#SteppIR down

It was the last straw.  Today, we had a "normal" Nor'easter storm, with NE winds gusting to ~25 mph, they said.  The antennas at AA6E had largely sailed through two hurricane / tropical storms and a few other major wind events.  But this "mild" one pushed us over the edge.  One of the reflector tubes popped off.  Fortunately, my policy of routinely retracting the SteppIR elements has paid off.  You can see a bit of the tape sticking out, but it looks OK from my vantage point at least.

This is where the tube fell, apparently without much damage in the front patio.  (The tree branch is from an earlier wind storm.)

Here is where things separated.  It looks like the rubber boot has separated, but the tube itself is probably OK.  The storm is still on, so I'm going to wait to do a more careful check.

The SteppIR is one of the original 3-element type.  It went up in 2004 IIRC, and has been trouble-free until now.  I'm not complaining.  We will probably have to bring it all down and replace the silicone rubber bits.

Best spam lately

Today's Spam

My candidate for most educational spam is above.  Checking with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Asian_numbering_system and current exchange rates, I find I am being offered something like US $ 1.5M.

I won't bite.  They seemed to have missed their demographic. (Note to Centurylink!)

Cutting the cord: FB

My Facebook account is now "suspended".  It was a long time coming.  The many problems of being on Facebook are well known among internet-literate folk, but hard to explain to casual users.

As someone said, "if you can't figure out what the product is, the product is you."  FB makes money by advertising and by using tricky ways to get you to disclose lots of marketable facts about yourself.

The same facts can be used by almost anyone who wants to know something about you.  The most notorious case would be prospective employers, who are known to require you to give up your FB password, so they can see all your history.  No doubt the Federal government has similar interests in your politics or your research into exothermic chemical reactions.

We need to pull out of Facebook.  It's painful, because FB provides some very useful networking with people you want to connect with -- classmates, family, etc.  But it's not enough for me.

There are quite a few other social networking sites.  Yes, they're mostly free and they all share some of the same problems as FB, but that's where I am now.  Try me on Google+ (Martin Ewing) or on Twitter (@AA6E) or talk back to my blog.  I'm active on the ARRL member forum (AA6E), too.

You can suspend your FB account -- a kind of trial separation.  If it still seems wise in a week or two, you can have all your info deleted.

Hams allocated 23,350 MHz

The good news: U.S. Radio Amateurs have frequency allocations (primary and secondary) of 23,350 MHz. (Primary allocations add up to 4,791 MHz.)

The less good news: 23,300 MHz of the total is allocated above 1 GHz, but 22,700 MHz of that is above 10 GHz, and 16,750 MHz is above 100 GHz.  Little day-to-day amateur activity takes place above even 1 GHz, but there is important experimentation in these regions.

Just a few tidbits from www.spectrumwiki.com.

By the way, these allocations would support about 7.8 million simultaneous SSB conversations at any given location.

Antenna Woe

I upgraded the AA6E antenna installation just before SuperStorm Sandy.  We pinned the beam to the mast and the mast to the rotator to prevent the slippage that occurred in Irene.  We also put up a Joel Hallas W1ZR style dual band skeleton sleeve-coupled dipole for 80 and 30 M, made from 450 ohm ladder line. (QST May and Oct 2011) All seemed well after Sandy's 60+ mph winds.

I haven't been on the air much since Sandy, while there have been a few biggish wind events and some snow and freezing.  When I went to work 80 and 30 on SKN on New Year's, I found SWRs of 7 and 8 to one.  The antenna is defunct.  But why?  I took photos from the ground, and no problem is yet visible.  (It is most likely an open or a short in the connection to the balun.)

The tower is hard for me to access (20 ft above a 20 ft roof), and I'd like to have a better idea of what has gone wrong before I bring in the work crew.

RF Overkill?

I ran across this item this morning.  (Read the post.) Somehow, it rang a bell for me about ham radio - QRO, "radiosport", etc.  It's interesting what the average deer hunter pays out each year. It puts radio into some perspective.

Chromebook printer gotcha

The Samsung Chromebook (previous post) is a fine little machine. Simple setup, simple operation. What could go wrong? Well, try to integrate it with your home network! You can't directly connect to anything, like your printers on the network. (There are SSH and FTP apps, but they seem to work through a proxy outside the local net.) Google wants you to use its Cloud Print service (beta!), which allows you to print to a file in the cloud which is then queued for any cloud-connected print server for which you have permission.

It's on you to create a cloud print server for your local printers if you want to print from the 'book. To do this, you must 1) log in to your PC (under your ID of course), 2) run the Chrome browser, 3) set up a server process, and 4) configure sharing with any Google IDs you want to have printing. Your local PC becomes a server (and it has to be turned on), and you have to be logged in.

It's a little more complicated than that for us, since we have a number of local PC user accounts between several family members. The print server has to be configured separately for each user who might be using the PC, and each user has to share the access properly. There is no simple way to run the server as a daemon or service. (It can be done, however. See this article for a Linux method.)

What they really suggest you do is to buy a new Cloud Print friendly printer, with the server capability built it.  HP calls this "ePrint". There are quite a few models available in a low to moderate price range.  For example, the HP 6600 all-in-one. Turns out we've got the HP 6500, with no Cloud Print...

That adds $100 or so to the price of the Chromebook.  Caveat emptor.

Samsung Chromebook for the XYL

We have been struggling with some equipment failures while trying to provide a good platform for Eva to do her e-mail and other moderate computing stuff.  (Alas, our beautiful old VAIO laptop has given up the ghost.)

Enter the Samsung Chromebook.  It's really well priced, and for someone who really does NOT want the complexity of a traditional OS, and who will always have WiFi, it's just the ticket.   We think!

One more foot in the Google world, for better or worse...