Ready, Set, GO!

Just shutting things down for the night. I have to pick up a buddy (ex Airborne Ranger, two terms in Nam) that I work with in the morning, and then off we go!
Y'all be good now, hear?

Finishing My Preps To Get Underway

Took in my laptop, backpack full of DVD's, camera, and lenses this week.
Packing my rolling duffle tonight, and I'll drag that onboard tomorrow, as I hate waiting for the luggage lift they do.
Friday night I'm the auctioneer at my radio club's "White Elephant Sale" where we raise money for Field Day, and I don't want to be bothered with any support functions Saturday morning when I board the ship, so I'm 95% ready-to-go.
If the launch goes off on time, I should be back on June 9th.
The 870 is cleaned and loaded with low recoil 00 buck, and my YF and stepson know how to use it.
Her TRR8 357 is cleaned and loaded, and she also has three speed loaders ready to go.
And she knows how to use them all.
I think I can sleep soundly, knowing there's a bit of firepower readily available, along with our two 80 pound dogs......

Food Preps..."A Week In A Bucket"

I'll be the first to admit that my (our) long-term food storage preps could use a little more finesse.

Water?
Check!
Purifier?
Check!
First Aid?
Check! (courtesy of my son the EMT)
Communications? (you're kidding, right?)
CHECK!
Food?.....Food??......FOOD?!?
Uh, here, sir....kinda.

We have several cases of MRE's,  a couple of cases of various canned meats, a couple of cases of soups and such, and a LOT of those fancy freeze-dried "camping" type meals that I bought when I was single, and before I knew better.

I've considered buying some of those "#10 cans" of stuff from the various purveyors of such, but what do you DO with all that stuff once you have it?

Lacking a plan on how to sort/organize/store/use it, I did what most people do.

Nothing......

WELL.....I stumbled across this article over at Mr. Rawles' place, and I'm stoopified at how simple it is.

You make up a week's worth of balanced meals (7 breakfast, 7 lunch, 7 dinner) out of all the stuff you've accumulated, and pack it away into "A Week In A Bucket", and store the buckets until needed.

Makes a pretty good grab-and-go, eat-for-a-week bug-out item, too.

Remarkably simple, and an excellent example of the kind of clear-headed, logical thinking that can save your butt when TSHTF.

.

High-Performance HF Transceiver Design

From EDN Online.
It's an excellent article that describes the State-Of-The-Current-Art in radio design.
I'd expand on the article a bit more, but I'm too tired to care about much tonight.......

Blah.....Just Blah.......

Approaching terminal job burn-out, I think......

Too Tired To Blog.....

As is usual, the last week of activity before we depart on a launch mission is brutal, with 10~12 hour days common. Tomorrow (Saturday) I'll be going in for another 10 hour day, and Sunday will be at least (on the books, anyway) 12 hours. We had planned some testing with the customer today, but they weren't in! Seems they found it necessary to take a day off "To spend time with their families before departing on the voyage".
And us?
We'll keep chugging along to the beat of the schedule drum with NO time off for our families.
I'm getting too old for this stuff, and when I turn 62 next year I'm seriously going to consider retiring, if the economy hasn't gone completely to shit by then, and I can afford to.
Taking the YF out for a quiet dinner tonight, as I won't be here all day Sunday, Mother's Day, and probably won't get back home until she's fast asleep.

BTW.....Happy Mother's Day to all the Mom's out there!
*NONE* of us would be here without you.

Chino 2012 Airshow Pictures

As usual, we had a great time hanging out at the Chino Airshow.
The grandstand seats were MUCH better this year, being right on the flight line. Last year they were behind the walkway, and you couldn't really see much from them. They were so bad, in fact, that several times some of the staff came by and told us you could get a refund if you wanted to!
The weather this year was a lot warmer and sunnier than last year. My YF forgot to bring her sunscreen, and even though we took several breaks and sought out some shade, and some nice people sitting next to us offered some sunscreen, she was getting pretty cooked, so we left early, right after the B-25's got airborne.
The Planes of Fame Air Museum is a wonderful place, and if you ever get out to SoCal, it should be on your "Must See" list if you like airplanes. They have so much stuff in storage and on display that you can easily spend a whole weekend there just wandering around.
Stop in at Flo's Airport Cafe for some excellent chow if you make it there!

