A Little 'Travelin' Music', Please.....

One of my favorite TV themes.

Since I'm on Garage Duty for the foreseeable future (well, plus "Iowa Duty"), I put together a bunch of music with an automotive theme that I can play in the garage while getting all grimy and dreaming of the time I'll be working on the car getting all grimy.

There's some backstory to this song. CBS was too cheap to pay continuing royalties to Bobby Troup for "Get Your Kicks On Route 66", so they commissioned Nelson Riddle to write a replacement. Most TV show theme songs are considered almost "throw away" songs, but Route 66 went on to become the first TV theme song to make Billboard magazine's "Top 30", and continues to this day to be a popular song, especially among those of us who are a "certain age".

Ahhhh....the carefree days of Tod and Buz, cruising the USA in their Chevrolet. Simpler, happier times........


Enjoy!

I Sure Am Glad It Was Trash Day Today

Because I started this morning with two empty trash bins, one for "recyclable" stuff, and one for everything else.

The recycle bin is already about half full of cut-up, smashed flat cardboard boxes and misc packing material, and the regular trash bin is about one-quarter full.

I'm taking the advice of one of my friends over on the Celica Supra forum; drag it all out, sort it, and then rearrange it as you put it back in.

So far, I've found another Heathkit receiver (a GR-78) I bought and forgot about, a Commodore 1571 disk drive with cables, two Commodore power supplies, both new-in-box, all the cables I've made over the years to connect various radios I've owned and still own to both an AEA Commodore Packet Radio modem, and my Kantronics KPC-3+, and several more boxes containing all the leftover stuff that you never use, but they include in the box a new PC motherboard comes in.

At least I can now have the big door open, and walk from there to the front of the garage, so it's a big improvement.

My current SWAG is that I'm about 21% to where I need to be.

And I haven't gotten to the workbench area, and the shelving along the walls....

Gonna be a long, slow, slog........

The Never Ending Garage Clean Up Continues.......

Man, I should have done this two years ago when I bought the car. Then you'd be reading my gripes about me actually working on the car vs getting the damn garage cleaned out.

Made a pretty big dent the last couple of days. At this point I'll take a SWAG and say I'm 20% to where I need to be.

I'm glad tomorrow is trash day, as I've completely filled (packed pretty tight, too) the "Recycle" bin with empty, flattened out cardboard boxes, and misc bits and pieces of "stuff" that are allowed in that bin, and the regular bin that gets everything else.

I finally got my two Dahlquist DQM-9 speakers out of there. They'll be going on the back porch for now until I get them listed on weirdoslist craigslist for sale.

If anybody "local" is interested in them, drop me a line and we'll talk. I got them from a very good friend who takes fanatical care of his equipment. He just had new foam edge surrounds (outer edge of the cones) installed by Dahlquist right before I bought them, and the cabinets look like new.

And I consolidated about 10~12 other boxes of small items (mostly computer stuff) into three boxes, meaning there's a lot less wasted space.

I still don't know what I'm going to do with all the PC bits and pieces I have; perhaps just sell them in "lots" on eBay. Stuff like that I won't list on weirdoslist craigslist because of previous bad experiences selling computer stuff there. Every single person who came to look at the stuff I had wanted to offer me me pennies on the dollar for brand-new parts and completely rebuilt and upgraded PC's.

I know what the "retail" value of the stuff is, and offering me $20 for something easily worth $200 is an insult. The $200 price I had on things was well under "retail", and even the flippers that came to look at it knew that, yet insisted on low-balling me to the extreme.

Oh, well....dinner time here, and then back out to the other end of the garage. At least I have free access to my two big rolling tool boxes now, and I can get to the shelving units behind them, and start going through all that stuff..........

Minuteman III Launch Tonight From VAFB

From one of my groups.........

The following is a media advisory from Vandenberg AFB:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
From: 30th Space Wing Public Affairs, www.vandenberg.af.mil

MINUTEMAN III LAUNCH SCHEDULED

VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. - - An operational test launch of an Air Force Global Strike Command unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile is scheduled between 11:00 p.m. PST Saturday, Feb. 20 and 5:00 a.m. PST Sunday, Feb. 21, 2016, from north Vandenberg Air Force Base.

The purpose of the ICBM test launch program is to validate and verify the effectiveness, readiness and accuracy of the weapon system, according to Air Force Global Strike Command.

Col. J. Christopher Moss, 30th Space Wing commander, is the launch decision authority.

