Ron Chester

This is a good antenna to take to Thailand, as it does 8 HF bands (80-10) without a tuner. We need to keep it simple on this first DXpedition!

This is a test of the 'mergency broadcast system - tested about by Andy - who is considering getting active as POTA activator.

I need to look through my books for a good reference on Thai customs and culture.  We now have a trained expert in the family who could translate such a book to native Thai and to Chinese!

Spent the morning tracing double entry back to the year 1300, when the merchants of Venice  were already using it in business.  Pacioli didn't publish the details of the system until 1494 but the merchants had already been using it for 200 years!  

This was a red letter morning.  I stumbled onto how to most easily find all the recordings posted on YouTube by any given contributor.  This will make it easy to gather a large collection of Bob's performances.  However there is one danger in this, which is that one must be very careful not to become a completist in making such a collection. Being a completist might be okay in some cases, but with Bob it could be a giant curse because there is such a gigantic quantity of material that one could find the collecting turning into an obsession to find it all and record it all.  This could become a mind numbing activity that could kill off the joy of finding and saving a large number of treasures.  It is very important to capture the joy and spontaneity in his work. 

We've had some frost on the grass in recent mornings, as winter approaches.   I need to get in the swing of it again in working folks around the world with CW, my favorite international language.

Yesterday I finally got my driving privileges restored at the DMV, since my fantastic cataract surgery!

24 October 2023 was the day my doctor informed me that I have a very young heart, rather unexpected, but pleasant. This was his experience from his actual inspection of my heart, not an extrapolation from other measures. He estimated my heart is about ten years younger than the rest of my body, when the heart is more often seven years older than the rest of the body for men and four years for women. This is the birth of a new tag line for me: Youngheart.

Today is the birthday for my wife's niece, Aun Aun, soon to graduate from five years of college in Thailand, now speaking her native Thai, plus English and Chinese!!

In the Planning Ahead department, now that tax season has ended, it's a good time to get stuff done for the future.  I start with a bush that claims to have purple berries the Northern Cardinals are said to love to eat.  Plant this bush and the Cardinals will flock to your yard!  Next trip to the nursery will include a search for American native beautyberry (Callicarpa americana).   

Soooo irrelevant that my link didn't even work!!  It would make a perfect posting on micro.blog, where nearly everything there is irrelevant to me.

The first in my new series on Irrelevant Postings, this one about the Johann Sebastian Bach - "Coffee Cantata" BWV 211, complete with full lyrics, as well as the video of a performance of the piece by a string orchestra and two vocalists.  How irrelevant is this for me?  Well, I don't drink coffee, never have, probably never will, so it's totally irrelevant for me.  But I sent the link to my brother, who is an opera fanatic, so it might be quite relevant, or at least a little bit interesting, for him.

I was very fortunate to be a student at Oberlin College in the Spring of 1964 when the Oberlin College Choir did a historic two month tour of Russia with their amazing chorale performances. It was a super successful way to win over the hearts of the Russians and was so characteristic of how my generation used to win people over with love and beauty.  

We managed to order Amtrak train tickets to Chicago with my mobile phone.  It took two of us 45 mins to navigate their website order form.  I used to just call Amtrak and do it over the landline. Much easier, but I guess those good times are over.  We're still looking forward to the train ride!  

I managed to find a help page that told me how to find the pw for my phone.  I tried it and it worked!  For the first time I can now hear voicemail messages that people leave for me.  Hooray!!

Here's a nice format for reading 51 years of the PAARA newsletter, the club in Palo Alto that I belong to. It's a wonderful club with great monthly meeting presentations and exciting Field Day activations every June.  

Wolfram/Alpha brags that it can translate messages to and from Morse Code.  But it makes the most common error of converting the code to text symbols, instead of to learn the sounds of Morse Code.  Learn the sounds and you can learn to do Morse Code at high speed.  Translating the sounds of Morse Code to text will only slow you down in using the code.  

Today Andy posted a long Status Update (2023-09-11) that shows our little updates can be pretty extensive and awesome!  I've experimented with this some too. For example my 2023-09-09 Update reaches all the way back to a very early posting (May 1994) on rec.music.dylan, which I then included on the cover page of my first ever website, a Dylan bibliography from 1999-29-05 which is still alive in its original form today and likely one of the oldest sites still in its original form on the web, more than 24 years after it was first created. The bibliography was built with the encouragement of the great Dylan master, CJ, and it was first posted as a surprise to him.  You may notice that I indexed the site using Alta Vista, which was considered to be a powerful search engine at the time.  Google searches had not yet been invented, so that's old, like me!    

