I haven't dug into my AppleScript bug, I've been too busy playing around with radios. For all the technical wizardry, speed and sophistication of the internet, there's still something cool about turning a dial and pulling a signal out of the ether.

It's just a shame that there's not much worth listening to.

It seems like religion is the main content provider for AM broadcasts, and is a big part of FM too. The other big part is "talk radio," which is mostly just angry white men ranting, or spouting conspiracy theories or talking tough to imaginary liberal listeners. I can't decide if it's more frightening or laughable, but it is both.

Is there an opportunity here for a modest analog resurgence? I mean, film, vinyl, why not AM radio?

What's the content? Live music performances? "Live" podcasts? Classifieds? Radio drama? Live radio coverage of nerd-culture events? Comedy?

I don't know. Seems like there might be some kind of opportunity there. I mean if enough people listen to religious programming and angry white men to keep the lights on, seems like there might be enough people to listen to something, you know, "normal."

I'm old enough to remember when FM was cool. Playing whole albums, and no ads! Or at least not ads for cars and personal injury lawyers.

Nostalgia is a powerful drug.

I'm pretty amazed at how far FM can broadcast. I've been regularly hearing Orlando stations here in Ponte Vedra. Savannah too. I don't know if that's just because there's a strong evaporative duct near the coast here or what, but it's kind of cool. Never noticed it before. Probably because the only time I listened to the radio was in the car.

AM at night is pretty crowded. Haven't quite figured out how to sort that mess out yet. Can easily pick out WCBS in New York, and it's listenable. I like the traffic reports.

I bought some suction-cup hooks the other day to try something. Most of these little shortwave radios come with an external wire antenna. Some of the radios have a jack, others you just clip the wire onto the whip. They're pretty long, and I've used them out back before, but I never really had anything to hook one end on. They'll work laying on the ground too, but it's better to get them up as high as you can, and fully extended.

Anyway, I put a suction-cup hook on two of the pillars of Mitzi's new screened enclosure, and I was able to unwind the full length of reel antenna that came with the Sangean 909X2. I could sit in a comfortable chair and tune around. I was pleased with the difference!

I could receive many signals on the whip, but many more on the wire. Listened to a guy in Maine talk to a guy in Stuttgart, Germany on 20 meters on SSB. If I unplugged the antenna, I could make out one of them but not hear the other. On the wire, they were both loud and clear.

Most of these conversations are just quick DX (long distance) check-ins, kind of measuring the performance of their gear. Fun for the operators, but not exactly fascinating conversation. It was kind of exciting to listen to though.

Anyhow, seems like my next efforts will be in antennas. The challenge I have is I'm kind of sealed in by the screened enclosure. I could drive a grounding rod into the lawn, but no way to pass a wire to it through the enclosure. May just have to resort to bug spray and brave the mosquitos. But I might also just lay a bunch of wire on the pavers in the enclosure as a "counterpoise," see how that works. I don't know what I'm doing!

But it's a harmless distraction from all the other bullshit going on around me.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 05:31 Thursday, 6 April 2023

In western culture, we're sometimes introduced to this concept as children when we're told, "It doesn't matter if you win or lose, it's how you play the game that counts."

I suspect we don't teach that to children very often anymore.

We live in a zero-sum culture, where if you're not winning, you're losing.

Jacksonville's incumbent mayor, the largely irrelevant and soon-to-be-gone Lenny Curry is an extreme example. He loves sports, especially football and seems to harbor some lingering disappointment that his diminutive stature never allowed him to play the game at a competitive level.

Lenny and his associates, Brian Hughes and Timmy Baker, aka "the boys," like to think of themselves as brilliant strategists and tacticians, "winning" elections and referenda. And perhaps there's some justification for that. They have demonstrated an ability to manipulate people when they're given a clear lane to do so.

Their failure to secure the privatization of JEA was due to the requirement to maintain the illusion that everything was being done "transparently" and in good faith. Trying to make people believe they were just following a process to make a determination if selling JEA was in the public interest.

That process would have eventually yielded the one thing they needed to get a clear lane: A number.

Lenny needed a number. A (somewhat) legitimate number that told the city what it could get for selling its public utility. After the whole process imploded due to astonishing greed on the part of JEA's then-CEO, Aaron Zahn, hand-picked by Lenny Curry, we learned Florida Power & Light was willing to offer Jacksonville $11B for JEA.

I suspect Lenny knew that number all along, or one close to it. He knew that number would dazzle both the city council and much of the public at large. Once they had a number, and a list of potential goodies $11B could buy, they could win any city council vote, any public referendum. But it had to be legitimate, an "offer." And that required a process, and these aren't "process" people.

Lenny's pretty unhappy these days. His Twitter timeline is often filled with re-tweets of self-help aphorisms, so he's been drinking deeply from the well of self-help literature. It's not a happy person who goes there.

Non-attachment to results is part of the path to liberation from suffering. One definition of suffering might be, "The difference between the way things are, and the way you want them to be." Which is to say, "Desire is the source of all suffering."

But it's also a lever for attention, that faculty of consciousness that apprehends your reality. It aids in directing "focus."

We're often told to "focus on the goal," in order to achieve it. But if you're focusing on the goal, where is your attention?

