More Rain On The Way ***UPDATE***

Supposed to start again tonight, and then "Heavy Rain" all day Sunday, Sunday night, and "80%" through Monday night, tapering off through Tuesday.

With the ground as saturated as it is, I predict the return of "Lake Long Beach" in the back yard.

My wife told me there were whitecaps on the water in the L.A. River on her way home from work yesterday.......


Well, the rain started again early this morning, around 0300 when I had to get up and let the dog out.

Something about a cold nose in the arm or face just makes me open my eyes to see what's up.

It was off and on until around 0800 when it started coming down steadily, and it's been doing that for the last 6 hours.

So far we've received slightly over 1.25", and it's coming down at about .6" per hour.

And it's expected to continue like this the rest of the day, and through tonight.

And tomorrow, and tomorrow night, tapering off on Tuesday.

"Lake Long Beach" has returned, and might get into the garage if this keeps up......

Obama Legacy Disposal Team

Courtesy of Stilton over at "Hope and Change Cartoons".

Now that President Trump (God, that feels good to write!) and the adults are back in charge, "Hope and Change Cartoons" won't be published as much.

It was a great run, Mr. Jarlsberg. Thanks for doing it!

And in other news, we got TWO INCHES of rain last night. The back yard is now a lake....

See Through Engine - 4K Slow Motion Visible Combustion

Ran across this on YouTube while looking for something else.

It's really cool to watch the flame propagation from the ignition point through the chamber.

Anybody Ever Leave Las Vegas Headed NORTH On A Sunday??

I know you sure don't want to head out SOUTH, back to L.A. on a Sunday!

The reason I'm asking is that registration for "Supras in Vegas 2017" just opened, and I went ahead and registered.

Since God willin' and the crick don't rise we'll be living in Fort Collins at that time, I'm planning my route from Fort Collins to Vegas.

Since it's 803 miles, I'm not going to do it in one shot! If I were 20 years younger, maybe, but driving through that terrain, at night, alone, is NOT something I relish doing anymore.

So far, I'm planning on overnighting in Green River, Utah, which is almost exactly half way between Fort Collins and Vegas.

I'll leave Fort Collins on Tuesday, and then roll into Vegas on Wednesday. The event starts Thursday, so I'll have Wednesday night to get a good night's sleep.

The event ends Saturday around 1700, and then we always have a "Mark II get together dinner" at one of the hotel/casinos about halfway back to the Excalibur from the Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

I'll roll out of Vegas Sunday, stop again in Green River, and should get back to Fort Collins on Monday.

Hopefully the traffic headed NORTH out of Vegas won't be nearly as bad as that insane crawl back to L.A. would be on a Sunday afternoon.

I'll have to ask some of the regulars to the event if they've ever gone North on a Sunday.....

"The Republic of Bill"....I think We'll Move There....

An oldie but a very goodie from Mr. Whittle.

Gene Cernan, Last Man to Walk On the Moon, Passes Away at Age 82

God bless you, sir.

May you travel ever fast and higher in your repose.

Full bio here on Wikipedia.

Early Chrysler "FirePower" Hemi Time-Lapse Rebuild

Another great time-lapse rebuild from Hagerty, this time of an early Chrysler "FirePower" HEMI!

I'll bet it really sings with that exhaust system.

Watch it in full screen for best viewing.

Rain and Other Stuff....

We've received over an inch of rain from this last storm system, bringing our season total to slightly over 8".

The NWS is calling for a 50% chance of more tonight, and then nothing until this time next week. Further North, the bay area's been really getting hammered, with more rain this month than our season-to-date total.

And there was another screwy "low speed" chase the other night. Some 30 year old known gang banger shot his sister-in-law, and then melted into the woodwork. The cops had a BOLO out on him, and he popped up in Reseda, up in "The Valley".

He took off with a squad in pursuit, and then proceeded to enter the 405 Southbound, where he slowed down to 5~30MPH for the next two hours, throwing stuff out of his car, and taunting the police the entire time. They finally got a couple of BIG SUV's after him, and did the -tap-and-spin maneuver to stop him, and then let the dogs loose.

