I finally got some audio from Radio Sweden. I got it tonight, and it is up here, as an mp3 It is about an anniversary of some boat that did trade with China. They don’t seam to be very forgiving of their ancestors though, the had some very harsh words for the people that did trade.
I was tuning around the Short Wave Radio band tonight, and there seems to be more active now then it has been for a while. I wonder exactly what is causing the upsurge in activity tonight. It is nice to have more stations to listen to. They are coming very nicely, I am still having some signal strength problems, but I think the main problems for me on that are that one I am inside the city, and two that I have the antenna in my apartment, both of those are not very conducive to receiving radio signals. I do try to compensate for the disadvantages I have there by having a very long antenna in my apartment, I have about 450 feet of wire wrapped around my apartment to compensate for the fact that I am in the city and have the antenna in my apartment.
And for those of you who are into the creative commons copyright, it looks like Radio China will be doing an article on it in the near future. The freq is somewhere between 9.2 and 9.8Mhz. Sorry that I can not be more exact with the freq, but I am using an older radio where the marker is a little bit off, and the bandspread is not dead on the freq and its marker is a little bit off too. It is about 500Khz off when the bandspread is set to 0, but it does change as you raise the bandspread is at about 90, I am trying to adjust for the bandspread missaliment here (it reads about 20 but to the best guess I can come to is that the aliment is about 70 off) And for the freq marker it is readding ~9.1Mhz. so I would guess about 9.69Mhz or about there somewhere.
The Pittsburgh Post Gazette is running an artical on how the Fire union is backing Republican canidate for mayor of Pittsburgh: Joe Weinroth. I did not belive this when I read it at first. But being this is Pittsburgh I will still put my money on the Democrate canidate to win. You know the 2 parties are Democrate and out of office, been that way since the 1930’s.
Bush has asked people to conserve gas again. I have a way people can conserve gas. I have posted about this before. But I will restate it since I think it is a good idea. You can bike to work. The good thing about this, is it just might save you time in your day. Here is how, if you take time out of your day to go to the gym, you can cut that out since you will get your exercise going to work and back home. Also depending on where you live it could be faster on the bike then in a car. Think about how much time you waste in traffic, I know that if I want to go from the Oakland section of Pittsburgh to the Point, I can make it in 20 minutes no mater what time of day it is. I can even make this 20 minutes during rush hour, where it could take over an hour, in a car. And to the question of “well how can you do this if you obey the laws” well here is how, I go down to the jail trail which is a bike trail so I don’t have to worry about being stuck behind cars or having to stop at lights since there are no cars or traffic lights.
The latest scanner net is now up on the podcast site for it at http://scanner.hamradiobb.com
I went on the bike ride I was working on getting together. I had only one person show up. It was still fun even though there were not many that showed up. But it did make it easier to get things together since both of us were hams and we were able to make contact via the radio before we saw each other.
Tomorrow (Sunday) is the bike ride, for any one that wants to go. This is mainly for hams, so meet around the North Shore around 2pm and give a call out to me (KB3HCG) on 147.48.
I just checked the NHC web site and saw that Rita’s wind speed is down to 135MPH, that is still high but only a Cat 3 level. So maybe it might loss some more speed before hitting land, and lets hope and pray that there is no major damage or that there is no loss of life.
Last night (Sep 22) I got together with some friends to play some RPG. Well not really play just plan for it. We worked on making our characters for the game. The game is The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying game. We probably will not get to play till sometime in October, we are working on mainly the history of our characters, and from there building in the attributes they might have and might need, to work with what drives them. I have put up a wiki for the group to use. I have made it so only people in the group can make changes. I hope the games turns out as fun as the character building meetings we have been having are.
The Trama podcast is now listed on the Pittsburgh Bloggers website The web master did have a nice thing to say about ham radio in the Pittsburgh area, “The Ham Radio community is thriving in Pittsburgh!”
UPDATE: some one made a note, it is org not come, I have fixed that type oh.
CNN is reporting that gas prices after Rita could spike to over $4 maybe $5 I will have to get a picture of it. I have a picture of the $3+ gas price from here in Pittsburgh I don’t drive but I know this will even hurt me, because the companies that deliver the food to the stores from where I buy my food will just pass the cost on to the store, and the store will pass that cost onto the consumers. I am not saying that the companies that pass the cost on are evil, they have to so they can stay in business, and I want them to stay in business because I like to be able to go to the store and get food (even if it is going to cost me 2x as much) But it could be interesting to see gas prices this high. I don’t know if the American population is ready for gas prices this high. One thing is for sure I will be in a much better position then most people since I don’t own a car and don’t have to buy gas. This just might be the breaking point were people will stop driving their cars for frivolous things and start to either walking that 1 mile or taking PT, or do I dare dream it, bike to get from point A to point B. I have seen an upshot in the bikers I see on the road, maybe I will see more people on bikes on the road.
