|
 Woo-hoo, I have finally achieved Ham radio
license Nirvana! Reporting this on World Amateur Radio Day seems appropriate. On
Saturday, April 15, 2017, I passed my
Amateur Extra exam in the presence of three VEs at the Wattsburg
Wireless Association meeting room in Erie, PA. Nearly 7 years have transpired since
I took the Technician test in the same room in 2010. My General license test was
taken Forsyth Amateur Radio Club meeting room in Winston Salem, NC, in, 2015. Until
the FCC updates my record in the online Universal Licensing System (ULS), my call
sign will be KB3UON/AE. Motivation for pursuing the Ham radio license goal was ...
4/18/2017
 Is this an über-cool homebuilt
radio or what?
Proud Canadian and RF Cafe contributor
Dr. Marek
Klemes wrote to me a couple weeks ago regarding a quotation I had posted a while
back. At the end of our communications, he casually made a comment about needing
to engage in an electronics project that would be free of the rigors of his professional
pursuits. Being a trained notable quote recognizer myself, I instantly realized
that his statement was itself worthy of being quoted widely. He granted permission
to post it here (with adornment of ...
3/23/2017
 As mentioned in the past, I put a fair amount
of effort into making
RF Cafe as user friendly and resourceful as possible while also providing
a valuable venue for RF product and services companies to advertise. Reading articles
on search engine optimization, effective user interface and user experience, webpage
organization, navigation, page load speed and content organization are popular topics
that the 'experts' have decided are most important to success. My ultimate philosophy
has been to make RF Cafe the kind of website I enjoy visiting. A piece ...
3/10/2017
 RF Cafe visitor and frequent e-mailer Joe
Birsa (N3TTE) sent a note saying that the Spring 2017 issue of Classic Trains
magazine contains an article titled "Radio and the
People's Railway," by Greg Gormick. I do not have a copy on-hand, so I went
to Wikipedia for some information on the Canadian National Railways Radio Department,
where it says in part: "The Canadian National Railways Radio Department was the
first national radio network in North America. It was developed, owned and operated
by the Canadian National Railway between 1923
..."
3/1/2017
 As you might expect, Ham radio operators
tend to be the type of people who engage in more than one pastime. Many are handy
with tools and like doing challenging home improvement projects and renovations
of cars, trucks or antique furniture. Others enjoy hobbies like flying model airplanes
and/or rockets, boating, fishing, baseball, and other endeavors of skill and prowess.
Some, like Canadian amateur radio operator
Neil Carlton (VE3NCE), count stamp collecting amongst their extracurricular
activities. Stamp collectors are known properly as philatelists. Neil does not collect
just any kind
...
1/30/2017
 The Space Race officially began on October
4, 1957, when the USSR successfully launched Sputnik 1, the world's first Earth-orbiting
communications satellite. It was a big deal. The 'bird' transmitted a continuous
alternate series of pulses at 20.005 MHz and 40.002 MHz, with a 300 ms
on and 300 ms off time. The batteries lasted through October 26. Sputnik 1
burned up in the atmosphere on January 4, 1958. Radio monitoring stations all across
the Earth scrambled to detect and track Sputnik 1's signals while noting signal
strength, frequency stability
...
12/16/2016
 The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
(USPTO) is constantly advertising for examiners. Its
workload is overwhelming and the consequences are significant. Based on information
on an extremely well-written and researched article in the July/August 2016 issue
of Popular Mechanics magazine titled "The Greatest American Invention," the situation is practically
out of control. Similar to many other pieces published in the last few years, author
Scott Eden meticulously outlines the systematic failures of the current patent bureaucracy
and how, as is typical, mostly unqualified lawmakers in an attempt to 'reform' it
pass regulations that make matters
...
11/3/2016
 You might have heard that
Obamacare rates are WAAAY up for 2017. Being self-employed
in Pennsylvania, the cost for bottom-end (Bronze)
plan for Melanie and me in 2017 is $772.28/mo. ($9,267.36/yr.)
+ $13,900 deductible. That's $23,167.36 out-of-pocket before Obamacare pays anything
at all, and then only 60% of fees after full deductible has been paid. Check it
out on healthcare.gov . Oh, and if I want to
keep my current doctor, that plan this year is $974.75/mo. + $13,900 deductible
($25,597.00/yr.). It does NOT pay for emergency
room, diagnostic, x-ray, MRI, etc., until AFTER the deductible has been
paid ...