"This mission continues a long string of vital ICBM flight tests from
Vandenberg Air Force Base," said Moss. "The launch not only demonstrates the capability of the Minuteman III weapon system, but also the tremendous capabilities of Airmen who maintain and operate it. The men and women of the 30th Space Wing are proud to partner with the Air Force Global Strike Command team to conduct this important launch."

The launch team, under the direction of the 576th Flight Test Squadron,
includes aircrew members from the 625th Strategic Operations Squadron, Offutt AFB, Nebraska, and crew members and maintainers from the 91st Missile Wing, Minot AFB, North Dakota.

The 576th FLTS is responsible for installed tracking, telemetry and command destruct systems on the missile, which collect data and ensure safety requirements, are met.

If you're out here on the Left Coast, and have the time to sit and just watch for a few hours, these are spectacular to see.

Rainy Wednesday/Thursday and Garage Cleaning

We need the rain, and I like sleeping when it's raining.

Got around half an inch, and the temperature dropped 10 degrees or so.

Dried out today, but a bit chilly (for Kaliforniastan!), so wearing a jacket while I'm going through boxes of stuff in the garage that haven't seen the light of day in quite a while.

Man, I didn't know I had so much stuff for repairing PC's!

I've got 30+ cooling fans of various sizes used to replace faulty power supply, CPU, and case fans, 30 or more Intel PCI 10/100Base-T Ethernet cards (remember when motherboards did NOT come with built-in Ethernet?), half a dozen or so sound cards, and a wide selection of video cards, with interfaces running the gamut from PCI to AGP, to PCIe, four 500 Watt "AT" power supplies, and all of this stuff is brand new.

I even have a few brand new 5-1/4" floppy drives, along with a good sized stack of 3-1/2" floppy drives.

And BOXES of memory going back to pre SDRAM stuff like "EDO" memory.

Don't have too many processors, except ones that were in the few motherboards I have. Mostly AMD K6 processors, as I was really hot into the "Socket 7" and "Super Socket 7" stuff.

The "rarest" processor I have would be a K6-III+ with a rated clock speed of 550 MHz. Not too many of those were released, and I'm not sure how I got it.

I suppose if I hang on to this stuff the price will go up, but for now, it's just a huge collection of memories from early days of building, repairing, and modifying PC's.......

Iowa Transmitters NOT On-The-Air Today. Next Post About This Will Occur When We're Actually OTA.....

This is getting frustrating, but I won't vent here.

Next time I post about this will be when I'm on-the-air!

PERIOD.......

OK, Let's Try This Again...Battleship Iowa's 1980's Transmitters to be ON-THE-AIR Wednesday 17 Feb 16

Well....I'm pretty sure I've got everybody on the same page for this.

We'll either be on 20 Meters around 14.261 or 17 Meters around 18.161, +/- any QRM.

All the equipment is working, I'm going to be giving the guys in the Gray Radio Gang some training in "Good Amateur Operating Practice" (most of them don't have stations at home), and then we should get OTA shortly after lunch, around 1300 local time, until about 1600, or 2100 UTC to 0000 UTC.

If you hear us, please bear with us. We won't be using the NI6BB callsign, but we will announce that we're operating from the Battleship Iowa.

I'm taking my tablet, and if I can get the damn Blogger software to cooperate, I'll post here that we're on, and we'll also self spot ourselves on the DX clusters.

Keep your fingers crossed!

Been Busy Tinkering on the Supra

"Supras In Vegas" is coming again this year, and I plan to have the car ready to go.

It's the 3rd week in September, which gives me about seven months to:

Replace the carpet, install the new stereo and speakers, and put the interior back together. I'll do a good cleaning of the floor under the old carpet, as I'm sure there's a ton of crud under the old carpet. While the front seats are out it will also give me access to the bracket that holds the levers for opening the rear hatch and gas filler door so I can bolt it back to the floor pan. It's currently adrift, and makes it a PITA to use.

Rebuild the front suspension with new KYB strut inserts, top strut mounts, springs that lower the car about 1", rebuilt power steering rack and pinion, new polyurethane bushings, and new rotors/calipers/wheel bearings. The new rotors are the drilled/slotted type, and are supposed to run cooler. One of the things Car and Driver noticed in their long-term test back in 1983 was that the rotors had a tendency to warp, so hopefully 30+ years of advances in rotor metallurgy and brake pad compounds will prevent that from occurring. I'm replacing the OEM rubber brake lines with stainless steel brake lines, and I'll flush and refill the brake system with "DOT 4" brake fluid. While I'm under the car I'll also replace the clutch slave cylinder, replace the OEM rubber clutch hydraulic line with a stainless one, and flush and refill the system with "DOT 4" fluid. The clutch master cylinder was replaced shortly before I bought the car, and the fluid is still "clear", so the master cylinder can stay for now.