I've told this story before in Groundhog Day, and I think in the Marmot, but back when I was studying martial arts, I had a little one-on-one lesson in aikido. I'd never studied aikido before, and haven't since either. But it was a lesson that would stay with me for the rest of my life, and it was one of those happy accidents that suggests there's more here than meets the eye.

We only had the hour, and it wasn't something we were going to do again, so my instructor chose a simple exercise to demonstrate one of the techniques and principles of aikido.

We stood facing one another and he asked me to grab his wrists with my hands. He then said that no matter what happened next, I wasn't to move or lift my feet. He would do the same, but he would move his arms, which I was holding at the wrists.

Just keep my feet planted on the ground, and he would do the same.

Well, it was perhaps a matter of a second before one of my feet came off the ground. So we did this a few times, and all I learned was that I couldn't keep my feet on the ground! All he was doing was moving his arms.

So we switched, he grabbed my wrists, told me to keep my feet on the ground and try to get him to lift one of his feet. Try as I would, his feet remained firmly planted on the mat.

Then, the lesson. He told me that when my hands grasped his wrists, all of my attention was going to my hands. That's how we manipulate the world! But my hands were useless in keeping my balance, keeping my feet firmly planted on the ground.

I had to place my attention at my center. Center of gravity, as it happens. You don't respond to being pushed off balance by using your hands, you shift your center of gravity. With each of us keeping our feet planted, our legs were constrained. All you could do was move your hips to keep your center of gravity over your feet. But it worked!

We did the drill again, and I was much more successful at keeping my feet on the ground.

The lesson I learned is that it's always important to pay attention to your center, that way you're less likely to be thrown off-balance. Less likely to end up on your ass.

Yesterday was a beautiful day. I took a walk in the morning and thought about things, as I often do on these walks.

I get worried. Frustrated. Angry.

There's an election coming up in Jacksonville. What's on the ballot are "more of the same," and a remarkable woman who may be able to bring real change to the political culture of Jacksonville. Certainly a new tone and direction for city government, for at least her term of office.

I never used to give money to politicians. I started giving to her when she ran for my congressional district, against a morally bankrupt, useless old man, who won re-election handily.

I gave Donna the max you could give as a personal donation. Which, frankly, felt a little surreal to me. It was $5800 back then, and that's a lot of money, even for me, a relatively privileged guy with a pension. Of course, she was out-raised and out-spent by her opponent. And I suppose in hindsight, we might have known it was futile.

But I don't regret it. Not at all.

Lately I've been thinking about "values," since Republicans seem to be talking about them all the time. On Twitter, I've been asking the rhetorical question, "What do you value? How do your values move you to action?"

Because if they don't move you to action, are they really values?

When Donna decided to run for mayor, she reached out to me for a donation. Different limits for local elections, $1000 for an individual to a candidate and $1000 for an individual to a committee. So I gave a thousand to her committee, and I did a monthly donation of $100 until I reached the max.

I don't live in Jacksonville, I can't vote for Donna. But my grandkids all live there. And as Sheriff Shoar always used to say, justifying his bloated budget, "What happens in Duval doesn't stay in Duval." So I feel as though I have a stake in what happens over the county line.

Well, I learned that the May run-off is a "new" election, and so you can give more money to a candidate. Last week, I gave $250 and felt pretty good about myself. Mentioned it on Twitter to kind of model that support. Said it was kind of a stretch, but it was worth it.

So on my walk yesterday I was reminding myself about non-attachment to results. I was worried that here I was, giving away more money, Democrats in Duval weren't even turning out to vote. Was I just throwing my money away?

Non-attachment to results. You do your best, the rest is not up to you. The only thing you have control over is what you do.

Was I doing my best?

What are my values? How do my values move me to action?

I donated the remaining $750 of the max contribution after I finished my walk.

I'm just a human being, and all men have feet of clay. But when I know what "my best" is, and I'm not doing it, well...

You do your best, the rest is not up to you.

If any of this moves you in some way, you know what to do.

Originally posted at Notes From the Underground 08:44 Monday, 3 April 2023

Forgot to kick off a new month! So Life's Little Frustrations is going to appear in March's archive.

As only seems suitable.

I was going to post a pic of the radios sitting on the table outside, but I can't. Or rather, it's harder than I care to try right now.

I'd made this little automation that automatically created a note in Tinderbox, with all the html in it to post a pic, and now that fails with a cryptic AppleScript error 1700. Something's changed in either Ventura or Tinderbox, and now I've got to chase down what that is.

When you're young, new things are kind of exciting. When you're old, and you realize that time is a finite resource, you'd like to choose the new things you wish to explore. It's not as much fun when they just appear uninvited.

I've been doing fairly well printing a photo card for Mom every day. I've missed a few, but not many. One of the reasons I missed a couple was because a Pages document I'd been using to print cards on my Canon 100 photo printer, suddenly couldn't print. The printer kept complaining that the media and the size were wrong.

I'd changed nothing.

I deleted the printer, re-installed it, twice. Created an account at Canon's support site, asked a question at the forum and received no response. Decided to just create a new document, delete the old custom paper size. Re-create all that and finally got it working again. That was a couple of days lost.

Do I know how I did it? I do not.

Because I created another card, this one for "portrait" orientation cards, same size paper, and got the same error! It's only "portrait" for the purposes of the orientation of the image in the document. They're both "portrait" as far as the printer is concerned. Again, futzed around with this and that and eventually it printed. Do I know why? No. Have I learned anything? No. Will it happen again? Almost certainly.