10/24/2016
 Recently, a company based in China contacted
me about advertising on RF Cafe. After doing a lot of up-front work for them creating
advertising materials, the representative informed me that he cannot access the
RFCafe.com domain from his location. It is really difficult to conduct business
when the customer cannot review your work, so at least for now, I am going to pass
on the opportunity. The obvious question that arises from the experience is whether
RFCafe.com is being blocked by China, and how do I find out? Fortunately, a few
options exist with websites that will perform the check for you by pinging your
URL from servers within multiple countries. Some, such as GreatFirewallOfChina.org, tests from inside China using servers
in Beijing
...
7/8/2016
 "There is no new thing under the sun." "Everything
old is new again." Many such idioms exist regarding how often things tend to run
in cycles; it's just that often times people who think they are witnessing a new
phenomenon are not aware of the previous occurrences. I have written of examples
where 'old timers' lament the attitudes of a fledgling work force when writings
show the previous generation of 'old timers' who worked with the current 'old timers'
in their youth expressed the same type concern. Experienced Ham operators think
newbies cannot carry on the tradition of wireless because they are not required
to learn Morse code anymore to earn a license. An article titled "OMG! We've Been
Here B4," appeared in the March 2016 issue of Smithsonian magazine
...
6/22/2016
 As someone who spends a lot of time surfing
the Web in search of interesting electronics and technical news, I am painfully
aware of the annoyances caused by intrusive, overwhelming advertisements. The most
detestable are the full-screen ads that get in your face before ever seeing the
webpage, and/or once on the page some cursed ad with video and audio plays automatically.
It is no wonder that an exponentially increasing portion of Internet users are employing
ad blocking software. If you are an advertiser paying for proprietary
representation on a website, you are advised to determine whether your ads can be
blocked. ...
 Factoid:
Astronomers consider all elements heavier than helium to be metals. That definition
obviously does not jive with the standard chemical definition of a metal, but a
concept called 'metallicity' argues that from a star (and
therefore the universe) formation perspective, extremely high temperatures
and pressures in first generation stars (like our sun)
preclude the identification of distinct elements other than hydrogen and helium.
Heavier elements, such as lithium - #3 on the periodic chart and actually considered
a metal in
...
 In case you don't already know, a grown-up's
version of the much-ballyhooed
littleBits electronics building block system is available. Instead
of assembling snap-together functional blocks for making LEDs flash or robotic carts,
X-Microwave's system provides a relatively simple and inexpensive
venue for designing and building RF and microwave circuits based on a selection
of component blocks for frequencies ranging from hundreds of kHz to tens of GHz.
As you can see in the X-Microwave video, functional blocks are screwed to a base
plate with optimized interconnects providing low-VSWR, low-loss interfaces between
blocks. Package sides, isolation compartment walls, and lids complete the system
package with coaxial connectors at the I/O ports
...
 Thomas Edison applied on November 4, 1879
to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for a patent on his "Electric-Lamp." Patent number 223898 A was awarded on January
27, 1880. Remember those years. While searching for technical headlines today, I
ran across an article in the New York Times where they point out the first-ever
mention of electric lights in their newspaper. Per the article "The Arrival of Electric
Light," The New York Times first wrote of the technology on April 15, 1858.
On that day, 'Our Own Correspondent' in Havana described celebrations of Holy Week
that included 'an electric light' cast across the harbor
...
 Sometime around 1985, I was enrolled in a
second-semester physics class while working on earning my BSEE. Along with covering
topics like electricity, magnetism, heat conduction, optics, etc., my professor,
a moonlighting oceanography instructor from the nearby U.S. Naval Academy, conducted
a laboratory exercise wherein he wanted to demonstrate the action of sea waves breaking
against the shore and underwater shelf discontinuities. He used an impressive contraption
that was comprised of coplanar parallel metal rods that were attached in their centers
to a spring steel bar for torsional continuity. The tips of the rods were painted
white so that when the end bar was perturbed
...
 Somehow, even with trolling daily for technical
headlines, I managed to miss (until recently) that
back in April of this year, IEEE's Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S)
acquired the copyright to Phillip Smith's legendary eponymous graphing format: the
Smith Chart. Per a column by 2015 IEEE president Tim Lee in the
Xplore publication: Mr. Tim Lee, IEEE's 2015 president. "In 2015,
the MTT-S had the opportunity to meet with Mrs. Anita Smith and her family and propose
a way to preserve the legacy of her husband and their father. The MTT-S offered
to buy the rights from the Smith family of the Smith trademark belonging to Analog
Instruments, along with the copyright. In return, the MTT-S would make the Smith
chart available to students, practitioners, and indeed people all over the world
involved ...
