Poor Puppy!

Poor Little Miss Pebbles decided she does NOT like fireworks this year.

She was fine last year, but now every time something goes BOOM, she runs to the door or a window to see what it was.

She's not scared, more annoyed and protective.

Be a "TWO Benadryl" day tomorrow.....

Battleship Iowa Interior Panoramic Views

In case you haven't been to the site that hosts these, or haven't been lately, there are a LOT of areas that have now been photographed, and added to the site.

One of the recent improvements to the museum area on the second deck has been the installation of some 60" (I think) monitors that have interactive views of all these.

There's a mouse, or track ball, or other pointing device, and the public can select the area of the ship that they want to see, and "explore" it in a Virtual Reality kind of way.

These are almost all areas that are Off Limits to the public, and I haven't even been to most of them.

The fact is, at my age I don't think climbing up to the "O-12 Level" is much fun, and going all the way down into the bowels of the ship isn't much fun, either, so I'm grateful that the photographer has been allowed access to the ares, and done such a knock-out job in documenting them.

I haven't been down to the museum area in a while, so not having seen the new exhibits, I'm fuzzy on the details, but knowing the quality of work that our crew does, I'm sure it's quite impressive.

Enjoy!

Panoramic Views of the Interior of the Battleship Iowa

WTF...No More Silver Plated BNC Male Connectors for RG-8X???

DUH....

Just looked at all my usual suppliers, and these seem to be NLA.

There are plenty available for RG-58/58 foam, but none for "Cable Group X", which also includes LMR-240.

I could use RG-58 for this little project, but in my humble experience, RG-8X stands up better to rough handling.

It's just to make some 3~5 foot jumpers for 3~30MHz, so the loss of the cable is irrelevant, but as I noted, 8X stands up to rough handling better than 58 does.

sigh.....looks like I'll have to use 58, which means a trip out to the garage to see if I can dig up the roll of RG-58 I bought years ago.

I knew I should have stocked up on these the last time I ordered them.

Good quality connectors and adapters to an "RF Guy" are like ammo to a gunney....it's hard to have "too much/too many"!

108 Years Ago Today

The Tunguska Event occurred.

And scientists' still aren't sure what caused it.

I tend to think it was a comet or air-burst meteor rather than a spaceship from elsewhere, but, since nobody knows for sure, who's to say.....

"Independence Day: Resurgence"

Took the wife out to dinner and a movie tonight.

We hit Panera Bread for dinner, and then went to see the new "Independence Day" movie.

They got most of the original cast back, except for Wil Smith, who wanted a cool $25 million, so they wrote him out of the script.

It's a fun summer action movie, a bit corny in places, but fun enough if you don't mind the price.

I got the Senior ticket for $9, but it cost $12 for my wife. Dinner was $26, and two boxes of Junior Mints and an ICEE for her brought the evening's total to a bit over $60.

Makes me feel like a Real Old Fart when I say I remember taking a girl to dinner and a movie for $11!

Field Day AAR

Well, it turns out I didn't set up my satellite station at the Field Day site after all.

My son's knee was really bothering him, so I told him to stay home, and I went down Friday afternoon to help the others get set up.

Hung around for a while, and since they had everything going well, I said hello to some of the guys I only see once a year, and then came back home.

Worked on the Supra for a while, took a 'mini-nap', and then jumped in the shower.

Saturday evening was the "Crew Appreciation Dinner" down on the Iowa, so I went down there, had a bite to eat and hung around a while talking to my friends, and watched the awards ceremony.

Hot and muggy here today so I'll get to work on the Supra a bit later after it cools a bit and the breeze kicks up....

Field Day

WELL.....

I emptied out the Jeep last night and loaded all my stuff into it.

As soon as my son shows up we'll load the tower, antennas and cross-boom, and the generator, and head down to the site.