There's a few "duds" in the pictures, but most of them came out OK. I used my Nikon  80~400mm VR lens, and I'll never take it to an event like this again. It's slow to focus, loses auto-focus easily when you zoom on a moving subject, and is just too heavy to be lugging around all day. It's a very nice lens for what it does, BUT.....I should have taken my 80~200mm lens instead. This lens is one of Nikon's "Professional" line of lenses, being of all metal construction, and has lightning fast auto-focus. Since it was made back when film was king (yes, I still shoot film with my F4 or F100), so when used with a digital camera, it acts more like a 300mm lens, due to what's called "Crop Factor". I'll take the 80~200mm next year.

The planes in the airshow were fairly typical for Chino, but the guy in the little red Team Oracle aerobatic plane had everybody on their feet and cheering. One of the most impressive displays of flying prowess (and power-to-weight ratio!) I've ever seen.

Enjoy the pix!

Airshow

Just got back, and I'm beat. It was a LOT hotter there this year than last, and my poor wife about melted. She can't take much sun, so we left right after the N9M Flying Wing did its act.
Pix later.......

Gettin' BUSY At Work

Well, we're all cranked up for the next launch, around the end of May if things stay on-schedule. Spent the last two days debugging the telemetry tracking antenna I normally run, and learning more about it, and it's history, than I knew before.
We found today that the bearing assembly on the spinning feed is "almost shot" (it's got a lot of play in it), and although we can physically move each axis through its range of motion very smoothly (the mechanical stuff seems OK), when we turn on the servos and use the manually position hand wheels, the elevation axis doesn't respond smoothly. It kind of 'bumps and jumps' in response to commands from the Antenna Control Unit.
We're not sure if this is in the servo electronics somewhere, or in the software settings, but it's not right, and either contributed to, or is the cause of, the loss of track we had last mission.
I was on top of it as soon as it broke track, and put it in manual mode so I could get it back on the profile. Since this happened at first stage separation, AND we were running a "strange" flight profile, we didn't give it too much thought until the post mission review of the equipment logs showed some weirdness.
We break auto-track about 25% of the time at one-two staging due to the fact that the retros they use to back the first stage away from the second are solid fuel, and puff out a huge cloud of ionized gas around the launch vehicle, and RF doesn't go through ionized gas very well. It's why there's a communication blackout during reentry. Normally the tracking antenna will "coast" through this loss of signal, and reacquire on it's own, but the last time I had to coax it back to doing it's job, and it just didn't "feel" right.
We have a back up antenna array, but this thing is the darling of the RF Group, warts and all.
Oh, well, we'll either get it fixed, or write a "Use AS-IS" on it, and I'll just have to be really sharp during the launch.

This weekend, the YF and I are going to the Chino Airshow, so I'll post a bunch of pictures like I did last year.
Always an enjoyable event!

May Day Festivities

I haven't had the TeeVee on today, but I do have my scanner up and running, and there are "protests" (that's what the cops are calling them) going on around the L.A. area.
The magnet high-school where my wife works is on the campus of one of the state universities, so anytime I see a transmission from them, I listen closely.
So far things seem peaceful, but from the 'back chatter' taking place on some of the other channels, Da Cops are taking no chances, and seem to have a fair amount of resources staged in various places around the city, along with several air units. I should probably fire up my "Air Band Only" scanner and see what's going on with the Eyes In The Sky.
Should be interesting.
I'm working "at home" today, as I have some projects to do that I can't do at work (no tools or parts!), so I'll be listening all day while I tinker away.

Hmmm....somebody in one of the protest groups is "distributing flares".

Sounds like the "protesters" are now going to go from bank to bank all along Hope Street (irony?) in downtown L.A.
BoA, Wells-Fargo, HFSC, and several others mentioned.

The LAPD is doing well at keeping the OLA  on their planned route, and preventing them from spreading out.

And I did hear one report of people walking along with flares.

Uh-oh...something's going on. ALL supervisors have been ordered to 5th and Hill streets.

Well....sounds like OLA has fizzled out. Nothing going on, and the only calls are to move police units so they can restore the normal traffic patterns.

Twenty Years Ago Today In L.A.

Today is the anniversary (if you can call it that) of the "Rodney King" riots here in La-La Land.
BonnieGadsden ran a series on it a couple of weeks ago, based on a series of forum posts by Texas Arcane long before there were blogs.
While there's been some "discussion" over the accuracy of the original posts, the important thing is to get the gist of it, and not quibble over some of the technical details.
This IS what will happen when TSHTF out here, and in every other big city.
Doesn't matter if it's caused by some "injustice", the power grid going down, a Massive Solar Flare or an EMP, or the total collapse of the U.S. economy. The cause of it will only partly determine the amount of time it takes to start and get up to speed.
And if the government is "down" or "off-line", it won't settle down until the damage and casualties reach absolutely staggering levels.
Be prepared, it will come sooner and faster than you think.