Replace the cam drive belt and idler, and the water pump while the front is off the engine. Also replace all the coolant hoses and A/C, alternator drive belts. There's a hose that runs under the intake manifold/air plenum that needs to be replaced on a somewhat regular interval. It's called the "suicide hose", because if it blows, you've got about 60 seconds to shut the engine down before it overheats, usually blowing the head gasket in the process. If all it does is blow the head gasket you can consider yourself lucky. If you keep going, the head will warp, and replacement heads for this engine have been "unobtainium" for some years now.

Replace the rear shocks with new KYB shocks, replace the springs with new ones that lower the car about 3/4", and replace the upper and lower spring mounts (aka "the rubbers"). Also replace the rotors and calipers and OEM brake hoses with stainless steel ones.

And to help matters along, I just returned from Home Depot with some new light fixtures, and a box of bulbs.

I *had* a couple of cheep two-bulb, 48" lights hanging, but when the kids moved out, one of them mysteriously disappeared. I found another one in the garage, but it doesn't have an ON/OFF pull chain, so it will probably go in the scrap pile.

The new lights hanging off to the sides of the car are four-bulb 48" fixtures, and I bought a new 48" high-brightness LED fixture for hanging over the workbench.

The original two-bulb fixtures will be relocated to the rear (toward the big door) of the garage so I can get some light back there.

And of course, I'm back to cleaning the garage (again!) because of all the cruft my wife has "stored" in there.

How come MY stuff is always "junk that should be thrown away", but HER stuff is "Ohhh...we have to keep that!"??

AND finally, we're really going to try and get the Iowa's radio gear on-the-air this coming Wednesday.

I'll take my tablet and post from the ship if we mange to get everybody on the same page to do this.


For those that have asked, here's the original post from when I brought the Supra home:

 http://every-blade-of-grass.blogspot.com/2014/01/new-project-for-new-year.html

Iowa Transmitters NOT On-The-Air Today. Next Week for Sure!

WELL......I got down to the ship today, and the guys had veered off onto a different path.

They decided they wanted to work on the autocoupler for the port side 30 foot whip, rather than get the gear OTA today.

Oh, well....not wanting to herd cats, I stepped back and did some other things.......

Battleship Iowa's "Original" 1980's Transmitters Possibly ON-THE-AIR This Coming Wednesday!

WELL....it's been a long, slow, slog, but we're 90+% there.

We have two "Red Phones" mapped out through the "Coke Machine", the audio interface boxes, the transmit and receive switchboards, and the R-1051 receivers and the AN/URT-23A transmitters.

We've verified that we have correct receive audio through the receive path, and the transmit audio from the "Red Phones" also makes it down to the Transmitter Room, and drive the #3 transmitter to full (1000 Watts +) power into a dummy load.

For the receive antennas we're using the "Twin Whips" mounted up on the bridge, and for transmit, we'll be using the "Goal Post" or "Bull's Horns" antenna located just forward of the #2 stack. The "Goal Post" antenna is fed with (I think) 3-1/2" Heliax cable from the transmitter room, and some time ago I made up an adapter that connected the Andrew flange to a Type-N female so we could run coax into one of the large antenna couplers down in the transmit room.

I used my Comet CAA-500 Antenna Analyzer to verify that adjusting the controls on the coupler caused the impedance to vary, and the manner in which it varied it varied in "looked" just like we were tuning a random length antenna with a good old Johnson Matchbox.


The players are as follows:



A "Red Phone":

The Infamous "Coke Machine":

R-1051 Receiver:

Receive Antenna Couplers:

"Twin Whips" Receive Antennas:

AN/URT-23 Transmitter:

Transmit Antenna Coupler(s):

"Goal Post" Transmit Antenna:

I'm posting this early so those who are interested in trying work us will have plenty of time to get ready. We know we transmit better than we receive, even running 100 Watts from the Amateur Radio gear, so please be patient with us if we manage to make this happen.

Not all of us are "Contest Operators", so pile-ups will be dealt with "Loudest Heard First", and then we'll try to get to the weaker stations.