Such is life in the 21st Century.

As a card aside, I visited my grandson last weekend and we took a selfie together. I printed a card with it and wrote him a little note in it and sent it to him. First time he'd ever gotten anything in the mail. I'm told he was over the moon about it. He'll be 3 in a couple of months.

Last night, I watched Joni Mitchell receive the George and Ira Gershwin Award from the Library of Congress. Great show, you should see it if it's streaming on the PBS app. Could have done without the gratuitous appearance of the politicians and Justice Roberts, but the rest of it was great.

Afterward, I bought a bunch of Joni CDs, because I don't think I have any physical media and my faith in the cloud diminishes by the day. I figure that someday when the net goes down, I can still listen to Joni on CD.

I have some number of CDs that I'd purchased back in the day, post-separation and divorce. I'd been meaning to take them to Goodwill or something. Mitzi wanted to keep them. I'm glad she did. And when we go hear a local artist perform, I'll usually buy some CDs. I've got an old Panasonic portable CD player that I kept because, at that time, it was also the only AM/FM radio I thought I had in the condo. (It turns out, I also have an old walkman-style Panasonic cassette player with a built-in AM/FM radio.) Kept it for the hurricanes.

Anyway, I've plugged it into the aux port on the Tivoli Model One I got from eBay and I'm listening to those local artist CDs lately. Pretty cool. Who needs "stereo"?

I look at Apple Music, and I'm not even sure I understand what I'm looking at anymore. I just tell Siri to play something and she gets it right most of the time. Not always, and when she doesn't, I've learned it's pointless to keep trying. I just don't listen to what I'd wanted to listen to.

"Ether" being, of course, the anachronistic notion of what the medium was that propagated electromagnetic waves. Analog radio being something of an anachronism itself, it feels appropriate.

Almost went down a rabbit hole on FM antenna polarization, but figured I'd better do this post or it'd never get done, since I overslept (or slept in) this morning.

Both the Superadios (GE trademark name) performed similarly on AM, and slightly outperformed the Panasonic RF-2200 in terms of being able to reproduce weak signals with reasonable clarity and volume. I will say that noise seemed better controlled on the RF-2200 though. I'm not sure why that may be, I'm little more than a dilettante in all this.

I used a Sangean PR-D5 as a digital (DSP) reference radio to identify the specific frequencies I was receiving on each radio. The PR-D5 is noted for being especially sensitive on AM, probably because of its larger than normal ferrite antenna, being similar in size to both the GEs and the Panasonic. DSP radios, when properly implemented, are more sensitive and selective than analog radios, certainly at least in the consumer space. It can also decode RDS (radio data system), so I can see the call letters if I don't hear them, if the station offers an RDS signal.

Later, I'll have to test more pedestrian radios on AM to see what the relative difference between a "super" radio and an ordinary one is, at least at my location. I had four radios on the table in front of me, and that was tough enough to manage, what with turning them to get the best signal and all.

FM was kind of a similar story; but a bit muddled, perhaps because of propagation conditions.

I received more stations than I expected, with Orlando being the known location of at least one of them, based on station ID in RDS. I didn't listen long enough for call letters in each case, and the others didn't decode in RDS. One was in Georgia, one in Gainesville, FL. This was unexpected, but VHF signals can often propagate beyond line of sight because of evaporative ducting. I saw this a great deal in the Arabian Gulf, where you could hear Channel 16, Bridge to Bridge, seemingly everywhere in the Gulf.

With AM, it's routine to turn the radio to get the strongest signal, with the long axis of the ferrite bar perpendicular to the direction of the antenna. Likewise, if there's a strong source of interference nearby, you can turn the radio to point the long axis toward the source of the interference, placing it in the antenna's null, reducing the amount of noise entering the receiver.

I confess I'm somewhat surprised to learn that changing the whip antenna's position also affects reception. Some signals are strongest with the antenna pointed vertically, other times horizontally. In some cases, there were two signals seemingly on top of each other, and you could get one clearly by orienting the antenna one way, and the other clearly by orienting it another way, to include changing its azimuth and elevation.

I thought there might be a simple explanation, but a quick look at the search results suggests otherwise, so I'm going to have to do some reading. At least it'll be interesting.

Of the two GEs, it's I think it's possible the SR II is more sensitive and selective on FM than the SR I, but I'm not sure. The PR-D5 would find a station, and I'd have to play around with turning off AFC (automatic frequency control) on the GEs to try and tune it in. AFC seemed to have a tendency to grab the strongest signal, to the exclusion of the weaker one, this perhaps being the intent of the function.

The tuning experience, in terms of the feel of the dial, is much better on the SR I. The SR II feels a little sloppy with some backlash in turning the dial. It works just fine, it just doesn't inspire confidence. That may just be an instance of sample-to-sample variation.

I remain somewhat astonished at the market for religious programming on radio. I think "political commentary" (demagoguery) and religious programming account for more programming on the air than music.

So, am I happy I spent $380 re-capping and repairing these two radios? Yes. Because I'm an old man, and it pleases me to spend some of my money making old things perform well again. Should you spend over $200 for a 30 to 40 year old radio and fix it up to have a "good" radio? Probably not. Unless you like old things.

Today's DSP radios, again, when properly implemented, will outperform consumer-grade analog radios from back in the day. You can look up what the PR-D5 goes for, but it's not much more than what eBay sellers seem to want for GE Superadios.