I haven't heard anything else, but I think he'll be going bye-bye for a while.

And we got the antenna rotor "fixed" down at K6AA. It turns out it was a non-problem caused by letting the antenna sot at a fixed position for long periods of time.

There's a potentiometer inside the rotor motor unit up on the tower that's used to supply position feedback to the indicating meter in the control head. As the motor rotates, so does the pot, sending a variable voltage to the meter. It's a "wire-wound" pot with a brass "wiper", and when it sits too long in one position, a small amount of corrosion forms between the brass wiper and the NiChrome wire of the winding. Since the applied voltage is only about 6 Volts, it's not enough to "punch through" the corrosion, and the voltage never gets back down to the meter. All we had to do was run the rotor through its full range of travel a few times, the wiper cleaned the wire winding, and the "problem" went away.

We made a note in the station operating manual that to prevent this issue in the future, the rotor should be cycled through its full range weekly, but I'll bet this happens again within six months....

blech......Getting Over a Cold

Been a bit under the weather, so I've been taking it a bit easy.

We got clobbered with another .75" of rain last night. Started about 0300 and woke me up it was raining so hard. No flooding and no mudslide I've heard of, so all is well here.

Have a brunch appointment Tuesday morning at one of my favorite little places, The Think Cafe in San Pedro, and then on to the L.A. Maritime Museum to troubleshoot the antenna rotator....again!

From the descriptions given by the operators at K6AA, the rotator is malfunctioning. It might be a loose wire on the back of the control unit, or the direction indicating potentiometer up in the rotor head may have gone TU. Since none of us are "certified" to climb the tower, and lack the now required insurance, if it is the rotor head, that'll mean hiring the guy we use to come out and swap the rotor head out with one we'll have to order if our troubleshooting leads to that problem.

Here's hoping it's just a loose connection on the back, as between ordering up a rebuilt rotor and paying the guy to swap it out, that's about $600 the club would rather not spend!

Stuff That "Our Side" Knows and Understands

You've probably seen this before, but it's always nice to see it again.

Graphic courtesy of Matt Bracken and the good folks at WRSA.

Phony Facebook Accounts

So far I've had five pop up out of nowhere. It took about 4 hours for them to respond the first time and kill the fake account, but now they're stamping them out about as fast as they pop up.

I think it also helps that several of my friends have notified them, as they're killing them off in minutes now.

Oh, well.....

Anti Trump Tripe

From a (former) friend on FarceBook comes this.

Indivisible: A Practical Guide For Resisting The Trump Agenda.

I'm not going to link to it. You can Google it. I know, it's a good thing to read and try and understand what "The Other Side" is up to, but every time I do that I get nauseated. I'll leave it to those with stronger stomachs.

Anyway....it's supposedly written by "Former Congressional Staffers" who "know all the tricks" to getting Congress to "listen".

Notice the emphasis on the word "tricks"? Not advice, or suggestions, but the TRICKS, by God!

Typical lib-speak, as it implies the easy way. Rather than relying on logic and facts, we'll just "trick" them into listening to us., wink-wink, nudge-nudge.

I'm so sick of this friggin' BS it makes my blood boil.

Got Nuttin' Today....

Just been tinkering on yet another ( ! ) laptop for my friend's animal rescue place.

This one had a hard-disk that was on it's way out, so I ran to Best Buy yesterday to grab a new drive, and now it's finishing up all the Windoze Updates.

I bought a 500 GB Seagate drive for FIFTY BUCKS....think about that a second.

The first brand-new hard drive I ever bought was in December of 1996. Fry's Electronics was having an after Christmas sale, and I bought a Western Digital 1.6 GB drive for TWO HUNDRED BUCKS.

And that was a very good price at the time.

So, what this means is that the drive I bought has over two-hundred and fifty times the capacity for one-quarter of the price.