Look for us in the upper half of the General section of the 20 Meter phone band. *IF* we get the gear On-The-Air, it will be after 2000 UTC, and before 2359 UTC.

We'll be using an individual's callsign, not NI6BB, and we'll include "Battleship Iowa" in all our CQ's.

Hope to see you On The Air!


I'll have my tablet computer with me, so if this is a "GO!", I'll make a post here right before we go live OTA.

Out With The Old.......UPDATE

And in with the new.

Jeep radio, that is.

I finally received the "4-pin" data cable I needed to get the Maestro unit talking to my new Kenwood "head unit", and decided to take the plunge and do it today.

It's not 100% finished, but it's in the dash, all connected up, and everything works!

Had a nice chat with the rep from Sirius/XM, and we killed the OEM Sirius radio that came with the Jeep, activated the new one, went over the freebies that came with the new radio, and got everything squared away.

I still have to find the best place to stick down the microphone for the "hands free"  Bluetooth operation of my cellphone, figure out how to run the cable from the new Sirius/XM antenna into the car, and figure out how to best run the female USB cable that lets me plug in a USB stick and play music and videos on the head unit.

And Kenwood has newer firmware for the head unit, so I have to reflash it, and I still have to sign up with Garmin so I can keep the maps updated for the nav.

After that, I'll just snap the bezels back on the instrument pod where the GPS antenna is located, and the bezel that covers the radio.

Then I have to learn how to use the doggone thing, program my favorite satellite radio channels, FM radio channels, and the couple of AM channels I use.

I stick a few pix on here tomorrow.


****UPDATE**** 

 It took me until midnight last night but I finally got the receiver to accept the USB memory stick with the updated firmware.

The manuals are poorly written in regard to this, and assume you already know the menu structure of the radio.

They kept mentioning to "put the radio into standby", with no explanation of how to find the "standby" menu setting. The main menu button takes you to the "Top Menu", and there's three little bars at the top of the screen. In my experience this usually indicates there are a total of three pages to the menu. BUT...how to get to the next pages? The radio has a touch screen, so I tried dragging the screen to the left. No luck, and this stumped me for a while. I finally figured out that to get off the first page of the menu you have to "flick" the screen to the left at just the right rate to get it on the next page.

There was the "Standby" button, and once I pressed that button, the "upgrade" button on the screen displaying the installed firmware version was no longer greyed out, and I was able to upgrade the firmware from the memory stick.

The next thing was getting updated maps into the navigation section of the radio. Garmin requires you to dump an XML file onto an SD memory card, insert it into a Windows or Mac PC, and then use their web application to read the card, and confirm you have a qualifying product. Then, after you pay your $69.95 for the new maps, it will download and install the new map files onto the SD card. I had the same issue with the nav section of the receiver....it wouldn't dump the file onto the card unless the radio was in standby mode. About 2345 last night I had the XML file on the card, and was able to get the Garmin web app to accept it, and proceeded to install the "updated" maps on it, but I couldn't find out how to get the file loaded off the card and into the receiver.

This morning I was on the support section of the Garmin website, and finally found out that all you do is install the card in the slot, and it reads the new data from the card. I put the card in the slot, and upon hitting the "upgrade maps" from another obscure menu setting only accessible when in standby, I was rewarded with "Reading Updated Map Info" on the screen.

They don't tell you if it overwrites the existing data in the radio, or if it needs the card in all the time, so I just left it in the radio.

Since the map version was "2014.0", and the new map version is "2015.0", it looks like they don't upgrade the maps very often!

I stuck down the microphone for the hand-free cellphone function, and stuck the bezel back on that part of the dash. I still haven't figured out how I'm going to run the antenna lead-in cable for the new Sirius/XM tuner from the antenna into the car, and then into the under/behind dash area, but it looks like that will be a several hour job by itself, involving pulling a bunch of interior trim panels off, routing the cable, and then putting it all back together.

This radio definitely sounds better than the OEM Alpine radio it replaced, and I'm getting a bunch more satellite channels than I did before, as I upgraded my Sirius/XM subscription.

And the FM tuner not only has regular FM, but also "HD Radio", which lets the broadcasters either deliver higher-quality audio, or multiple channels, similar to what the new Digital TVs have. Where you only had "Channel 5" before, you now have sub-channels like 5.1, 5.2, etc.

Think I'm going to take the dog for a walk....I need to relax a bit, and "wind down" from this project!