More 2-meter ducting on my APRS map this morning with the top DX being in almost completely opposite directions:
- KQ1L-2 in Litchfield, ME, at 39° 230 miles
- W3ND-2 in Enola, PA, at 245° 230 miles
Archive for July, 2007
more ducting
Sunday, July 29th, 2007Surfin’: If It Looks Like A Ducting…
Friday, July 27th, 2007Two-meter band openings and a unique way to spot them is the topic of this week’s installment of Surfin’. After you read Surfin’, you can leave your comments here.
By the way, Surfin’ is a weekly column published on ARRLWeb that finds and features Web sites that are related to Amateur Radio, specifically, and radio, in general. If you have any suggestions for Surfin’, please contact WA1LOU using the e-mail link to the right.
144-MHz band opening
Thursday, July 26th, 2007Every evening after work, I drop off my briefcase in my home office/shack and check the status of 144.39 MHz as displayed on my computer screen running APRS. Last night was no different except that there must have been a nice band opening on 2 meters during the day.
It looked like your classic summer tropospheric ducting event with loads of stations received by my station all clustered along the East Coast down to the Virginia-North Carolina state lines. The most distant station received was WB4YNF-4 in Ahoskie, NC, approximately 430 miles away!
There was one station I received that was a bit of an anomaly: K3ARL-1 near State College, PA, approximately 267 miles west/southwest of WA1LOU. It is inland and far from the other stations huddled along the coast and I am not sure how my reception of that station fits into the tropospheric ducting model.
1984 plus 23 part 2
Wednesday, July 25th, 2007What were the pre-2005 “other intelligence activities”? …our own Government was spying on us using methods even more blatantly illegal than the “Terrorist Surveillance Program”…
1984 plus 23
Wednesday, July 25th, 2007They’ve got your number and probably mine, too.
the original X-men X-man
Wednesday, July 25th, 2007
The Man From Planet X is another filme that scared/scarred the crap out of me when I was a kid.
Mind you, I only saw this film on television, never in a movie theater, so, in my humble opinion, the scary parts had to be really scary in order to be as effective viewing it on a 10-inch television screen in the comfort and safety of my parent’s living room vs. the big screen in a dark movie theater.
The real scary elements of this film:
- Lots of fog just like a gothic monster flick.
- Lots of suspense waiting for The Man to show up.
- The Man finally shows up in spectacular fashion.
Recently, I viewed this film again and it still holds up. I recommend it.
why I hate e-mail
Monday, July 23rd, 2007I get 200 to 250 e-mails per day. I estimate that 20 to 25% of that e-mail is legitimate e-mail, i.e., correspondence with real live people, the output of e-mail lists I subscribe to, and advertisements from companies that I agreed to accept e-mail from. The rest is junk that I wade through in order to separate the wheat from the chaff.
I actually don’t hate e-mail. It is the process of separating the good e-mail from the bad e-mail that I dislike.
I have been using Thunderbird as my e-mail client for about three weeks. It spots about a third of the junk I receive and seldom mislabels good e-mail as junk, but it may be able to do better. I will tweak its spam filtering settings to see if I can improve things and let you know how it goes.
why I hate Harry Potter
Sunday, July 22nd, 2007Ron Charles pretty well sums up my feelings about Harry Potter.
Instead of regurgitating what he wrote, you can read it here.
white MD-80 mystery
Saturday, July 21st, 2007Thursday morning, I took my daughter to the airport (BDL) to catch a flight to Phoenix. After she disappeared into the bowels of the terminal, I headed home.
Exiting the short-term parking lot ($2.50 for 1/2 hour), I noticed an MD-80 moving slowly on the tarmac in front of me. This was not your everyday MD-80. It had no passenger windows, it was painted white, and the only insignia was a small US flag on the side (behind the wing, but ahead of the engine) with an N-something identification number below the flag.
Friday afternoon, I walked my dogs and as we headed back home, I hear a jet airplane approaching from the north. It was louder than most, so I figured it must be low. When it cleared the trees blocking my view, it was indeed low and it was a white MD-80 just like the one I saw the previous morning. My guess is that it was the same plane having just left BDL, which is less than 25 miles away.
I am familiar with the routes of planes in my neck of the woods and everything related to BDL in my neighborhood flies north into BDL. I never see a plane flying south from BDL, but my white MD-80 was flying south from BDL.
This unusual plane and its unusual route caused me to believe that this plane was involved in some kind of government operation.
I began researching the mystery on the Internet and I had my answer quickly via AIRLINERS.NET. On the web site’s discussion list, the white MD-80 puzzle was solved: U.S. Marshals use it to transport prisoners.
I highly recommend AIRLINERS.NET for information and photos regarding aviation. By today’s count, the web site has 1,188,164 photos on line!
By the way, the white MD-80 looked spectacular winging its way over Downtown Wolcott.
Surfin’: It’s All Too Much
Friday, July 20th, 2007This week’s installment of Surfin’ provides a grab bag of short topics, all too much to summarize here. After you read Surfin’, you can leave your comments here.
By the way, Surfin’ is a weekly column published on ARRLWeb that finds and features Web sites that are related to Amateur Radio, specifically, and radio, in general. If you have any suggestions for Surfin’, please contact WA1LOU using the e-mail link to the right.