 Actually, the title of this and other news
stories is very misleading regarding exactly what has to be registered. The generally
uninformed or marginally informed public believes the definition of a 'drone' is
anything that flies without a human pilot in the cockpit. It associates the greatly
dramatized and sensationalized reports of public encounters with what are technically
classified as Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) - multirotor copters. These are for
the most part the variety sold in toy stores ranging in cost and complexity from
$50 for a basic 4-propeller 'quadcopter' to $500 for a 6-propeller model with an
onboard camera and maybe even a First Person View (FPV) wireless system that allows
the pilot to fly from a vantage point on the craft while remaining at a remote
...
 Long before there was a World Wide Web for
getting the latest weather report and the local time for setting your clocks, there
were phone numbers that were set up with recordings of the sought after information.
As a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, I called the weather forecast number,
WE6-1212
('WE' for weather), multiple times daily during the
winter in hopes of hearing a forecast for snow, and during the summer in hopes of
favorable conditions for flying model airplanes and launching Estes rockets. An
obsession with time and watches and clocks had me calling the time phone number,
TI4-1212
('TI' for time), so often that my father used to refer
to the lady on the recording that updated
...
6/16/2016
 Since I do not have time to watch television
on a regular basis, paying for a cable or satellite subscription cannot be justified.
My plan was to install a traditional
FM/VHF/UHF
television antenna on the roof along with a rotator. Some pretty models are
still available from Channel Master, RCA, and a few others. TV broadcast stations
in the Erie area are all within 10 miles or so, so signal strength would not be
an issue. I listen to both AM and FM radio most of the day, so being able to get
an FM signal boost from a steerable antenna would be a nice bonus since occasionally
reorienting the FM dipole was needed to get a clear signal. The entire outfit would
cost less than a year's
...
6/8/2016
 DIY (do-it-yourself)
is the relatively new term adopted to describe any activity engaged in by laymen
and even professionals plying their trades after hours. Subjects range from hanging
a kitchen cabinet or planting a tree, to a total engine rebuild or building a robot.
Reasonable quality and capability tools for performing around-the-house chores are
fairly cheap and available for purchase or rent for projects most people undertaking
such challenges. Cordless saws and drills, stud finders, airless paint sprayers,
and electronic readout levels can be had for under
...
6/7/2017
 Early automobiles presented significant challenges
to mobile radio designers due to a combination of a fledgling understanding of electrical
and electronic circuits and quickly evolving automotive materials and configurations.
A 1935 issue of Radio-Craft magazine presented eight
automotive
radio designs that represented break-through techniques for dealing with some
of those innovations. All of the technical issues involved here have been pretty
much solved in modern radios. Ignition interference is nearly invisible to FM and
satellite reception, although audio frequency circuits can still pick up noise is
not properly filtered ...
6/1/2016
 In a Scientific American article
titled "Elemental
Urgency," Jennifer Hackett reported on a paper published in 2013 by Yale University's
Thomas Graedel et al regarding the availability (or unavailability) of the raw elements
- and suitable substitutes - used extensively in modern manufacturing. Unlike half
a century ago when most products were made from relatively common and easily obtainable
elements like lead, iron, tin, nickel, aluminum, carbon, zinc, silicon, and even
silver and gold, many more elements are now regularly included in mass manufacturing
processes. Rhenium (Re), used in high strength, temperature alloys
...
5/31/2016
 The
January 2016 issue of Scientific American ran an article by Clara Moskowitz
titled "Elegant Equations" that presented a few prints from "The Concinnitas Project" which
"...is a collection of ten aquatints produced from the contributions of ten mathematicians
and physicists in response to the prompt to transcribe their 'most beautiful mathematical
expression.'" My personal favorite is "Ampère's Law," by Simon Donaldson, because
it incorporates a simple line drawing along with the familiar equations. It brings
back memories of sitting in electromagnetics class at the University of Vermont
watching my seriously brilliant professor (no kidding),
Dr. Kenneth Golden, draw ...
5/16/2016
 No, this is not a liberal vs. conservative
thing, although you might be tempted to think so when considering the terms of each.