In other words, the "raw" price-per-bit has dropped by a factor of one thousand in the twenty years since I bought that first drive.

And the reliability and performance have increased by a great margin, too.

I haven't bought any memory lately, but the first memory I ever bought was sometime in 1995 for my son's first computer.

I paid $35 per MEGABYTE for it.

4 meg of memory cost me about $150 out the door back then, and IIRC it wasn't even EDO (Extended Data Output) memory, just "regular" FPM, or "Fast Page Memory".

Today, 4 GIG of memory is about $25 at Newegg, or  greater than FOUR THOUSAND times cheaper.

And it's much faster memory, to boot.

I'm not sure if this makes me feel old or not......

***YAWN*** Happy New Year!

Lots of fireworks around here last night, and something I hadn't noticed in previous New Year's Eves.....gunfire!

Drove the dog nuts, and I had to give her a couple of Benadryls to get her calmed down.

I just hope the "people" shooting off guns were shooting them into the ground.

Every time I heard somebody start to dump a magazine, I'd start counting shots.

EVERY time it was 15 shots or 17 shots. Every. Single. Time.

So, hey Kommiefornia....how's that "High Capacity Magazine" ban working out for you? Pretty good, huh?

And I could have sworn I heard somebody rip off a string of shots in full-auto.

Considering were only a mile or so South of infamous North Long Beach, it was probably a banger bangin' away....

Quiet New Year's Eve....

Not much going on here. My wife went to visit a dear old friend from High School, so I'm just snuggled in here tonight with the dog, listening to the scanner, and seeing what mischief other people are getting into tonight.

Quiet night so far, but then it's only 1930 here, and I expect the "action" will pick up several hours from now.

Went to In-N-Out for dinner tonight, so I'm nice and full, and will be hitting the hay early tonight.

Happy New Year, everybody!

Terrific Apollo / Saturn-V Launch Composite

This one of the best I've seen.

Just about makes me shed a tear....

Also reminds of standing on the Launch Platform Odyssey at 154*W, 0*N with one of my friends one night. The Moon was up, and I said to no one in particular, "Gee....We went there once"....and he almost started crying.

Funny what makes grown men tear up, isn't it?

OK....It's **OFFICIAL**....I'm Going To Be A GRANDPA!

We've known for a while now, but wanted to wait until The Kids In Colorado announced it.

Making the announcement of the wonderful news are, left to right, Coco, Obie, and my big lovable moose-of-a-dog, Diamond.

As expected, my wife is absolutely ECSTATIC.

Any doubts she had about moving to Colorado went POOF! the moment my daughter-in-law told her.

Gee....looks like I'll have to buy another set of tools in around 15 years or so......

Merry Christmas to All My Friends and Family!

Me In Full-Geek Mode c.1967~1968

A high-school buddy of mine on FarceBook found this photo of me and posted it.

The ham gear is the Heathkit "SB Series" I built, consisting of the SB-301 receiver, the SB-401 transmitter, along with the SB-600 speaker, SB-630 station console, and HD-10 single-lever keyer.

The receiver had the optional 400Hz CW filter, and the transmitter had the optional "crystal pack" so it could operate as a stand-alone transmitter. If you didn't install the optional crystals, you were locked to the oscillators in the receiver. You could operate "split" or slaved together in "transceiver mode", but the transmitter couldn't operate by itself without the heterodyne crystals installed.

The box with the large meter to the left is the control box for my "HAM-M" antenna rotator, which was installed in my 70' fold-over tower that I bought used and refurbished.

The antennas in use were a Hy-Gain 402 2-element 40 meter Yagi at 75', and a Hy-Gain TH6DX about 10' above that.

Yep, I put out a pretty BIG signal, and then added about 10dB more when I built my dual 4-100 amplifier.

The receiver has my Renwal "Visible V-8" kit on it.

This is down in the basement of "The House I Grew Up In" back in Joliet, Illinois, and is before my Dad's buddy, Master Carpenter Al Poole, built the beautiful L-Shaped desk/console for me along the back wall, and down the left side of the picture for about 6 feet. I can't pin down the exact year for this as I don't remember when the desk was built.