I'm NOT going to push hard this year. I'll have the "100 point" satellite contact on Saturday as soon as an analog/linear transponder bird goes over, and then just goof off and hand out contacts to other stations.

We have three new analog satellites in orbit this year, but I didn't manually add them to my tracking program, and since I also didn't set up and do a dry run this year, I'm not sure if they were automagically added when I updated the Keplerian Elements for the program.

I usually have lots of "dead time" between passes, so I can always add them manually if I have to.

And I see our friends in the UK have decided to withdraw from the EU.

Good for them! One of the guys I volunteer with on the battleship is from France, and they don't like how Brussels runs things, either. As I was watching the news about 0100 this morning, I saw items rolling by in the banner that several other countries are stirring with demands for a referendum. Maybe the EU will crumble, and maybe it won't, but all the "Doom and Gllomers" were spouting the standard party line, and wagging their tongues about how the breakup of the EU would be a bad thing.

Yeah, right.....

Nice Cool Down

Down into the low 80's today with a nice breeze.

SO....rather than go pummel away on Field Day stuff, I'm going to work on the car.

I really think I'm going to blow off operating the satellite station this year. I just don't feel like lugging everything down there, and then lugging it all back home, and spending a day putting things back in storage.

The "Supras in Vegas" meet is coming up in mid September, and there are some things I simply have to get done on the car before I feel comfortable driving it to Las Vegas and back.

I've been doing Field Day with the club since 1996, and except for the times when I was at-sea to support a lunch, I never missed one.

Plus my son injured his knee a couple of weeks ago at work, and he won't be able to do as much stuff to help me this year as he always does.

We'll still go down to the Field Day site and support the other guys, but I'm going to sit this one out......

Happy Father's Day!

To all the other Dads out there.

Enjoy the day.

I've got most of my Field Day stuff rounded up, and ran the generator for about 30 minutes this morning.

Put a heavy load on it, got it all warmed up, and changed the oil.

Just kicking back for the rest of the day. It's 96* and climbing here. Supposed to hit 105* on Monday.

Too hot (for me, anyway) to do much outside.

A Question for the Mainstream Media.....

This is all I have to say about the Orlando massacre......

And some advice from the Brevard County Sheriff:

Field Day is NEXT Weekend

OOOPS....got too busy on the Iowa and messing with the Supra this year, and now Field Day is one week off.

SO....that means tomorrow I'm going to have to drag out the generator and fire it up, go through my "Field Day" tool bag and round up the usual suspects that always turn up missing, drag the antennas, preamps, feedlines, and control cables out, and set everything up.

We have three new satellites this year, so I'll have to make sure that they show up properly in SatPC32 (my tracking program), and make three new uplink/downlink frequency "cheat sheets" that I use to keep track of the frequencies used for each satellite.

Here's an example of the one I made for FO-29:

My tracking program is set to tune the radio to the middle of the downlink passband, in this case, 435.850MHz. The corresponding uplink frequency is 145.950MHz, +/- any Doppler shift. If the middle of the transponder is busy, and it usually is, I'll tune up to 435.870, or until I find a clear spot. The transmit VFO in the radio should tune to 145.930, but if it doesn't, I'll hit the "unlock" button on the radio which separates the two VFO's, and tune to what the corresponding uplink frequency should be, and do a "1,2,3" transmission to find myself, and center my signal through the satellite to my downlink frequency. Then I "lock" the two VFO's back togther, and the tracking program will send frequency corrections to both the transmit VFO and the receive VFO, keeping my signal properly tuned.

The chart just helps me keep things straight, as FO-29 uses an inverting transponder, which means the signals come back through the satellite on a different sideband (LSB up, USB down), and with the tuning direction reversed.

I'll be back at Angel's Gate Park this year, working with my other club, URAC. We ran Field Day on the Iowa last year, and although we did rather well, lugging all the satellite gear aboard, and getting placed in the location we were allowed to set up in, made satellite contacts difficult.

More to come as the week progresses......