A copyright, as you know, is legal protection against unauthorized usage or obvious
modification of original works, something a right-winger would like because it represents
a right to private property. A copyleft,
on the other hand, is a left-winger's dream because it permits free distribution
of original works with the only restriction being that it and/or derivative works
also be declared copyleft material. That explains why evil capitalist companies
like IBM copyright and patent everything it creates, and why liberal-dominated companies
like ...
5/10/2016
 My introduction to a
tesseract was during
an episode of Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" series in the 1980s, where he was demonstrating
how beings in of dimension N would perceive items of dimension N+1. The tesseract,
Sagan explained, is a 3-dimensional projection of 4-dimension hypercube. Watch the
embedded video for more information. The Tesseract website, which has nothing to
do with a hypercube as far as I can tell, deals in some very cool antique scientific
instruments. I learned of it from an article in Astronomy magazine where an editor
recommended it when researching the potential value of a collectible telescope.
Run by Drs. David and Yola Coffeen, Tesseract has a huge inventory of items
...
4/28/2016
 "The Congress shall have Power … To
promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Tımes to
Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
- United States Constitution, Article I, Section 8. Therein lies the authority for
legislation and prosecution of rights for virtually every human creation within
the jurisdiction of the country. Each nation has it own version, and international
agreements help assure universal protection of a creator's rights of ownership;
e.g., the "Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works" of 1886
and the World Intellectual Property Organization. America has the U.S. Copyright
Office. Those of us involved in presenting information and referring to legally
protected ...
4/27/2016
 Questions
asked by interviewers at Google are objects of much ballyhoo. Depending on the job
being sought, questions range from relatively simple and objective to massively
esoteric and subjective. Perform a search on "Google Interview Questions"
and you will find a host of websites that collect experiences from recent interviewees.
Some people curse Google for their insanely difficult questions, but what is fundamentally
a form of profiling and discrimination is what provides Google with exactly the
employees they need to be at the leading edge of all sorts of technology - networking,
software, hardware, publishing, website design, social media, global politics, search
optimization, etc. As you can see, many questions require the interviewee to state
assumptions and conditions prior to asserting a solution. For instance, "Estimate
the number of tennis balls that can fit into a plane" has no single answer because
while the size of a tennis ball ...
4/1/2016
 Many format changes to RF Cafe have occurred
since its inception in 1999, primarily to optimize the layout and content for presentation
to my targeted audience - engineers, technicians, hobbyists, managers, and salesmen
who make a living and/or pastime of electronics. This latest format change, however,
comes in response to Google deciding to penalize website search ranking for any
page or pages that do not pass its Mobile-Friendly Test. With 2/3 of the world's
search business, they set the rules. If a page is not deemed Mobile-Friendly, it
will likely be demoted to a lower spot on the search result page compared to if
it was compliant. In some cases a website that would
...
February 15, 2016
 That is probably Yogi Berra's most famous
line, and is the first thing that came to mind today when I read in the local newspaper
where GE Transportation here in Erie, Pennsylvania, plans to layoff
950 production and 100 management employees. An additional 200 "temporary" layoffs
could also occur. Rumors have been in the works for a couple years regarding an
eventual total plant closing, since a new plant with the same capability (and more)
was being established in Fort Worth, Texas. The Erie location is totally unionized,
and Texas is a Right-to-Work state (union membership not mandatory). In an effort
to be "globally competitive," labor rates must be kept as low as possible - for
everyone, not just production workers. Texas also has no income tax, which helps
keep wages low as well. Property taxes in Erie are quite high, typical of the Northeast...
4/9/2013
 I stayed up late last night (early this morning,
actually) to watch the
FITSAT-1 CubeSat satellite flash its Morse code "HI DE NIWAKA
JAPAN" message via super-bright LEDs over eastern North America. It was scheduled
to pass just south of my location in Erie, Pennsylvania, at 1:14 AM, with a
lights-on intensity great enough to be easily seen with binoculars. FITSAT-1 is
a project conceived of and built by professors and students at the Fukuoka Institute
of Technology (FIT) in Japan. In addition to the LED visual display, the satellite
also carries several Amateur Radio payloads including a CW beacon on 437.250 MHz,
a telemetry beacon on 437.445 MHz and a high-speed data downlink on 5,840.0 MHz.
The CubeSat Project was developed by California Polytechnic State University and
Stanford University's Space Systems Development Lab. It creates launch opportunities
for universities previously unable to access space. A CubeSat...