WTNT63 KNHC 212351 TCUAT3 HURRICANE RITA TROPICAL CYCLONE UPDATE NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL 650 PM CDT WED SEP 21 2005 ...RITA BECOMES THE THIRD MOST INTENSE HURRICANE ON RECORD... DROPSONDE DATA FROM AN AIR FORCE RESERVE UNIT RECONNAISSANCE AIRCRAFT AT 623 PM CDT...2323Z...INDICATED THE CENTRAL PRESSURE HAS FALLEN TO BELOW 899 MB...OR 26.55 INCHES. THE DROPSONDE INSTRUMENT MEASURED 32 KT/35 MPH WINDS AT THE SURFACE...WHICH MEANS IT LIKELY DID NOT RECORD THE LOWEST PRESSURE IN THE EYE OF RITA. THE CENTRAL PRESSURE IS PROBABLY AT LEAST AS LOW AS 898 MB...AND PERHAPS EVEN LOWER. FOR OFFICIAL PURPOSES... A PRESSURE OF 898 MB IS ASSUMED... WHICH NOW MAKES RITA THE THIRD MOST INTENSE HURRICANE IN TERMS OF PRESSURE IN THE ATLANTIC BASIN. SOME ADDITIONAL DEEPENING AND INTENSIFICATION IS POSSIBLE FOR THE NEXT 12 HOURS OR SO. RITA CURRENTLY RANKS BEHIND HURRICANE GILBERT IN 1988 WITH 888 MB AND THE 1935 LABOR DAY HURRICANE WITH 892 MB. FORECASTER STEWART
They are also saying wind speeds of up to 175 MPH. Wow this one is looking worse then Katrina lets all hope and pray that it does not turn out to be as bad as Katrina was with damages and loss of life.
Well after all that work to get my info in the FCC database correct the final version of my License came in the mail. So tomorrow after work (or on my lunch break) I will go out to get the larger version of it framed and the wallet size one laminated for my wallet. I am pleased that I finally have a copy of my license that has my current address and my last name spelled correctly.
Before I wrote the domains off I emailed my registrar and I just got a message back that they had the problem fixed, so I have those domains for another year. I don’t think I am going to do with them what I was going to do with them before, I will have to think of better things to do with the. The geek for life one I will not be doing the same forum software as before as I was doing before I was getting so many same registrations there. So any one have suggestions for the domains congeek.com and geeksforlife.org?
Well today I found out that one of my domains I owned expired a while back, I never got notice of this, I never got a renewal notice for that domain either. Another one I have expires today, I can not for the life of me figure out how to renew domains with my registrar. I looked though their KB but there is no information there, I looked though their online forum on how to do this, again no info, the 3 people that asked were just told to email them about how to do it. Well I will have to say no major major loss. The first geeksforlife.org I was hoping to do something with but I could never get any one there that is the one that I will say was stolen for the most part and write it off as lost. The other one is congeek.com. Again I tried to do something with that but the people that were helping me with that and I never really had the time for it, so I am going to give up and let it get lost, I tried a few things we will see if it stays, if it stays I will have it for another year, but I am thinking I should just write it off now. I figure I will just keep the 2 that seams to be having any thing done with them. This one mikeoconnor.net (it expires in Feb of next year so in Jan I will be emailing my registrar about renewal) and hamradiobb.com that one expires next month so I should start looking into how to renew it. So I am going to go from 4 domains to 2 domains.
I was talking to a ham friend of mine about the new domain I have and said I am thinking of doing a website on the domain along with the email. And he said since it will be a ham radio website, I have to do it in 90’s style since a lot of personal[…]
Today I found out about the .radio TLD. I also found out that while it normally 200+EUR ham radio operators are given a discounted price of 25EUR (about 30USD) a year, and I thought it would be nice to have my call sign as a domain. so I registered kb3hcg.radio right now I have it[…]
I fiannly got the attena tuner today, and have set it up. Now here are some pics of my setup. First here is my setup where I sit to operate the radio. You can see the ham computer I have setup, the ham radio and the tuner, and my late mothers old shortwave radio (a[…]
While my FT-891 works great with my ATAS-120A Antenna on my car. But I been unable to get a good attena working for my FT-710, I been tring to use 2 ham sticks setup in a dipol setup, but I can not get the SWR under 5:1, so I kind of given up, so I[…]
Back on Nov 24th I went out to the DE Ham Radio Outlet, to get a Yaesu FT-710 feild. While I was out there I also picked up a FT-891 for my car, since I recently got my general upgread for my ham license. I have not had a chance to play with the FT-710[…]
The other day I went down to a local home depot to pick up some stuff to build a small attena mast for my balcony. One of the items I needed was a block of wood for the base. When I went to the wood section the guy there was helping another customer cut some[…]
Back on Oct 11, I took the test to upgread my ham licnense from Tech to general, yesterday I got the email from the FCC that my license in the database has been updated. Also last week I decided to join the ARRL. Over the years I have heard of 3 things that the ARRL[…]
Tonight I setup my 40m attena to tune around the 20m band of the ammature radio band, while I did not key up (still have yet to make any contacts on my new privileges that passing my general exam granted me) I did enjoy tuning around. It took me some time to get my attenas[…]
Well I been Furlough durning this goverment shutdown. I have decided to not waste the time. So I took a Skywarn class and got a skywarn certification. That was on Friday Oct 3rd, so now I am a weather spotter. Then last week I spent studing to upgread my Ham radio License from Technitian to[…]
For the last few years I have been off the air. And recently decided to get back on the air (Amature Radio) This was persipitated when my old car (a Scion IQ) died, the computer of it got fried. So I had to get a new car. With the change of the car I took[…]