I guess I should comment on how they sound. Of the four radios I listened to yesterday, the SR I would be the one I found most pleasing. The SR II could be made to sound better, but it always required fiddling with the volume, bass and treble controls. That tweeter in the SR II can make the SR II sound reedy, less full. At its best, it offers a spectral clarity that the SR I can't match, with clear highs and a crisp mid-range, but it requires fiddling. The SR I always produced a rich, full sound that was pleasing to listen to.

The sound out of the PR-D5 is a bit of a disappointment. It's fine for news and talk, but it seems to perform better with music at higher volumes than are comfortable for "personal" listening. But it seems to me to be an amazing receiver in terms of being able to detect and demodulate low signal-strength broadcasts.

I bought a refurbed white one that looks good on the kitchen window sill. I don't think Mitzi is going to let it remain there, so it'll probably just be a reference radio for me when I'm "playing radio."

The RF-2200 sounds fine. It's great for its purpose, but it's strictly a low-volume affair. I was often having to crank it all the way up to hear weak signals, though the audio was clear. I don't know if there's an issue in the amplifier section, but strong signals played loudly enough so I suspect not.

The GEs seem to have a stronger amplifier driving a much larger speaker with six D-cells compared to four for the RF-2200. And the amplifier seems to respond non-linearly to the volume pots on the GEs. A little goes a long way on that control. I seldom (never?) had that control turned "up" more than maybe a quarter to a third of the way, the volume getting uncomfortably loud above that. And then there was always the fiddling that the SR II required.

So I still need to do some playing around with FM. I want to have a clear understanding of the mis-alignment on the SR II before I describe it to Chuck for possible re-alignment. It seems larger at the low end of the band, and it's a closed loop. At the bottom of the dial, I was getting stations from the top!

And I want to have a clearer understanding of the relative differences between the two radios in terms of their tuning performance. The SR II seemed to be slightly more selective, but then there was that feel of backlash in the knob.

Anyway, something to do outside before the weather becomes unbearably hot.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 07:43 Friday, 31 March 2023

It never fails. I see a news item, a blog post or get an email that kind of sparks a question. Next thing I know, a couple of hours have gone by and I've got nothing accomplished I'd intended to accomplish.

This morning's distraction was rising water tables and salt water intrusion due to sea level rise. Bigger problem in south Florida than here, from what I was able to learn. But I noticed the time and headed out for my walk before I was able to find reports from the surveillance wells in the St Johns River Water Management District, and what the historical trends suggest.

We live adjacent to (actually kind of "in" but for fill) a swamp. Groundwater rise may be a relevant issue in the fairly near term, at least with regard to the health and longevity of the pine trees in the preserve behind the house. They can drown if the roots can't get enough oxygen. Not solely because of sea level rise. This was all silva culture around here. Pines cultivated for wood or pulp. Now they're mowed down to put in developments. A lot of that groundwater used to be held in the trees, but not anymore. So it's higher just because of development. Sea level rise will just make it worse. Suspect it'll all transition to cypress and mangrove at some point, perhaps in my lifetime, but I'm not certain.

Anyway, the GE Superadios are here. Going to do an AM and FM band scan this morning or afternoon as assess their performance. One issue I noticed on the SR II is that the dial marker is off by nearly 2MHz on FM, which is significant. I'll have to email Chuck and see about a re-alignment. There isn't much at the top end of the dial here, but it shouldn't be that far off.

Also received a 1990's Panasonic RF-B45 SW radio. Verified last night it'll receive single sideband, at least on 80 meters. Copied Tennessee, Louisiana, P-cola and a few others I didn't get the location. That's on the whip. Seems in immaculate physical condition. Seller was in Arizona and the radio still has stickers from the audio retailer that sold it originally, so I suspect it's always been in a dry environment. Nice faux-leather vinyl case too.

Anyway, laundry to fold, sub to order, stuff to do before I can play radios.

Chuck Rippel, the gentleman who is re-capping the GE Superadios I bought, reports that one is complete and, while he was able to restore battery connections, the interior of the radio was more badly damaged than just the battery compartment indicated. The radio is working on batteries now, but it was a much tougher job than anticipated. So, reminder boys and girls, don't store battery powered devices with the batteries in them! (HP calculators included.)

Garret Vreeland had some nice things to say about the marmot. Much appreciated. I'd like to see more local blogs in this part of Florida. I've found a couple, but it seems that Twitter still commands most folks' attention, the marmot's included. I plan/hope to make myself scarce there after the May elections, spend more time here and in the Underground.

John P. Weiss offered a meditation on the movie The Whale and honesty in writing. Well worth reading. God knows there's a crying need for more honesty in everything these days.

One of the things I learned in therapy is that the inner voice is a unreliable narrator. Sometimes, not so much recently, but more so back in the Groundhog Day era, it was a struggle to determine who was writing my blog posts. The inner voice, or that other place, from which words emerged that often surprised me. The inner voice isn't just an unreliable narrator, he's often an uncompassionate editor, or a cowardly one. Like a public relations manager.

It is hard to do honest introspection. That's why therapists have a job. We could use more therapists.

Euan Semple is struggling with something along those lines. We wish him well. (Is my use of the editorial "we" an affectation? We wonder.)

AKMA's been chronicling his efforts at pounding the pavement into submission.

