**NEW** Obama Bumper Sticker Removal Kit!!!

This is just TOO funny!
And here's what's in the kit.....

Internation Space Station

Just had a wonderful 80 degree pass of the ISS. It came up out of the Northwest, and set in the Southeast. Brighter than Venus, which is the bright "star" by the Moon, and always fun to see go over.
If you're interested in how you can see it yourself, AMSAT has a very nice Web application where you can enter your Longitude and Latitude, and get real-time pass prediction. Keep in mind it's only visible when in the sun, you passes that occur around dusk are just beautiful to watch.
Real Time Pass Predictions by AMSAT.
Use the drop-down box ("Show predictions for") to select the ISS (it defaults to AO-51) and enjoy!
And if you're curious about the history of Amateur Radio Satellites, there's an excellent story to be read over at Space Today Online.

Weirdness in the Gulf

Haven't checked this out yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was true......

The Gulf Smells (This will give you something to think about for a while.)

1. 4 Weeks before the BP blowout Obama builds an alibi---“I am opening offshore drilling off of all the Coastal U.S.” Goldman Sachs dumps nearly all of its stock 40%+ in BP, a profitable winner. Days before they dump the rest.

2. BP ignores the advice of all the drilling contractors on making the well safe. British Petroleum had a manager directing drilling who had never been on an offshore rig before, that purposely ignored all safety warnings. BP ignores TransOceanic warnings about a problem with the blowout preventers. BP ignores repeated warnings on numerous problems from numerous sub-contractors.

3. The well explodes under suspicious circumstances, but BP does nothing immediately to control it. Why? The Dutch offer to have it controlled in 48 hours. They are ignored.

4. Obama sacks his National Intelligence Director (a Navy Admiral) who cannot comment on intelligence, or the reasons he was sacked because of Federal Laws.

5. BP top fills the well but it fails as predicted in advance by numerous oil professionals causing downhole damage to the well which has caused a massive pollution of the southern U.S. The way they bungled everything, the Gulf will be dead for decades!

6. Obama now declares ALL drilling is suspended in the Gulf and makes numerous PR trips to the Gulf to look like he is outraged.

7. John Podesta is Obama’s man that built his cabinet, and all his Czars

8. John Podesta is also head of George Soros ‘Center for American Progress’ (a socialist organization dedicated to killing capitalism in America and for building according to Soros “A New World Order”)

9. John Podesta’s brother is the lead lobbyist for British Petroleum, whose services are now in huge demand.

10. Soros was a huge contributor to Obama’s campaign

11. Soros invested $900 million in Petrobras, the Brazilian government controlled oil company that plans on drilling offshore in Brazil, yet cannot get the deepwater rigs operating in the Gulf

12.Days after Soros investment, Obama grants $2 billion to Petrobras of U.S. taxpayers dollars to drill offshore in Brazil….the company nets over $15 Billion annually

13.U.S. drilling companies must do something with their now idled rigs and are planning on moving them off to South America----to Petrobras which will supply the oil to the U.S. as an Import

14.Obama gives a patsy White House Oval Office speech on the disaster, but also during the speech he states the need for Carbon Taxes…Cap and Trade.

15. The carbon tax exchange will be based in…You guessed it…….Chicago….and called the CCX…..The CHICAGO Climate Exchange

New T-Shirt!

Shamelessly swiped from a buddy on a forum I frequent.