The Niners won their opener against the Steelers, 30-7. Clearly no sophomore slump for Purdy, and the entire team did a great job, especially Aiyuk & McCaffrey. The offense moved at will and the defense stopped nearly everything, far exceeding their 2.5 pt advantage at the start of the game.

The most amazing thing in years has happened today.  I just found one of the most important people in my life, one of my classmates at Oberlin College, Lynn Bengston. She and our mutual friend, Steph, got me into Bob Dylan's music one night our senior year in 1966.  I eventually lost touch with both of them.  I started searching for them in the 1990's.  I was too late in locating Steph, she had already passed on.  But I never had even the slightest lead in finding Lynn, none of our friends had any idea what had happened with her.  But today I finally located her and we talked on the phone for 15 mins, with more to come soon.  We were both verrrrry happy to reconnect!!!

I realized that if we go to Thailand in February, I will be able to get an antenna up and enter the ARRL DX CW contest, my first DXpedition operating ever!!

Spent time today confirming that our visiting beaver was actually a beaver (a broad flat tail FOR SURE) and NOT a groundhog, muskrat or gopher.  But we also have two new holes dug in our front garden.  We don't think beavers dig holes, so we might have two visitors, not one: a beaver plus a groundhog, muskrat or gopher.  Quite an interesting development. 

We saw the Super Blue Moon here and it was really fantastic.  I took a bunch of pictures, but none were as fantastic as seeing it with the naked eye.  It definitely looked blue to me.  My astronomer brother told me it's not really blue. I saw BLUE!

Google Keep has been upgraded with bold, italics and such.  So once I have that update, I think I will use Keep to document my full inventory of QRP and other ham radio gear.

Production Is the Basis of Morale!   Feeling a bit down?  Up your production and you'll feel better right away!

It is 70 deg at 10:30 am this morning.  Soooo much better than the heat wave last week.  Maybe I will take a walk today.

Our many day long heat wave broke last night.  A bit after 9 pm the temp dropped from 98 deg to 80 in half an hour and then 10 more degrees in another hour.  Along with that drop we had a lot of rain and plenty of thunder and lightning, with a severe thunderstorm warning coming from the Weather Service over the TV.   

Little girl to her mother: "Mommy, can we go eat at McDonald's?"  Mommy: of course we can, as long as you can spell McDonald's for me.  P A U S E   Little girl again: "Okay Mommy, let's go eat at KFC!"

Two hot nights in a row, maybe two more to come.  We have good A/C downstairs, but not so good upstairs.  But we both slept okay in the heat. This is summer, not any special climate change.  Just a normal seasonal change for us.

I own a nice red baseball cap, but it's an official MLB St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap, for the team I grew up listening to on the radio as a kid. They never made it to the World Series until I went off to college in Ohio.

As we came out of the restaurant, we heard a loud siren in the distance coming our way. It was coming fast, blaring its siren and honking its horn, loud and fast, over and over and over. It was coming up a wide four lane road and cars were escaping to the shoulders fast along the way to give it room. They were soon upon us and then past us and going fast. It was verrrrry exciting!! We stood by our car and just watched, transfixed. Once it was gone, we both got in the car, very excited!! Wow, that was really exciting, terrific, no wonder kids want to be a fireman! As soon as we were settled in the car, Supattra said, "You'll never see that in Thailand!" Oh, really? Why not? "Because Thai people don't know what to do. They get flustered and don't know how to get out of the way. So it just becomes a big traffic snarl, with a fire engine stuck in a traffic jam." Wow, I never noticed that, but then again, I can't think of a single time I've seen a fire engine in Thailand. 

A terrific article on local news by Doc Searls provides plenty of excellent ideas about directions that local news is considering in many places.  I even own an excellent domain name for such a project in our neighborhood.

My Elmer (from 1959-1960) discovered two great Bob Dylan CD's in his Jeep that have been in there for a long time. One had been played once, the other had never been played at all.  Then again he has one of the highest standings of all the thousands of people on SKCC.  His main priority in his spare time is CW, obviously not Dylan. That's okay. To each his own. <br /> <br />

But tomorrow I'm gonna call him and ask him whether he has played the Blonde on Blonde album yet!  