A couple of weeks ago, which I only read a few days ago because I was behind in my RSS feeds, Peter Rukavina wrote an honest post about a recent episode in his life, which I imagine took more than a small amount of courage.

There are honest voices in the blogosphere. You have to kind of listen for them. They're usually not the ones competing for attention. And there are more than the ones I've noted in these dispatches. This is just a small sampling.

Cultivate an RSS feed of honest voices, and it'll help to make you a little less hopeless.

Again with a late reading of a blog post, Dr. Drang offered an amusing insight into one of the properties of concrete.

When I was president of my condo association, we had a building burn down, a total loss for twenty homeowners. We had insurance, and back when Florida was in the business of responsible law-making, they made a provision in the statutes for excess loss coverage, such that if a special assessment were ever necessary to fully recover from a loss, it could be covered by your condo (homeowner's) insurance. We were fully insured to value, with a current appraisal, so we had plenty of resources to do a proper job of rebuilding Building 100.

Then I learned that all the top-flight design and build companies, or first-rate architects and general contractors wouldn't touch reconstructing a condo building with twenty owners and potentially 21 litigants.

So we did the best we could, with who we could get. To make sure, I also had a professional engineering firm involved in every phase of construction. The PE assigned to us, Bryan Busse, was on speed-dial on my phone, along with our attorney and insurance adjuster.

When they poured the slab, we had Bryan come out to observe the "slump test," which is used to make sure the concrete you're pouring is the good stuff.

Funny story about the slab. The building is really two buildings with a common roof system and an open center with stairs. The architect we hired worked off the original plans and made revisions to bring the building up to the current building codes; the county and our PE both reviewed the plans. The slab was poured as two slabs, with the center pour done later.

Only days before we were scheduled to do the second pour, the welders doing the shop plans for the stairs in the center notified the GC that the plans for the slab were wrong. There wasn't enough room for the stairs under the revised building codes!

Nick of time. I'm sure we'd have gotten a waiver or something if we'd have poured it and then found out, but who knows? Revised the drawings, re-staked out the slab and all that work and made the second pour in the proper location a week or so later. One of many delays.

But yeah, "slump test." The things you learn.

And it does take a team.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 08:33 Friday, 24 March 2023

Trying to catch up on my blog reading. Just read this post from Woeter Groeneveld from over a week ago. Shot him a note to tell him I enjoyed it and relate a similar experience.

I'll not recapitulate all that here, save to say that reading, history especially, and travel are two of the best ways to expand or change your perspective.

Given the crisis we face with the abuse of fossil fuels, reading is to be preferred for the time being. But travel remains a powerful experience nonetheless.

So Amazon's killing DP Review. Unsurprised. Pretty stupid taking down the site though.

I haven't been spending much time there lately, so maybe that's a clue, I don't know. I did go to my profile and looked through all my bookmarked posts in the forums. I downloaded web archives of the pages I thought were useful.

Then I went to the micro four-thirds forum and checked the list of most-bookmarked posts to see if I had missed something that might be useful. I downloaded web archives of a couple of those as well.

Everything that has a beginning has an end. Yours and mine is coming too. (Are? Verb agreement?) Until then, we have web archives.

(FWIW, I'm killing time waiting for a crew to come insulate our garage attic. Gate has notified me they're on the way.)

The local blood bank comes to our community regularly and I donate. It's convenient and they give you a $20 gift card! So when they were here on Tuesday, I dropped by after taking Mitzi to the airport and gave a pint.

I poke around eBay, looking at old radios. Sometimes I want to see what they're selling for because there's one up on Goodwill. If there's something I'm interested in, I'll add it to my Watch List. I may not be interested in buying it, I may just be interested in seeing what it sells for.

I guess sellers find out when you've added something they're offering to your Watch List, and sometimes they'll offer you a discount. I've taken advantage on one or two of those, and I suppose that data is shared with sellers as well. Who knows? At any rate, I get a lot of discount offers.

I almost took one for a Sony ICF-7601. The particular listing I'm talking about shows it as an ICF-7601L, but the photos all indicate that it's not an "L" model, which deleted shortwave band 1, and added a longwave band. It's listed at $100, and the seller offered me 15% off. So I searched on recent completed listings and found that that radio often goes for much less than that, with all the accessories!

What piqued my interest was a web site about Sony design, so I'd been thinking about adding a Sony portable to my collection. The 7601 is a fully analog radio, with no digital display or processing of any kind. Mixed reviews. Good to great sensitivity, average selectivity, gets overloaded on an external antenna, not a hall-of-famer by any means, but a decent radio.

So I made a mental note to keep an eye out for one. Not the $85.00 one either.

Well, then I saw a Tecsun R9700DX, and damned if it didn't look just like an ICF-7601!

I don't really fully understand this radio manufacturing business. Who actually designs and builds what, who's an OEM, who just slaps a badge on whatever's on offer. The ICF-7601 was still being sold in some markets well into the 2000s, so someone was manufacturing it for Sony.

Well, to make a long story short, the R9700DX looks like the same design as the ICF-7601. So, it's not a Sony; but it's not 30+ years old either. It's an all analog radio that gets the same kind of marks the 7601 seemed to get. It's small, not tiny like a C.Crane Skywave, has an illuminated band/frequency display and it's $59 at Amazon.