Clean-Up Time

Well, the YF (ham-speak for "wife") and I started a "little" project last Saturday morning that's still going on. We have an enclosed are at the back of our garage, about 4' wide, that runs the width of the garage. The roof of the garage was extended, a concrete pad was poured, some 4x4's anchored to the pad with 2x4's to tie them together, and sheets of corrugated fiberglas nailed to the studs and stringers. One end has a discarded door from somewhere, and the other is blocked off with some large wood planking. Voila! Instant storage area that's out of the rain and sun, and fairly secure because of the location. It hadn't been cleaned out, sorted, or organized in at least 7 years, and going in beyond the first couple of feet got pretty scary. It looked like something from a Wes Craven movie, and the further in you went, the worse it got. As we pulled things out, I'd go in with my shop vacuum and remove all the cobwebs, dead bugs, and other debris. When we finally had the movable stuff out, I went in and pulled out the shelving that was in there, and then we cleaned the concrete pad and walls. One of the shelf units is really sturdy wood, so we kept it, and the better of the three metal shelf units. Two of the three metal shelves were *really* cheap, and bent up as I was moving them! I picked up some Plano plastic snap-together shelves on sale at Lowe's, and then we reloaded the storage "shed", setting aside all the worn out and broken things that were in there. We wound up with so much nicely organized extra space back there, that I was able to move some of the larger items I had in the garage into it, along with a ton of smaller rarely-used items.
Then I attacked the garage!
The first thing I did was to hang two new shop lights, and move the existing light to over the work bench. I'm still running them off an assortment of extension cords (yes, I really do know better!), and now there's more than enough light to work out there after dark. I had dozens of large, medium, and small boxes full of stuff that are now sorted, stored, or tossed out. Weird stuff, like serial cables with one end cut off (wonder what I used it for?), dozens of old Ethernet cables ("Cat5 Network Cables" for the non-geeks), half-boxes of hardware (I had SIX boxes of 1/4-20; now I have ONE!), broken stuff that people had given me ("If you fix it, you can HAVE it!"...uhhh...then if I can't fix it, you want it back broken??), obsolete stuff good only for the salvage value of the metal, HUNDREDS of old software CD's that came with long-gone hardware, dead motherboards, bad CPU's and CPU's out of machines I upgraded for people, a HUGE box of old memory ranging from 1-Meg 30-pin SIMMS to high-end server memory, and on, and on, and on.
And that was just MY stuff!
Then we spent a couple of pleasant afternoons going through all the boxes, milk-crates, and old, rusty tool-boxes from her oldest son and deceased husband. I still don't know why they needed TWENTY-FIVE staple guns, multiple sets of El-Cheapo sockets and screwdrivers, and other assorted "Harbor Freight Quality" tools, but there they were.
We now have a huge pile of "stuff" stacked up in the driveway to get rid of, and a reasonably clean and organized garage. We're still not finished, but it's much better than it was.
The next big project will be to organize the dozen or so boxes of Star Trek, Star Wars, TMNT, and various Action Figures to list on eBay so we can get rid of them.
And we haven't even started on the TWO THOUSAND comic books her husband had acquired over the years......

Field Day 2010 Pictures!

Finally had time for a breather here. Got busy this morning cleaning out the storage area behind our garage (a.k.a "The Shed"), and it wound up taking almost all day. And we stacked a whole pile of bent up metal shelving, an old wet/dry vac, some hedge trimmers and weed-eaters, and a bunch of PVC/ABS pipe in various sizes.
I bet it'll be gone by tomorrow afternoon!
Enjoy the photos. They were taken at the K6AA 2010 Field Day operation at Angel's Gate Park in San Pedro. We had a ball, and I made thirty-five ( ! ! ! ) satellite contacts this year!

The Iceberg

Go read this now.
Please.
It's a most excellent viewpoint of our current times, and with some REAL hope for a real change.
And Happy Birthday, America!

Field Day Fun and Other Thoughts

Well, our annual Field Day event is over for another year. Nobody was injured (it's happened), no major equipment problems at any of the stations on site (a few "nail-biters", though), we all had a great time, and my friend The Wandering Minstrel even stopped by Friday while I was setting up. We had several elected representatives of local government show up, and the Police as usual stopped by to see how we were doing this year. One of our club members is retired LAPD, so we always have both the LAPD and Port of Los Angeles Police drop by to say hi. Our "Get On The Air" (GOTA) station was a huge hit this year, due to us having it on the grounds of the Fort MacArthur Military Museum, and a lot of the visitors there took the short walk "up the hill" to drop by and see some serious Amateur Radio operations. We previously had to have the GOTA station in the immediate vicinity of the other stations to be inside the 1000' diameter circle the rules specify, but this year, due to some construction at the North end of the area we use, we had to move the entire operation several hundred feet to the South, which put Fort Mac inside the circle, and they graciously allowed us to operate there.
BTW, if you live in the Los Angeles area and like Military historical things, please drop by and visit the Fort MacArthur Military Museum. It's a trip though the history of the defense of the Port of Los Angeles, from 1910 through the Nike missile era. And if your historical bent runs more to things nautical, please drop by the Los Angeles Maritime Museum, another time capsule of POLA history, and the host of my radio club
We ran class 4A this year, which means up to 4 simultaneous transmitters, and running without "commercial" power. I don't have the final number of contacts made, or the total score, but I made 35 satellite contacts, an all-time record for me on Field Day. You get a 100-point bonus for making the first contact, and then any other contacts count as 1 point each. My previous "best" was 5 contacts, so I kind of ground my previous performances into dust! This was the first year that everything I used worked "As Advertised", so it was well worth the time I spent on it since June 1st to hammer out all the bugs I've experienced the last several years, and really learn how to use the equipment I have, both the stuff I've had for years, and the stuff I just built. Just having all the right "Black Boxes", cables, and software doesn't mean you know how to use them, and how they interact with each other. You might be well-versed in theory, and be able to explain exactly what all your gear does, but until you've used it on a regular basis, you don't really grok it. Just like I know people with $3000 "Race Guns" that can barely hit a target at 10 yards with them, and I've seen people in some of the training classes I've taken who had old, well-used, out-of-favor firearms, and they could work magic with them, I know people with the latest $10,000 Amateur Radio rigs who can barely turn them on, and people with gear made from cast-off and WWII surplus parts that are superb operators.
So now is it time to put the gear away for another year? Nope, I'm going to weather-proof what needs protecting, replace a few connectors on some control cables with better quality ones so they don't cause the random, hard to trace down 'weirdness' I had Saturday morning, and leave most of it set up for continued use.
Oh, and I'm going to spend more time at the range. Pounding away for the last month on this particular radio setup made me realize that unless I train with and use my defensive firearms on a regular basis, those skills, too, will atrophy.
And I don't want that.