I have rediscovered the website for John, AE5X, who has one of the best blogs for hams who enjoy QRP CW operation.  It is a very informative and useful website!

In really difficult times, it is important to keep one's eye on the ball and to follow the highest priorities in the correct order to ensure that a proper & sane resolution to the matters at hand is achieved without fail.  Do not waver, or be distracted.

I snagged a like new Chameleon LEFS 8010 with 50 ft of RG-58 coax.  I've found that Chameleon always uses the highest quality components in their antennas, but it's never cheap.  So it was good to find a like new antenna at a discount.  It should do 80m to 10m end fed, without a tuner, so a very handy antenna, especially for portable operating!

I woke to a delicious 67 deg F this morning!  I listened to a new K4SWL POTA activation which wrapped up my morning activities perfectly.  73, Ron

An excellent video of Mr. Carlson repairing a Tektronix 503 oscilloscope. What a great technician and teacher he is!

Today we have 66 deg temp at 1:00 pm on 2 Aug 2023 after a light steady sprinkle this morning.  This is a welcome respite from our very hot July weather! 

I saw a gorgeous Monarch butterfly in our front yard yesterday!  I called out to welcome it, but it ignored me and flew over to an enticing bush on the other side of our yard.  We need to plant some Milkweed plants in our yard.

We opened a new checking account at a bank right downtown, just 1-2 blocks from the post office and the library.  It's in a very nice bldg with excellent A/C on a super hot day.  They had sent me two ads in the mail, offering $400 cash bonus if we opened a checking account with direct deposit attached.  Hey, that's a lot better than a toaster, so we decided to give it a try. Free enterprise comes up with nice incentives!!

History will eventually show the the two IRS whistleblowers are American heroes. Their intervention may have saved the Dept of Justice from making some major blunders that might have made it very clear that Justice for All is NOT a reality in America.

I had a lovely 40 min chat with my childhood Elmer, who now lives in MI, on a lake in a town of 800 population.  He is happily retired, with a W0 call, from his time when he lived in Iowa in the same town as the Collins Radio factory.  He couldn't afford any Collins equipment, but I wish he could have taken a tour of the factory to see the great stuff being built.

I promised to post an episode from the Christopher Lyden podcast, which Dave Winer helped to originally get up and running. The Lyden podcast, Open Source, was the first ever podcast and it has always been one of the best.  I decided to link to one of my favorite episodes: when he had on Christopher Ricks, now Sir Christopher Ricks, to discuss Bob Dylan and his art. I had the good fortune of becoming friends with Ricks in 1998, when I hosted him as the Keynote Speaker at the Stanford International Conference on Bob Dylan.  Ricks was one of the first in academia to suggest that Bob was worthy of study as a great American song writer at the university level.  Many years later Ricks was asked to produce the most exhaustive Dylan lyrics book ever  (and there have been many) which was published by Simon & Schuster on 28 Oct 2014.  In the 7 Dec 2016 Open Source podcast, Ricks described Bob as the “greatest living user of the English language.”   Follow the previous link to see that podcast episode, or you can listen to the original audio of the episode by clicking here.  Not too long after that podcast, Bob was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on 13 October 2017.  Yay!!

I browsed microblog for a bit this morning. I saw a LOT of negative postings, more than I usually expect.  Many seem to be mad at Musk. Why do they like to criticize him so much?  Maybe I will adopt a new policy. Count negative postings and leave the site when the count reaches a certain count, like 5.  I don't need to have negativity added to my life.  Starting Anti-Negativity Week now.

This is how it can be when you're in your mid-seventies. I have a flashlight that is charged with a small flat solar panel on one side.  I bought it in a Kickstarter, before microblog came along.  They actually delivered on their Kickstarter promises!  It is called a Waka Waka Power.  I have two of them; one is yellow and the other is black. I put the black one on top of my lower sash window, so it was pointing east into the bright sun, to charge it up.  Fast forward a day or two and I realize I haven't taken it out of the window and surely it is done charging.  But now I can't find it in my window!  I ask my wife whether she moved it (Nope) and I looked and looked all over, but didn't find it.  I gave up, figuring it will turn up.  Fast forward another day and my wife calls me into the kitchen and points me to the window in the pantry area.  There is my black flashlight perched on top of the window, right where I had put it!!  I had been looking on the matching window in the bathroom, five feet or so down the hall from the pantry in the kitchen. (Red face)  And it had quite a good charge on it, of course.