That's not the lowest price it's been offered at Amazon either. It had recently been sold for ~$45, so $59 wasn't exactly a deal.

But...

I did have that $20 Amazon gift card. Blood money.

$43.85 delivered. Should be here tomorrow.

Both GE Superadios arrived, separately of course. The photos in the listings didn't include the battery compartment, so although both bodies looked in decent shape, and both antennas were present, I wasn't sure if I wouldn't be finding damage from battery leakage in one or both.

It turns out that the SR I did have battery damage. The terminals had corroded away. I didn't open the cabinet, so I don't know how much may extend into the interior of the radio, but the batteries were at the bottom and the radio looked, from the amount and distribution of the dirt and dust still on it, like it was stored upright. It still worked on AC from the cord, so that was encouraging.

The SR II looked slightly better. There are a couple of small blemishes in the speaker grill paint that can probably be touched up, and the chromed plastic tuning knob shows a couple of blemishes in the fine knurled lines around the circumference. Not bad for something over thirty years old!

As it happened, I decided to have both radios refurbished at the same time. I corresponded with Chuck, and he seems to think he can repair the battery terminals. That was important to me, because the interior of Saul Haul is an rf-dirty environment. In a better world, house current would come in two flavors: 110v AC for high power requirements, and low voltage DC for all the rest, like LED lighting.

Compounding the noise problem is the aluminum foil IR barrier on the roof decking, it's also an rf barrier. While FM radio from the local stations works pretty well everywhere in the house if the radio has an antenna, everything else struggles, to include cell phones.

So to do any sort of "band scanning," since it's forbidden to mount anything as hideous as an antenna on your house or in your yard (exceptions for satellite television because they have a better lobbyist), you have to go outside. Which, thanks to Mitzi's new screened enclosure, is a comfortable proposition these days!

I checked out the SR I on AC outside and it worked fine on FM. Since the cord is fairly short, and the only outlet is below the window that has my Ambient weather station in it, on AM it was also picking up noise from the weather station. I think, or hope. We'll know soon I guess. I guess I could have unplugged the weather station too. Oh well.

If you want to find out how well a radio works, one place to start is to see how well it receives local stations, which leads to the question, what are my local stations? You can find the answer at this web site. Enter your Zip Code and you'll get a list of AM and FM stations whose service areas should cover your location. They're in two tables, with FM displayed first. The lists are sorted by predicted signal strength at your location.

Select all the data in the first table (FM), launch a spreadsheet (I used Numbers), and paste the table into the spreadsheet. In Numbers, I created a second table for the AM stations. The links in the station call letters should come over. You can click on those and get data from the FCC about the station, which is pretty cool.

I tried using these tables on my iPad, sitting outside and discovered something I guess I already knew. The touch screen uses capacitance as the touch-sensing mechanism, and an antenna is nothing more than one element of a capacitor (both elements if you include ground). So my radios were picking up all kinds of noise from the iPad's screen.

So print your tables. But first, sort them in ascending or descending order by frequency. I didn't do that, I'd scan the dial, check the freq then look at the table, which involved a lot of visual scanning up and down the table. And the frequency scale on many old radios can be off by a little or a lot, so it helps to scan the radio up and down several kHz or MHz for closely spaced signals to figure out which one is which. You may be picking up signals not on the list, depending on the sensitivity of your radio, or propagation conditions.

If your radio can receive all the signals in the list, then it's at least a decent radio. If it can receive more, then it may be better than decent, or propagation conditions are better than usual. This is the fun of "playing radio!" Which is it? Do I have a "super radio," or is vhf ducting taking place?

Anyway, what I have to do now is go through and populate the lat and long position of all those stations and then calculate the line of sight distance to Saul Hall.

Next little experiment is to take something like this page at Wikipedia, a listing of all the 50kW radio stations in the United States, and see which ones I can receive. Read the legend carefully at the top of the page. Not all 50kW stations broadcast at that power level at night.

Anyway, something to look forward to when you're retired, right? Thanks for dropping by.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 05:25 Thursday, 23 March 2023

They held an election in Jacksonville Florida last night. Ennui won walking away in a landslide.

It wasn't an ordinary election, it was something un-ironically called a "jungle primary." In this peculiar institution, a candidate who receives fifty percent of the vote plus one is declared the winner. Failing that, the top two vote-getters advance to a run-off in May.

Roughly three quarters of Jacksonville's registered voters couldn't be roused to cast a ballot, either by mail, early voting or on election day. Despite the expenditure of the most money in a municipal race in the city's history. Despite having one candidate with a clear, positive vision and message, a compelling personal biography and a lifetime of personal and family connection to the city. She did earn the most votes, but not enough to win outright.

Instead, she will face a wooden white man. A caricature of the status quo. An inert, perpetual politician, seemingly groomed by the donor class to eventually be mayor some day. A man who spent millions of dollars trying to destroy his Republican opponents, succeeding in one dispatching one, and likely improving the election performance of his closest Republican rival.

If democracy isn't dead in Duval County, it's on life support, hanging by a thread, if not a chad. (Though Daniel Davis, leading Republican candidate, has "Chad" written all over him.)

What kind of democracy is it when nearly three quarter of the citizens don't vote? And this isn't a new phenomenon in Jacksonville. I don't want to get ahead of myself, but it seems like someone's been holding a pillow over the face of democracy for some time around here.

