The cycling trainer mocks me. Last night after a five minute L14 fitness test, which tries to roughly estimate my VO2 max, I discovered I lost my “elite” status and am now “above average”. boooooo
No longer elite
Oct 17th, 2006 by bwann
Last night at a party Burton and I got a craving for brisket. It was around midnight, which guaranteed everything was close. Apparently that wasn’t the case, a place called Sam’s BBQ on east 12th stays open until 2 AM. We went there and it was pretty typical east Austin, but they had some good brisket. They even sold mutton, which is something I don’t see too often.
I’ve been limited in my lurking down in the lower HF bands because of my lack of ability to copy high speed code. I was looking at handheld readers today and ran across some Windows software called MixW. You can buy a special interface board, or just plug your radio’s speaker out to a PC’s mic together. The software will decode Morse, RTTY, FSK31, packet, fax, and SSTV from the audio received via the sound card. Going further, it has CAT support to control a transciever’s modes and frequency selection from the PC.
So, I rigged this stuff up this afternoon and went in hunt for code transmissions. It’s been stormy which made it hard to find stuff with decent quality. MixW features a graphical audio analyser to see where the sweet spots of the transmission are and allow you to pinpoint that exact frequency range to decode. Here is a screenshot of a random CW transmission I picked up on 40 meter between Illinois and Colorado. It’s not perfect copy, but close enough to see what’s going on. I imagine handheld decoders can’t do any better.
Tarheel antenna
Oct 14th, 2006 by bwann
I finally finished installing my new Tarheel antenna on the truck. I needed a way to mount it up on the bed rail for the best performance yet be able to easily fold it down to clear the parking garage at work. I spent all week looking for a fold-down mount that would readily mount to a truck bed rail, but no such thing exists. I solved the problem today by getting a Comet trunk-lip fold-down mount, cutting off the trunk lip and bolting it down to the bed rail. Bolting the untouched mount to the lip of the rail almost works, but there’s not enough clearance to fold the antenna down. Anyways, got it mounted an ran the coax to the radio.
Tarheel tuned to 80 meters
Little Tarheel II and 2m/70cm VHF/UHF antenna
Ham sexy! Scanner, CB, transciever
After getting the antenna installed, I tuned over to 14.100 MHz and finally heard the 4U1UN (New York UN), VE8AT (Extreme northern Canada), W6WX (California), IARU beacons. Sweet, finally!
Krav Maga not safe for crotches
Oct 12th, 2006 by bwann
A fun night of Krav Maga tonight. My head wasn’t there or something and I kept messing up and not doing drills right. On Tuesday I clipped my partner in the nuts with a straight kick, not enough to hurt him, but enough to make him say “woah”. Tonight was my turn, I got accidentally kneed lightly to the nuts during a choke drill. Didn’t take me down, but enough to make step lightly. No running tonight, my quads are on fire from workouts earlier this week.
Today I was monitoring K5VPW, the local IRLP node. On the drive to class, I heard a guy from Las Vegas, then a few minutes later a guy from Melbourne, Australia come on. They were chatting back and forth about the weather and Vegas and Australia for a few minutes. It was so awesome hearing people so far away chatting away on a local node of all places!
Geocaching
Oct 8th, 2006 by bwann
Today was a fun day of Geocaching. I found three caches, struck out on two. The last one was an adventure in getting lost in white people suburbia. I had set out to find GCH3CZ, so I parked at the recommended dead-end street at the trailhead. Somehow I got off trying to go to the coordinates for GCYK7E instead, which is near the same neighborhood. I took off down a mountain bike trail for a mile. It wasn’t feeling right because I was going west a lot and I knew it was in a northern direction, but the trail was looping around a lot so I kept on going. I wound up in the back yard of some houses, I knew at that point something was wrong. I punched in what I thought was the parking spot for GCH3CZ to backtrack, but it was really turned out to be the trailhead for GCYK7E. blah! I didn’t know the neighborhood (who pays attention when you’re going 20 mph on a bicycle?), so I walked about two more miles finding the right street and back across the neighborhood to where I had parked my truck.
It was nearing sunset, cool outside, so parents and their kids were out in their front yards were playing. Fortunately I didn’t see any spooked parents grab their kids and whisk them inside as my dirty and stinky presence was made.
One pound of fat is about 3,500 calories. To lose eight to ten pounds in a month through exercise, a person would need to burn at least 7,000 calories a week, or 1,000 calories a day. I’ve been trying to get my head around how much effort that is. That’s a solid hour of about 5-6 miles of running, or about two hours of 15-18 mph cycling, every day for a month. I’m going to say that an hour of Krav Maga qualifies as “intensive kickboxing” which will burn about 800 calories an hour. All this means that weight loss is a lot of sweat. Stupid fucking not-cycling-all-summer.
Last week there was an article (which now requires registration, boo) in the Statesman about Lance training for the NYC marathon. The thing that struck me was during his informal time trial at the highschool, he ran a 4:51 mile. wow!
Where’s a person gotta go to learn Farsi in Austin?
And speaking of sweat, I really wish my apartment had access to a sauna. I think the Finns are onto something.
Belton Hamfest
Oct 8th, 2006 by bwann
This morning I ventured up to Belton to the hamfest. It was an early crowd, when I got there at 11:30 people were already packing up their tables and leaving. Some new kit, but mostly old odd gear. I decided a while back I wasn’t going to get a Yaesu ATAS-120 after readng the horror stories of what happened to them after they were left in the rain. I had my eye on a Little Tarheel II which had received solid reviews. Today at the hamfest, a vendor had one, so I bought it.