I don't remember which one of my Dad's buddies did the electrical work, but I had him install  a 220V/25A circuit and outlet for when I had my linear amplifier finished. I knew I couldn't get enough power from a 110VAC outlet to be able to run a 1000 Watt DC Input amplifier, so the 220 outlet was a must.

Here's a shot without yours truly in the picture, showing the 220 Volt outlet directly above the transmitter:

The "Visible V-8" was one of the hundreds (possibly more) of model kits I built over the years, along with the "Visible Man", and the Monogram P-51 Mustang that was molded with a clear skin, and has numerous changes over their silver-skinned version of the same model.

I used to drive my poor Dad nuts every time I built a Monogram WWII Navy plane, and asked him if "I got it right"!

Took me a while to understand that my Dad was a SeaBee, and while it technically qualified as being "In The Navy", he never served on a carrier, knew very little about Naval Aviation in WWII, and the only time he spent on ships was going between islands in the Pacific on his way to build the next airstrip, bridge, base, hospital, and all the other stuff the SeaBees did.

As far as the Visible V-8 was concerned, it was a pretty neat kit, with little bulbs for "Spark Plugs" and a "working" distributor to light them up at the right time.

I was always jealous of the Visible Chrysler "Slant Six" that my best buddy Joe had.

His model actually had real metal screws to hold the connecting rods together, and as I recall, piston rings you had to install on the pistons! How cool is that!

Christmas is Almost Here....Have You Been Naughty or Nice?

You'd better be nice, because Santa does NOT like naughty!





Shamelessly swiped from Lone Star Parson.

Merry Christmas everybody!

Rainy Wednesday on the Iowa

Been raining here again (.7" last night, with more to come), and it was a pretty soggy day yesterday on the Iowa.

I dropped off a new Ben-Q "Short Throw" projector that my wife and I donated after a plea for a donation at the Crew Dinner we went to, and then headed to the Comm Center for my typical Wednesday stint.

I'd noticed one of the projectors down in the museum area by the gift shop was off, but didn't know it was broken and "beyond economical repair", but that's taken care of now.

And I replaced the video card in the NI6BB station computer as the fan on it had failed, and the computer would shut don with a "video hardware fault" after being turned on for around 10 minutes. I put one of my "in stock" high-end video cards in it until I can get the fan replaced on the card that was in there. Since the $50 card that was in there was more than adequate for the programs we run, I'll pull my $300 card out after I put a new fan on the card that was in there.

During on of my forays out on the deck, I answered some questions from one of our visitors and his little boy. Turns out he was a Combat Photographer for the Army, and was in 'Nam from 1965 to 1967. He'd been from on end of 'Nam to the other, and told me he was currently working on a book about his experiences.

Unfortunately I didn't get his name, as I got too wrapped up listening to the stories he told me!

As always, it was a great day on the Iowa!

RATS! Dead Battery in the Jeep....

Ran out to Walgreen's last night to get a magazine ("Super Street", not the kind of car mag I typically buy) that has coverage of the "Supras in Vegas" event.

Came out of the store and BZZZZZZT! when I turned the key to start the Jeep.

Called my wife, who got dressed and came to the store (God bless her heart!) so I could jump the Jeep from her little car. Got the Jeep started and drove around for a bit to put some charge in the battery.

Got home, and ALL the parking spots on the street were gone!

That's a post I've been wanting to write, but hadn't been ticked off enough to do.

Coming Soon!

Had to pull her car all the way up to the driveway gate, and then crept the Jeep up right behind her. Turned it off and tried to restart it and BZZZZZZZT!

SO....this morning I took my super-duper-charge-any-battery-known-to-man charger to the Jeep, pulled the connections to the battery, and connected the charger.

The charger went into "analyze" mode, declared the battery to "OK", and then started charging. The state-of-charge as measured by the charger was only 65%, BUT I noticed the battery clamps were somewhat loose on the battery posts when I hooked up the charger.