I have made contact with a ham on microblog who has had a WSPR server up for over a year!  He recommended a QDX rig for setting up the same kind of server.  Only $69 for the kit. How could I go wrong? 

Dave Winer has declared today to be Journalism is Stupid Day on Scripting.com. He offers no prizes for playing along, but he DOES tell the complete origin story for the long running OpenSource Podcast with Christopher Lyden.  I don't think he meant the stupid part to apply to Lyden, as we know he has great respect for Lyden's long and great career as one of the best podcasters of all time. We will be posting a link to one of the great Open Source podcasts here in the near future. Don't even try to guess which one, just stay tuned to see which one.

An unexpected pleasure: when I went to the library during out black-out to charge up my phone, I bought a book about Ronald Reagan that has been a lot of fun to read. It set me back all of $1, a dollar very well spent.  

In the UK you can be trained to argue correctly, very helpful for social media.

Here is some of the very best of John Cleese.  I was laughing uncontrollably while watching some of these.

I took advantage of the Amazon Prime sale to buy a four panel solar panel and a portable power station which will work as an uninterruptible backup power supply for my main computer and will also do many charge-ups on our phones, as well as on many of my QRP CW rigs.  

Test post with new editor, linking to Andy Sylvester

Recently Dave Winer wrote about one of his most worthy accomplishments, which was when he helped Christopher Lyden in 2003 with the mechanics to broadcast his first ever podcast. That podcast, Open Source, has now run for decades, the longest run for a podcast ever produced.

In December 2016, I was thrilled when I heard that Open Source was going to be having Sir Christopher Ricks as a guest, in celebration of the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to Bob Dylan. It is a terrific episode, with Lyden and Ricks discussing Dylan's life work, capped off with a recording of Bob giving his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Quite marvelous!!

Recently Dave Winer wrote about one of his most worthy accomplishments, which was when he helped href="http://scripting.com/2023/07/09.html?title=odeToMaryAndChris">Christopher Lyden in 2003 with the mechanics to broadcast his first ever podcast. That podcast, Open Source, has now run for decades, the longest run for a podcast ever produced.

In December 2016, I was thrilled when I heard that Open Source was going to be having Sir Christopher Ricks as a guest, in celebration of the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to Bob Dylan. It is a href="https://radioopensource.org/bob-dylan-poet/">terrific episode, with Lyden and Ricks discussing Dylan's life work, capped off with a recording of Bob giving his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Quite marvelous!!

We had a nice productive day today, with the temp not going higher than 80 deg and blue skies all day long. I've been researching small affordable solar power sources and backup battery charging systems for our phones and other devices. We don't need a full blown solar power system on our gorgeous black roof. I'd rather just keep the handsome look of our house as the architect originally designed it. We will need to hire some tree guys to come in and tidy up some trees and remove a few dead trees. Because of our recent storm, the city will be carting off all tree limbs that came down during the storm, at no cost to us.

Supattra made Tom Kha Ghai for dinner tonight, a delicious Thai soup with chicken in it, as well as fresh lime juice. Of course she made one version for me (low on spice) and another for her (no shortage of spicy). The more I ate, the more delicious it was. I'm soooo lucky to have a Thai wife!

Our next door neighbor has been helping us with yard cleanup today. We also went to Menard's to get battery operated garden trimming tools: a 6" pruning chainsaw & a 20" hedge trimmer. We love these new battery operated tools. We've been using a battery operated lawn mower for at least two years now. Our gardening tools are all switching to battery powered now, no cords on any of them.

We had a nice productive day today, with the temp not going higher than 80 deg and blue skies all day long. I've been researching small affordable solar power sources and backup battery charging systems for our phones and other devices. We don't need a full blown solar power system on our gorgeous black roof. I'd rather just keep the handsome look of our house as the architect originally designed it. We will need to hire some tree guys to come in and tidy up some trees and remove a few dead trees. Because of our recent storm, the city will be carting off all tree limbs that came down during the storm, at no cost to us.

We finally got our power back on after 52.5 hrs with no power. One day was cool, so not too bad. Second day was in the 80's, so a nightmare. I am working on having alternate ways to charge my phone. Also beginning to think about some solar choices, but don't tell anyone, as I don't want a phone book worth of regs to follow, if I do that. I'd really like to have a simple life.