Loaded Up and Ready to Go!

Well, the Jeep is about 80% loaded and ready to take off for the Field Day site Friday morning. I can't believe how organized I managed to get this year, but then I guess that's what happens when you start planning and testing 4 weeks before. I got tired of making multiple trips to my car dragging one or two small items every year, so I bought some good sized plastic tote bins at Lowe's. The radio, power supply, rotator controller and PC interface, along with all the manuals, fit in one tote box. The other one has some of my tools and supplies (soldering iron, heat gun, heat-shrink tubing, cable ties, crimpers, connectors, etc, etc), and the third one has all the rest. I also shortened up most of the cables this year. I just couldn't see having 75' of rotator cable when 30' was plenty. Same with the coax; the cables I made years ago were about 50' long, so I made some new ones this year that are 30', like the rotator cable. Saves a bunch of space, and a LOT of weight.
All I have to load Friday morning is the mast with elevation rotator, the cross-boom (with the preamps already mounted), the antenna, my 5' tripod/8' mast for my GPS antenna, and then slide the ladder in last.
In the meantime, feel free to check out some pix from our past Field Day events.

Awwwww.....RATS! One O' THEM daze....

Woke up today and when I started this PC it gave me an unending string of errors as it booted up. Tried to repair the file system by booting a Live-CD, unmounting the disks, and running fsck on them, but no dice...the main disk was hammered with corrupted files. Spent the morning installing a new hard disk and reinstalling OpenSUSE 11.2. Probably take me the rest of the week to get it tweaked back to how I like it.
Then I went out to fill my new gas can for my generator, and the first place I stopped at wouldn't let me! "Sorry, we don't allow gas cans to be filled here". DUH! Well, I'll never fill my Jeep up there again, either! The next two places had some newer type of Kaliforniastan-approved anti-smog pump nozzle, and I couldn't get either one of them to seal well enough to the little 2-gallon gas can to put any fuel in it! I finally gave up and came home. I think I'll just siphon a couple of gallons out of the Jeep to fill it with.
Ran the generator with a 1200 Watt load on it until it ran out of gas, and then changed the oil in it. As I was pouring the new oil in, the puppy came out and stuck her nose right in the drained oil!
Ever try and get used motor oil off your dog's snout? Yeah, I didn't think so. At least she didn't step in it and then run back in the house. I could just imagine my wife's expression if she came home and saw little oily puppy paw prints through the house. Yeah, that would have gone over *real* well.
I just home Tuesday is a "better" day, although I have to admit the things I'm griping about are really pretty trivial compared to all the other $h1t that's going on in the world.........

Happy Father's Day!

To all the Dads out here.
I'm out on the porch playing radio. My satellite station is working better than it *ever* has; the program I use to run the radio and antenna controller interface is doing everything it should, and over the last several days I've made in excess of 50 contacts using the Amateur Radio Satellites AO-7, FO-29, VO-52, and HO-68. Field Day should be quite good this year, and I'm tempted to set it back up in the driveway after Field Day is over. I have a few things to do before I take it all apart and load it in the Jeep Thursday night, like change the oil in my generator
Oh, and the wife is taking me to the local Outback tonight for dinner.