Absolutely NO corrosion on them, as I greased them pretty well when I put this battery in the Jeep a few years ago.

Hopefully it's just a case of the battery clamps loosening up over time, and things will be OK again after the battery charges up, and I properly tighten the clamps.

This model Jeep uses an obscure size battery, and last time I replaced it cost around $200. It's the biggest battery I've ever seen in a passenger car, and looks like it belongs in an 18-wheeler.

***UPDATE***

Well, it's not the starter. Charged to 100%, and all I get is the BZZZZT!

Jumped it with my mammoth Optima "Yellow Top" I use for my portable solar-powered Ham operation, and it started right up.

THREE times it started flawlessly.

Connected the charger back up, and charged to 100% again. Disconnected the charger and no start. And after ONE attempt to start it, the charger showed that the state-of-charge had gone from 100% back down to 65%!

Looks like it developed a bad cell, literally overnight.

Obamas Legacy.....

The wife and I are off to the "Crew Appreciation **Christmas** Dinner" onboard the Iowa tonight, so I thought I'd leave you with this little video, passed on to me by a good friend.

Enjoy!

Rain and Cold Weather for L.A.

So far the rain gauge says about .15" over the last several hours. NWS claims we could get 1" to THREE inches of rain tonight. That's a whole lot in such a short time for out here. Most of the soil here is adobe, a clay/sand/"black dirt" mix, and after an inch of rain or so, not much soaks in, and it starts to pool and run off.

And I know "cold" is a very relative term (just ask Rev Paul!), but THIRTY SEVEN degrees and raining in SoCal is a bit "unpleasant" for the natives.

Just hope we don't start getting mudslide in whatever burn areas there are this year.....

Virgin Galactic's "SpaceShipTwo" Completes Suscessful Glide Test

Full story here at SatNews.

Hard to believe it's been two years since they lost the first one due to an inadvertent pilot error.

 

For those that don't know the history of this interesting mothership/spacecraft combination, here's the article at the Wikipedia.

Pearl Harbor Day on the Iowa

Had a great time today playing radio on the Iowa, and also the somber experience of the ceremonies held in commemoration of 7 December, 1941.

The press was everywhere for the noon time ceremonies, and if you live in the L.A. area I'm sure you'll see it on the news.

We made well over 300 contacts using the "regular" Amateur Radio equipment, but the guys running the 1980's era "legacy" Navy equipment had problems. Seems one of the R-1051 receivers we've been using has developed a problem with the frequency changing mechanism, a complex arrangement of gears, chains, and rotary switches.

It looks to be a simple problem, as these things go, just requiring a bit of jiggling one of the switches to wake the receiver up again, so I'm guessing dirty or slightly misaligned contacts. A bit of DeoxIT should clear it up, but getting the receiver apart enough to actually get at the contacts is a bit of a PITA. Fortunately we have a person who has restored several of these, so we're going to go through the required paperwork to get it off the ship and let him go through it. We have the complete service manuals for it, and a good supply of spares he can use. We really don't have the facilities on the ship anymore to drag it to the Electronic Repair Shop and do it there, as all the test equipment was removed before the ship went into the Reserve Fleet.

The legacy transmitters we've been using have been working 100%, and we now have a "new" antenna, with an autocoupler, for use with the legacy transmitters, and just having the autocoupler makes using them much easier, as we don't have to manually adjust an antenna coupler for lowest reflected power when we change frequencies.

Election Post Mortem: Tucker Carlson Makes a New York Slimes Columnist Really Squirm

This is great! The only other thing I've seen that's this good is the NewsWeek Managing Editor squirming around try to explain not only how their "Madam President" issue went out in error, but why it was so stridently anti Trump, and some would say anti American.

Hint:......NewsWeek doesn't produce their own "Commemorative Issues"!

I'll post that one later on.

In the meantime....enjoy this twit from the New York Slimes getting raked over the coals.....