12/12/2012
 "Learn almost anything for free." That is
the tag line of the Khan Academy. While the claim is a bit of a stretch, especially
when you need to delve below surface level, they do have over 3,300 videos on everything
from math to physics, finance, and history. According to their website, in August
2004, Sal Khan began remotely tutoring his cousin, Nadia, who was struggling with
unit conversion. Soon, Sal also began tutoring her brothers as well. He became so
popular that he started recording videos and posting them on YouTube. More and more
people kept watching, and Sal has continued to make videos ever since. Khan eventually
drew the attention of Google ($2 million grant) and Bill Gates ($1.5 million grant).
The rest, as the saying goes, is history. RF Cafe visitors might be particularly
interested in subjects like circuit analysis (4 lessons), capacitance, magnetism
(12 lessons), electric motors, electrostatics, Doppler, optics, and fields. You
might also like watching the video lessons on momentum and torque, friction, gravity,
thermodynamics (5 lessons), Newton's laws , and fluids (12 parts)...
8/16/2012
 Tax Freedom Day for this year is April 18
- five days later than last year. Today, April 15, is the day in America by which
half the population gets to pay its *fair share* to the government in the form of
income taxes (the other half pays no income taxes). Oh, excuse me, it is when we
are "asked" to pay our fair share. Don't you love the "asked" term ...as if we have
the option of refusing without going to jail? Six envelopes are pictured here that
contain various tax mailings for Melanie and me: one each to the IRS for income
tax and Q1 estimated income tax, state income tax and Q1 estimated income tax, local
income tax and estimated income tax, plus a local services tax. The local services
tax is just for the 'privilege' of working - I kid you not. After paying federal,
state, and local income taxes, sales taxes on all we bought (including gasoline),
utility taxes, taxes on savings, property taxes, school taxes, etc., etc., etc.,
our total 'fair share' works out to 37.6% on adjusted gross income. So, more than
a third of my income was paid in taxes. Just our federal adjusted gross tax alone
worked out to 26.6% of adjusted gross. By comparison, according to Whitehouse.gov,
"The President's effective [2012] federal [adjusted gross] income tax rate is 18.4%..."
4/15/2013
 Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit
Emphasis (SPICE) has been around since 1973. The basic computational engine
has always been open source. It began as a simple analog circuit simulator that
took a structured text file as the input net list and provided a text file output
that contained the calculated values that the user specified such as DC bias points,
transient analysis, and AC analysis. Component models started with relatively simple
definitions. If you wanted a graph of the response, it was in the form of text characters
with a standard 80-column division on the y-axis and the x-axis was as many divisions
as it needed to be to cover all the points calculated (often printed out on fan-fold
paper in a pin printer). Yes, I personally used those versions in the mid 1980s.
As time progressed, improvements were added to the computational engine to handle
a wider range of component models including digital and RF/microwave. More parameters
were added to component models to yield a better agreement between simulation and
laboratory measurements. Lagging...
12/20/2012
The old adage about a picture being worth a thousand words is validated often
with charts and graphs made for science, engineering, and finance. This chart illustrates
levels of collaboration between 25 countries on scientific papers published in 2011
in a select group of journals. Author John Sexton uses color and line width to indicate
origin and volume between countries. Circumferential length is relative volume overall.
He also includes a similar chart showing internal collaboration within the 10 countries
with the highest scientific paper output. Per Mr. Sexton, in 1996 about 25% of scientific
articles were authored by people in two or more countries; today it is 35%. Non-commercial
"Big Science" projects like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, with multinational
funding, contribute largely to the increase. Aptly pointed out is how global access
to and...
9/21/2012
 How much do you pay every month for all of
your personal communications?
That includes, but is not limited to, smartphones with data plans, land lines, Internet,
cable TV or satellite TV, wireless tablets and computers. Life in 2013 practically
requires some degree of connectivity, but many people are paying for way more of
it than necessary. I absolutely need a high speed Internet connection because of
publishing RF Cafe (14 Mbps for $44.90 per month). Since most
of my personal communications are via e-mail, phone service is not a high priority
so my cell phone is a TracFone that I pay under $100 per year to use (mainly
when away from home). Since there is no time for TV, any watching is done
via the Internet - it doesn't matter if shows are a week or month old - so no cost
there. I like using an old-fashioned telephone with a handset at home, so a landline
is also used. Up until a couple months ago I was paying the local phone company
$27 per month for basic local service (no long distance, caller ID, messaging,
etc.).