What does "democracy" even mean when the majority of the citizens don't vote? It means "self-government" is government by the will of a minority. It's a message to any administration that the majority just doesn't care.

If democracy is dead in Duval, did it die of natural causes? Was it an accident? Or was it killed? If so, was it suicide, negligent homicide, or murdered with malice aforethought?

In any obituary, democracy's early life and young adulthood in Jacksonville would be seen as at least, "troubled." A part of the Confederacy and, later, Jim Crow, Jacksonville never embraced democracy for all its citizens. And yes, my little Republican friend, the power that imposed that was wielded by Democrats. It's about the only fact of history you seem to have mastered and can recall at will.

Not long after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Jacksonville decided that it would become a "Bold New City of the South," by consolidating Jacksonville city government with Duval county government. There were many reasons for this, and the city's defenders will say that race had little or nothing to do with it. The net effect, however, was to dilute the voting power of the city's Black population.

To be sure, Black voters were courted in the referendum; promises and assurances were made, which ultimately resulted in an on-the-record approval of consolidation by Black voters, providing white politicians with a solid alibi for decades to come.

Nearly contemporaneous with the beginning of Jacksonville's experiment with consolidated government was Nixon's "southern strategy." Whether or not it was Nixon's design to court disaffected racist southern Democrats, it began the process by which racist southerners found a welcome home in the Republican Party.

Writing this now, I'm wondering if this is where the fear of democracy began to infect the Republican Party. Because one thing is clear, Republicans today do fear democracy, and that wasn't always so.

If democracy was murdered in Duval, perhaps we have our motive.

If it was murder, was it a crime of passion? A lone, deranged killer?

Or was it a conspiracy?

Jacksonville has a civic and political culture. It's not particularly pretty, especially lately. It's a monoculture of Republican politics and governance. There is a Democratic Party in Duval county; but it's riddled with an auto-immune disorder that has left it nearly as dead as democracy.

If it was a conspiracy, it's to be found in the leadership of Jacksonville's civic and political culture, which is a Republican one.

In agriculture, a monoculture is a field or region that is cultivated to produce just one species of plant. This specialization offers greater efficiencies and greater profits for the planter. But it makes the crop especially vulnerable to disease and parasites.

The same is true in a political monoculture.

Any observer of Jacksonville's city government, whether it's the city council or its "strong mayor," Lenny Curry, would have to note the fecklessness and faithlessness that defines its actions. Embarrassing spectacles that would shame any rational political party or office are a routine occurrence. The public has grown inured to the farce that routinely plays out on the public stage.

There is a leadership vacuum in Jacksonville. There are no elder statesmen that command respect, who can criticize the people in power and direct public attention and opprobrium to their conduct and failures. The last one was Jake Godbold, and he played the part brilliantly in his last public act.

There are former mayors still around. The most visible one is John Delaney, a man who is seemingly most proud of his popularity as mayor, still able to quote his approval ratings nearly twenty years after he left office. Abandoning politics for the academy, Delaney is sometimes active on Twitter, though he demonstrates little talent for the platform.

When engaged about politics on Twitter, Delaney stakes out a bold stance, feet firmly planted on "both sides" of any issue, defiantly proclaiming, "I shall not be moved."

There will be no leadership from Jacksonville's most popular former mayor.

There are no civic institutions that call local government to account. They're all insiders. There's this thing called the Jacksonville Civic Council, which seems to mostly be a vanity effort by some local business leaders. It doesn't do much, if anything, to weigh in on issues. It did get excited about Lenny's plan to spend city money to build a University of Florida graduate school in Jacksonville, racing to city council as fast as it could to endorse that idea. And it did manage to rouse itself on the JEA debacle, late in the game. Mostly though, it's just a web site and a bullet in a bio.

The local chamber of commerce? Headed by the Republican favorite to succeed Lenny Curry to be what many expect to call "Lenny's third term."

How about the media? Well, we have some excellent reporters and commentators in Jacksonville. Nate Monroe, A.G. Gancarski, Mark Woods, Melissa Ross, and many others. But traditional journalism outlets are competing for attention in an attention economy that is saturated with competitors. While they have a pretty clear assessment of the dismal state of affairs in Duval, they don't command a following that can move the needle. They're lucky if they can make payroll.

It seems the public can't be bothered to pay attention to local government, and local government likes it that way. With only a quarter of the electorate willing to make the effort to vote, local pols, mostly Republicans, only have to target their "super-voters." Their messages narrowly tailored to the fears and prejudices of their most rabid supporters.

Lenny Curry likes to call the toxic cesspool of Jacksonville politics, "the arena." Well, Jacksonville has a septic tank problem. A holdover failed promise to underserved neighborhoods, that threatens local health in an increasingly flood-prone city, and water quality in the city's largest asset, the St Johns River.

A better writer than I could probably do something with that metaphor. Suffice to say, democracy's death may be due to criminal negligence. An insufficient attention to duty to guard the public health.

I don't know who the public authority is to declare democracy officially dead in Duval. Perhaps it'll be kept on life support, because, you know, Republicans are "pro-life." At least that way, there'll never be an autopsy to determine the official cause of death.

Damned by distraction, indicted by indifference, condemned by complacency, democracy was put to death in Duval County.

Originally posted at Notes From the Underground 05:59 Wednesday, 22 March 2023

We watched the first episode of Extrapolations, an Apple TV+ series that looks at what the future might look like.

