going. On the other hand, start bitching about computers or some other off-topic old fart rant, and you’ll get 30 messages a day. The SKCC group made me sick with its virtual pitchforks-and-torches assault on the new owner of Vibroplex because he had the audacity to replace the stamped brass identification plates with a silkscreened version. The way that a few prominent members of that group (including one who is affiliated with a competing key manufacturer I might add) character assassinated the owner was quite disgusting.

This provides a nice segue into another topic people love to hate: Twitter. I quit tweeting a few months ago due to the large jackass/decent person ratio that I was experiencing. I thought I would miss it quite a bit, but once I got over the DTs in a few days I didn’t really miss it much at all. I still debate whether I should go active on Twitter again, because I see some utility in it; but even when you remove the jerk factor, it still feels like drinking from a firehose most of the time. Not to mention that huge time sink that results from checking your account all of the time make sure you are up-to-the-minute on the latest crap. What to do?

Finally, a plea. Some of you may know of qrpedia.com, which I tried (and failed miserably) to turn into a QRP/homebrewer aggregated blog and knowledge repository. It’s already in sad shape, but with the new kid coming, I know I’ll have no time to devote to it, so I need to let it go. I don’t want to nuke the site because there are a handful of people who put a lot of hard work into posting content there. I would like to sell the site for a nominal price and have it go to someone who could give it another chance. Please contact me if this interests you at all. Prices and terms are very negotiable.

So I’ve taken the plunge into the strange and magnificent world of Twitter. I resisted it for a while because I didn’t see much value in it, but I’m starting to get what the hype is all about. One area where I will freely admit that I have a weakness is in keeping up with my e-mail. I subscribe to tons of e-mail lists, which is bad enough. But it’s easy enough to mass delete posts from mailing lists. However, having a big web presence (at least for a ham) means that a lot of people e-mail you personally. Don’t get me wrong, I love getting e-mails from people who stumble upon my writings on the web. The problem that I have is that I feel obligated to put as much time into replies as senders put into their e-mails. So when someone sends me a great e-mail that is 10 paragraphs, I feel like I have to reciprocate in kind if I’m able to. The problem is that it gets me into a rut where I feel like procrastinating because I can’t sit down for 20 minutes in one stretch to craft a worthy reply. Not very cool, and not very fair to those who are expecting a response.

On the other hand, Twitter molds your messages into a forced austerity. I feel quite a bit more liberated in my ability to shoot off quick replies to Tweets from my ham buddies, knowing that I’ve taken care of business and have moved on. The back-and-forth dynamic is also very invigorating compared to e-mail. It’s almost like a live chat, but just a tad bit slower.

Twitter is also quite good as a place to get raw information about breaking events. The recent Mumbai terror attacks proved that, much to my surprise. You have to filter this kind of raw data (well any kind of Internet data) through a skeptical eye, but it was amazing how much of the live Tweets from incident turned out to be essentially accurate.

Of course, there’s always a downside to any trendy new technology, and Twitter is no exception. As you may have noticed throughout the ham blogosphere, folks are finding that it’s hard to filter the good stuff out of the cruft once you start following large numbers of people on Twitter. Really, no one cares that I’m currently trimming my nose hair or that I’m in the 5th hour of my Top Chef viewing marathon. The challenge for me is to fight the information overload. Much like a raven with ADHD, I find information on the Internet to be like one shiny bauble after another. It’s extremely easy for me to lose myself in the irresistable ebb and flow of the information currents. Seeing those Tweets pop up is quite destracting and hard to ignore. There’s no doubt that you have to have self-discipline to be an effective Twitter user.

Now that I’ve taken my turn beating this quite-dead horse that 20 people in line in front of me have already taken their whacks at, I have my catharsis. Isn’t that what the blogosphere echo chamber is all about? I’ll do my best to actually publish some real content here on the blog, instead of more navel-gazing introspection. But what do you expect from an introvert anyway?