4/22/2013
 "Squaring the circle" may as yet be an unattainable
goal for even the best mathematicians, but the November 2012 edition of The Family
Handyman magazine had a tip for how to use a square (of the framing type)
and two nails draw a circle. This is what it said: "Make a Circle
with a Square - Here's a tip for laying out small circles or parts of circles.
Tack two nails to set the diameter you want, then rotate a framing square against
the nails while you hold a pencil in the corner of the square. You might need to
rub a little wax or some other lubricant on the bottom of the square so it slides
easily. Don't ask us why this process works; all we know is that it does." They're
either very honest or they don't think the average reader would understand the explanation.
The Pythagorean theorem is the key, of course, for explaining the reason. For any
right triangle: a2 + b2 = c2,
where 'a' and 'b' are the lengths of the two perpendicular sides, and 'c' is the
length of the hypotenuse...
12/25/2012
 Each year the Foundational Questions Institute
(FQXi) holds an essay contest inviting writers to submit missives addressing the
question chosen by the FQXi board as being particularly thought-provoking. In their
words, "FQXi catalyzes, supports, and disseminates research on questions at the
foundations of physics and cosmology, particularly new frontiers and innovative
ideas integral to a deep understanding of reality, but unlikely to be supported
by conventional funding sources." The 2011 question was "Is Reality Digital or Analog?"
Scientific American magazine, being one of three partners, published the
runner-up entry in the December 2012 issue: University of Cambridge professor of
theoretical physics professor David Tong's paper argues that the world is in fact
fundamentally analog.
Professor Tong actually tied for second place, but for some reason SciAm does
not tell us whether the other second place paper supported an analog or digital
viewpoint. For that matter, it did not say which side the winning paper came down
on. Strange. I looked it up on the FQXi website. First place went to Jarmo Makela,
who believes reality is digital in nature based on a personal discussion with Isaac
Newton in his London home in the year 1700. When...
1/12/2012
 You have probably heard and/or seen the scuttlebutt
about Congress trying to push through an
Internet sales tax,
ostensibly in order to level the playing field for brick and mortar businesses versus
online businesses. You can be sure the effort has nothing to do with fairness and
everything to do with politicians' insatiable appetite for tax money. They have
been salivating over the possibility of reaping that new revenue source for years.
The plan is to require online sales from out-of-state buyers to have sales tax collected
and remitted to the appropriate state revenue department. Local businesses are per
the claim disadvantaged because they must collect their home state's sales tax,
which supposedly causes buyers to prefer Internet vendors in order to avoid such
taxes. As one who has purchased many items over the Internet in the last 15 years,
I can't think of many times when avoiding sales tax was the prime motivation for
my decision. It was usually because either the item I wanted was not...
4/26/2013
 How far do you commute each day for the privilege
of doing your part to push back the frontiers of technical ignorance and to boldly
go where no engineer - or technician - has gone before (split infinitive
by Roddenberry,
not me)? Do you know what the cost equates to you each year? This handy-dandy
poster by the folks at Streamline Refinance lays out some gruesome numbers. Those
with a weak stomach probably should pass on viewing this one. Here's a hint at what
you will see: See that big $795 in the thumbnail image? That's the average
cost per year for commuting
-- per mile! Yessiree, if you live just 10 miles from work, you're losing nearly
$8k per year, depending on you automobile type, on gas, tires, maintenance, devaluation,
and loss of your personal time (which is valuable, after all). Back
in the early 1990s I drove 45 miles each way to Comsat, which took about 65 minutes
due to miserable traffic. That's 130 minutes round-trip, or 2 hours and 10 minutes
(about the run time of an average movie) each day. Figuring
two weeks vacation and 10 holidays, that leave 48 weeks x 5 days/week = 240 days
per year of commuting. 240 days...
3/15/2013
 Every week while sitting in the studio where
Melanie takes her cello and piano lessons, I usually read technical and hobby magazines,
but lately I have been studying the ARRL General Class License Manual in
preparation for taking the written exam in a couple months. Last week a lady saw
the book title and remarked, "I didn't know
ham radio
people were still around." Wow. It would be tempting to blame her for being
ignorant, or to blame the ARRL (American Radio Relay League) for not adequately
getting the word out, but the reality is that the mass media does not consider Ham
radio's contribution to be significant enough to cover in news stories. Amateur
radio operators perform a mighty service in times of trouble, but they do it so
efficiently and effectively- without actively seeking credit - that their efforts
are lost in the noise. Ham radio operators have been on the front lines of national
and civil defense since World War II and even a bit before...
12/4/2012
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