It’s a slick little unit, looks very well constructed. The coil + 32″ whip made it about 10″ too long to mount on top of the truck bed rail, which left the rear bumper. The when the unit is tuned to 6 meters, the coils are about 6″ below the side of the truck. Being the impatient cheap sort I am, I made my own bumper extension mount to swing the antenna off to the side. The thing appears to be designed to only be mounted via a 3/8″ stud mount, which seems really lightweight to me.
The Tarheel is a motorized screwdriver-type antenna, which means it has to be tuned to match whatever band I’m operating on. I suspect this is going to get really old really fast, because I have to tune the antenna by ear. When I pulled out the switch kit, it has this klunky momentary DPDT rocker switch — not exactly high tech. This is opposed to the ATAS which is designed to be tuned with the FT-857D; push a button and it automatically tunes for you. This has me looking for automatic tuners that work with the FT-857D, namely the Antenna BOSS.
Anyways, I hooked it all up tonight to play with it. From my apartment I wasn’t picking up anything interesting so I drove out to the end of the street. 60 meter was active, I picked up six conversations; there was some mild background static noise, but the voice was easy to hear. From listening to conversations and recording some callsigns I determined there was a group in Virginia, Michigan, and New Jersey; another pair in Arizona and California, another pair in San Diego. Googling tells me one was the “3.955 Ragchewers Group”. I couldn’t figure out what the San Diego guy was doing, he kept calling out K6VO over and over .. I don’t know if he was working DX or some sort of contesting.
I hate Web 2.0
Oct 7th, 2006 by bwann
I don’t like the effect that “Web 2.0” is having on appearances of websites, namely logos. There’s no shortage of logo competitions out there, trying to take existing, well established logos and reinvent them with a new font, reflections, and a glazed look. The latest that I’ve seen is Cisco — their new logo has less balls than the old one. I think people that design this stuff are the same sort of people who get way, way excited when an application has a new icon. I’ve seen a number of links and comments on digg that don’t really focus on the fact the application has a had a number of improvements (and breaks things), but “OMFG ITUNES HAS A NEW BLUE ICON!@#!” wha? Does the rest of the world really care that much? I never see my desktop or dock (which is also minimized and auto-hide), therefore I never see those icons.
get off my lawn too.
Disorientation
Oct 3rd, 2006 by bwann
The Game of Disorientation – I love this game, it’ll totally screw with your head. I wish it went on longer.
Linux, Hams the same
Oct 1st, 2006 by bwann
After careful consideration, I’ve decided the ham radio community is exactly like the Linux community. Except instead of teenagers, you’re dealing with fairly articulate greybeards. People who take themselves way too seriously, more with strong opinions that can’t *possibly* be proven incorrect, and lots of smackdown to anyone who is unaware or ignorant (usually newbies) of some bit of information. I can’t believe there is so much hate for CB people from hams; moreso I can’t believe it keeps getting constantly rehashed over and over. “It’s just a radio,” isn’t it?
I picked up my FT-857 on Thursday along with fix’ns to wire it up in the truck. I went with LMR-400 Ultraflex cable because I’m clearly a yuppie with a dispoable income. The stuff is certainly beefy, almost a half-inch in diameter. Putting on PL-239 ends was easiler (a new 80 W soldering iron helps) since it was harder to burn through all two (!) layers of shielding and inner core. I gave in and took a drill to my truck’s bed railing and mounted a 140/440 Diamond antenna. Someday I’ll figure out antenna duplexing and ditch the other whips.
I resisted buying the matching ATAS-120 HF antenna. From what I read on eHam.net, there’s enough people having problems with their units when they get wet to make me apprehensive about owning one. I may wind up buying a Little Tarheel or something similar.
One thing I’m already missing with the 857 is a keypad for direct frequency entry. The solution to this appears to be a new mic with a built-in keypad. Operating the 857 definately requires cracking open the manual. Having used the 7R for a few weeks now, I sort of get how Yaesu’s interface works, but they still throw in some surprises on the 857.
I drove up to Oklahoma on Friday. I hit some nasty traffic congestion in Dallas, which took two hours to go through. On the way up I hit up army surplus in Killeen and bought a thigh holster for my HK. While slogging through traffic in Plano, I stopped by Texas Towers to check out their store. I have no idea where the promising local mom & pop radio store is in Dallas, this place wasn’t that interesting at all.
On the way up I also bought a 26′ dipole antenna. At the very least I hope I can use that on my balcony at my apartment. I rigged it up in my parents’ backyard to the 857. It was neat to finally see my radio come to life on HF and scan around the bands. I heard quite a few stations transmitting high speed Morse code, but too fast for me to understand it. I need a decoder of some sort.
Tonight I added 76 feet worth of wire and extended the dipole out to 102 feet, which is about 3/8 wavelength at 80 meters. I almost ran out of yard, 100 feet is roughly 1/3rd of a block. I see now why dipoles are made of 14 gauge wire, it takes a lot of tension to hold 102 feet of cable horizontally flat.
The new extended dipole picked up quite a few more Morse conversations on the lower frequencies. Somewhere down on 160 meters I heard a couple of guys ragchewing, but I didn’t figure out where they were at. Tooling around in the broadcast AM radio bands I picked up stations from San Antonio, Galveston, Dallas, and St. Louis (all hundreds of miles away). The big thing I was after was propogation beacons. Even with the hugeass dipole (and using all CW, SSB/AM, USB, LSB, FM modes) I wasn’t picking up anything on 5m, 10m, 20m nor any of the NCDXF beacons. I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong, the atmosphere just sucks this weekend, if the dipole needs to be more than 8′ off the ground, or what.
Bring the pain
Sep 25th, 2006 by bwann
A hard hour of Krav Maga tonight. You know it’s a good class when you’re wreaking of somebody else’s sweat, it hurts your chest to breath, and your throat is bleeding. More please?