I've veered in two new directions: (1) Early books on very early crystal radio sets, as exemplified by the coverage of the Alfred P. Morgan books for boys, as posted on YouTube by @MIKROWAVE1, N2UD, Michael Murphy and

(2) A new top notch SWL receiver I have acquired, a Drake R8A receiver, not yet received, but it won't be too long.

I found a four-part series on YouTube from Michael Murphy, WU2D

Morgan Revealed: Regen Fever - based on the books of Alfred P. Morgan
He tells the history of Morgan and shows two of his many books. Then he shows the regen receiver he built from the instructions in the books. My first shortwave receiver was a Knight Ocean Hopper, a classic regen kit that was hugely popular in the early 60's. I built the kit and then discovered a whole new world, as did many others who built the kit.
See the videos: Morgan Revealed #1 Morgan Revealed #2 Morgan Revealed #3 Morgan Revealed #4

The first major survey about Field Radios by Thomas (11 May 2023).
“What QRP radio do you tend to use the most in the field?“

#1 The Elecraft KX2: 131 votes
#2 The Yaesu FT-817 or FT-818: 105 votes
#3 The Icom IC-705: 101 votes
#4 The Elecraft KX3: 80 votes
#5 The Xiegu X6100: 40 votes
#6 The lab599 Discovery TX-500: 38 votes
#7 The (tr)uSDX: 29 votes
#8 The Xiegu G90: 27 votes
#9 The QRP Labs QCX-Mini: 15 votes
#10 Tie Between the Mountain Topper MTR-4 series & Venus SW-3B: 13 votes

All others below 1.7% in voting

On 3 May 2023, Thomas reported on a survey he ran on FB about What Rig Folks Primarily Use in POTA Activity.
Here are the Rankings by Percentages:
1. Yaesu FT-891: 25%
2. Xiegu G90: 9%
3. Icom IC-7300 and IC-705: 7%
4. Yaesu FT-857D, FT-991A, FT-817/818: 4%
5. Xiegu 6100, Yaesu FT-897D, Elecraft K/KX series: 3%

On 3 May 2023, Thomas reported on a survey he ran on FB about What Rig Folks Primarily Use in POTA Activity.
Here are the Rankings by Percentages: 1. Yaesu FT-891: 25%
2. Xiegu G90: 9%
3. Icom IC-7300 and IC-705: 7%
4. Yaesu FT-857D, FT-991A, FT-817/818: 4%
5. Xiegu 6100, Yaesu FT-897D, Elecraft K/KX series: 3%

This posting is in memory of my longtime & loyal friend, Steve Porter, now SK*.
Today is his birthday, June 12. Decades ago I created an automated mailing list on the Internet for members of our church scattered around the country. Its purpose was to make it easy to distribute good news among our friends in the church and it became wildly popular with them. Steve and our mutual friend Rick helped manage this activity with me for a very long time. It was a huge amount of work, but we were all very dedicated to the activity because we wanted to do our best to help our church friends, who were not often recognized in the world at large for their good works.
*SK is a ham radio designation for Silent Key, someone who has passed on.

REFERENCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML

The Top Ten QRP Rigs of the 1970's & 1980's The Birthing of QRP as we Know It Today Rated by WU2D, Michael J Murphy in Manchester, NH #1 - Yaesu Musen FT-7 Superhet rig, 1979 - 50w SSB & CW, 12w AM - 80m - 10m #2 - Ten Tec Model 505 & 509 Argonaut superhet transceivers - SSB & CW #3 - Heathkit HW-7 (1972-75) & HW-8 (1976-83) - Direct conversion (DC) rigs #4 - Ten Tec Power Mite Transceiver, PM-3, 40m & 20m, 1968-1971 #5 - PW Severn by Rev G C Dobbs, G3RJV in Practical Wireless May 1983 #6 - Tuna Tin II by Doug DeMaw, W1FB - 1976 QST #7 - The Mountaineer by Wes Haywood, W7ZOI & Terry White, Aug 72 QST #8 - Ten Tec Century 21 Model 570 - 1st commercial rig, solid state 70 watts CW #9 - W1GAC The Mighty Mo - QST Dec 1951 #10 - Ameco AC-1 - Single tube

Test post 02 Ron 6/9/2023

Test post 01 Ron 6/9/2023

Test post Ron

Test post 06 5/28/2023

Test post 05 5/28/2023