Illustrated Guide To Gun Control

From the fine folks over at Western Rifle Shooters Association...

Cool Tuesday

Had a cold front go through last night bringing a little rain and clearing up things a bit.

It's in the mid 60's today, so I'm enjoying the outside weather and doing some work.

Dumped some soggy dirt out of the wheelbarrow and moved the 'barrow off to the side of the garage to free up some driveway space. Have an old BBQ grill and some other things that are getting moved out to the street for the junkman that comes by daily, and that will free up more driveway space. Then I can move the Supra around easier so I can finish degreasing the underside after I get it up nice and high on the jackstands again.

Tomorrow is my "Iowa Day", and we have several things to get knocked out. First is getting a specific antenna reconnected to an antenna coupler down in the transmitter room with an adapter I made that adapts 3-1/2" Heliax to a female Type-N connector. Some of the other guys are finishing up mapping out the connections between some of the Red Phones and the SA-2112(V)4/STQ "Coke Machine" audio router. All the cards were removed from this big box, so we have to manually patch the receive audio, transmit audio, and push-to-talk signals between the pins in the sockets the cards used to plug into, a royal PITA!

Red Phone:

Coke Machine:

And there are LOTS of wires feeding it:

Every one of those big connectors has something like 40 pairs of wires, plus the shields, going into it.

We're only going to map out three or four Red Phones to it, but since we can't figure out the cable numbers, it's hand-to-hand combat with a continuity buzzer and the wires in the connectors.

And we still have the continuing saga of a "bad" URR-74 receiver (MIL version of a Watkins-Johnson 8718) where we've been spinning our wheels for six months. The one guy I'm working with wants to find out exactly which part has failed, and according to the single company that still services them, that's not the way to go. These receivers are loaded with Tantalum electrolytic capacitors with a known history of slowly degrading over time and becoming "leaky". The vendor has told me "Replace part X, and then part Y. If that doesn't fix it, replace ALL the tantalum caps in it." Some people don't like this "shotgun" approach to repair, BUT if you have 40 or 50 parts in the box, and each one has degraded slightly, the end result is that it looks like one or two have failed almost completely, when the real culprit is that they've all failed "just enough" to degrade the entire receiver. You can't say that "this" part or "that" part was the cause when each one of the 40 parts caused 2% or 3% of the "failure". You simply have to replace them ALL to see an improvement.

And I have two more association members that I have to get checked out and cleared on the procedures for operating our Amateur Radio equipment, and them issue them the key to the equipment locker. We're keeping control of the equipment much tighter, as we've had a couple of incidents where people have come in to operate, and found the settings on the radios to be randomly flipped around.

We now lock up some of the equipment, and Management has installed a video camera tied in to the security system so if it happens again we'll know who did it.

Oh, well....lunch is over. Time to get back outside, and back to work!

Hapy Halloween!

Got the candy ready and some spooky music playing on the home theater receiver.

And the living room scanner is running on the local PD frequencies so I'll know if anything hinky is going on in the area.

We don't get a lot of visitors. Usually one big bag from Costco is more than enough.

And the neighbors across the street are having a party tonight, so I expect we'll have some extra visitors this years.

Have a safe one!

What In The HELL Happened To "WIRED" Magazine?

I've been reading WIRED (I refuse to link to them, that's how pissed I am) since about 1995, a couple of years after it first started up.

It used to be a cutting edge-of-technology magazine for telecommunications, computers, and the computer/hacker culture.

They broke stories, started trends, and influenced the hacker culture to some extent, and had excellent articles.

Over the years, I noted a left-leaning drift, and within the last 12~18 months they went all East Coast/Beltway/Metrosexual/Global Warming/bullshit/Democratic Party/Renewable Energy/Obama-is-god bat-shit crazy.

Long gone are articles and interviews with the movers and shakers of the PC and Technology Industries.

No more "Japanese Schoolgirl Watch" column, either.

The newest issue came the other day, and who's on the cover as a "guest editor"?

Serena Williams, the freaking tennis player!

I have no problem with Ms. Williams as an athlete, as she's proven her prowess repeatedly. But as a guest editor of a TECH magazine?

Fuhgeddaboutit.....

And then there's the headline, in red print, on the cover....

"Let's Change The Future.......Race, Gender, and Equality in the Digital Age"

What a crock of CRAP!

With this issue, WIRED has finally crossed the line from being an interesting tech magazine, to being just another East Coast, Big City "Lifestyle" rag, as if there aren't enough of those out there already.

I didn't look inside the "magazine", even for curiosity value. It went right in the dumpster, and so will all the others I get until my subscription expires.

I'm just glad it comes in a plastic wrapper so I don't have to soil my hands with it......

Friday Morning Mellow Music

From John Kay, former lead singer for Steppenwolf.

Just a Little Old Band From Texas

ZZ....one of my favorites.

Enjoy!

We Need More News Anchors Like This

Enough said.....

TGIF....maybe....

Took care of getting a whole bunch of hams checked out on the ham gear on the Iowa Wednesday, and did a bunch of housework yesterday.

Today I'm (finally!) finishing up the wiring on the little Harbor Freight trailer I built a few years ago so I can sell it, and be rid of it.

I was going to mount my 8' mini-tower on it so it would be easier to move the mini-tower to Field Day and other events, but when I got the whole shebang finished (except for the wiring) I found out it wasn't quite stable enough for me to comfortably pull behind the Jeep.

And I've also got a pair of Dahlquist DQM-9 speakers in the garage that I'm going to pull out and sell. I got them from a friend of mine, BUT (there's always a but...) the wife say's they're "too big" for the living room, even though they're furniture quality cabinets, and look really nice. They also just had the foam surrounds replaced, so they should be good for many more years.

And The Great eBay Clearance is still going on, although I missed selling things for a couple of weeks due to the Supra event I went to. I pride myself on shipping as quickly as I can, and I lost the two weekends on each end of the event to list/sell/ship things.

And a good friend of mine recently became a gun owner (Glock 17 and Remington 870), so I'll be getting in some range time with him to help him learn about The Modern Technique of the Pistol.

And......well, that's about it. Hope you all have a great weekend!

Ballistic Gel Ammo Test by Lucky Gunner

Very interesting test by the folks at Lucky Gunner.



And they have a nice table at the end of the test giving the results.


Thanks to Anthony at Lucky Gunner for sending this to me!

The Mechanical Universe

Just on a lark this evening, I punched in the name of one of my favorite science programs into my favorite search engine, and came up with a stupendous (for me, anyway...) find.

The entire series is available for free streaming directly from Annenberg Learner.

It's also available on YouTube, but my first search came up with the episodes all scrambled up.

ANYWHO........if you were ever curious about Physics, this is an excellent series to watch, and I highly recommend all 52, half-hour, episodes.

JOTA on the Iowa

Totally forget to mention we had the Scouts aboard today for JOTA.

It went much smoother this year than in years passed, although the count was down.

Last year we had over 160 Scouts when we expected about 100, and this year we had about 65 when we were expecting 60.

Basically, we have three or four stations set up out on the fantail, and give the Scouts their "Air Check" portion of what they have to do to earn their Radio Merit Badge.

Some of the "kids" (from 10 to 17 today) are natural at it, and very comfortable talking on the radio, while others barely speak two or three words each time they transmit.

And this year, the second group had mostly done their "On Air" portion (they had an active Ham station at the campsite), so out of the second group of 30 or so, only 8 needed to use the radio.

And then it was over!

We'd run everybody through by 1430, when we had expected to go to 1500 or beyond, and the afternoon session was only the 8 Scouts, so we were done early, and packed up by 1500.

I think one of the reasons this went so fast was the Scouts were on a very strict schedule. The last couple of years they marched from the campsite to the Iowa, and this year they had a bus, with a strict cut-off time. Everybody HAD to be back on the bus by 1500 to get them back to the campsite, -OR- the cost of the charter bus went up significantly.

As usual, the Iowa staff (besides the radio guys) was magnificent in their support of the event, having pop-ups, tables, and chairs out on the deck for us to set up this morning, and it's always a pleasure working with them.