I don't think people will find it very entertaining. That is to say, I don't think it will have the effect its producers seem to intend. Briefly glancing at some of the reviews, I'm not alone in that assessment.

The series does depict the broad outlines of how I think things are going to look. Progress on some fronts, chiefly technology, will continue. There will be whizzy new things to distract us from the catastrophe unfolding before us.

Capitalists will continue to get rich. People will still be having babies. The most important things in people's lives won't be the disaster, it'll be the same things that are most important in people's lives absent a disaster, their families, their jobs, themselves, their money.

But it's not very well done. It's not satirically funny, I didn't relate to any of the characters, nearly all of which were more caricatures than people, and it's not frightening in an immediate sort of way.

Or Yangon, rather.

The Panasonic RF-2200 arrived safely on Thursday afternoon. We were getting ready to have company, so I only spent a little time with it, but my initial impressions were favorable. I've since spent much of the morning yesterday, and part of the afternoon playing with it and I'm quite happy. I have yet to open the cabinet and look at the work, but I'll get to that.

"So what's up with the radios thing?" you may wonder.

Apart from being an old retired guy with too much time on his hands and more disposable income than sense?

Good question, perhaps.

It seems to me that I've been satisfying various itches from my youth or early adulthood, when I had less time and money.

I've been down this route now with cameras, the Apple II, calculators and now radios. And, leaving out cameras, that order is roughly the reverse chronological order of my youthful fascinations, though I bought my HP-41CV after I had my Apple ][+, I may even have been on to my //c (which came before my //e) at that point. But I did have a TI programmable at USNA, and used it to good effect. The camera interest, was first, when my parents got me a new Konica compact 35mm rangefinder for graduation, or my birthday or something.

I loved that little camera, and better cameras were more expensive, which largely squelched (Heh. A radio pun.) any interest in acquiring better cameras; and the cost of film and processing limited the amount of production I got out of that one. (Thankfully!) Mostly shot slides.

With regard to the calculators, I had one of the more "limited" TI programmables, 56, maybe? And I was comfortable with TI's algebraic order of operations. I had seen some HPs, and Reverse Polish Notation seemed like some sort of voodoo. It kind of scared me.

But the HP-41C (I bought a later model, the CV with built-in expanded memory) was getting a lot of hype about being the best programmable handheld on the market. As I recall, the TI-58 was its competitor, and I really had little use for a programmable of that power; but I was a young, single lieutenant on shore duty with disposable income, so I bought one to see what all the fuss was about. Still have it. (Along with an HP-41CX, and a host of other HPs, to include my most recent senseless acquisition, an HP-71b.)

What seems to be taking place is that I'm kind of resolving old questions or desires from faint echoes of fomo (fear of missing out). I acquire things I couldn't have when they were new, or didn't have for one reason or another, but wanted. I use them, learn about them, experience what it was like to own them, and then much of that desire is satisfied, and I can let them go.

I gave away thousands of dollars of Apple II hardware and software. Spending my children's inheritance, perhaps literally. I think the camera and lens thing has been largely satisfied. I may get the mZuiko 8-25mm zoom at some point; and if I won the lottery or something I'd probably get the 300mm/f4 and the 150-400mm, but for the most part, I'm satisfied with the lenses I have and could probably even stand to part with a few more. Photography has stuck with me as an interest. There's little new anymore in the technical developments to excite me. But I still enjoy taking pictures.

There's a box of HP calculators that are redundant to my "collection." I have plans to give that away soon. Mitzi's still on Facebook, so I'll ask her to join an HP interest group and find someone to take it off my hands.

What makes all this relevant to this rapidly growing missive is that I seem to be beginning to understand what's going on inside with all this. So I can foresee myself acquiring a bunch of radios and then having to dispose of them in some way. This growing realization has saved me some money already, though I still struggle a bit.

The heyday of shortwave radio listening is long past. There's little on there to listen to for entertainment or edification. What one appreciates today is the sensitivity of the radios and the changing dynamics of propagation conditions; and perhaps some satisfaction with trying different antenna designs or configurations. Similarly with medium wave, or more colloquially, AM radio.

In that regard, I seem to have made a fortunate choice in getting an RF-2200. It's an analog radio, there may be an IC in there somewhere, I confess that I'm not as intimately familiar with the design of the radio as I will be when this particular itch is scratched. But as an analog, consumer (today we'd probably say "pro-sumer") product, it is, like the GE Superadio, perhaps the highest expression of the art. Sony fanboys (and other manufacturers as well) will object about now, and that's fine. They're probably right; but in terms of the experience of using a radio of this era, this is about as good as it gets. Yes, it drifts a bit, but that's actually kind of fun.

I sat outside yesterday evening and listened to hams on the 20-meter band, using the radio's built-in whip antenna. It's definitely a finicky experience, but I could hear a guy in England, clear as day. Wasn't pegging the needle by any means, but intelligible.

And that was it. I could recall the feeling I had as a teen in my parents' basement, calling CQ on 80 meters in CW (Continuous wave, or "Morse code" for the totally uninitiated.), and the thrill of getting a reply from someplace far away. Most of my contacts ran north and south because of my antenna.

I don't know if that's nostalgia or something else, but it was fun experiencing that feeling again. I've listened to hams on my little DSP radios, but it wasn't the same experience. Superior in most ways, but didn't recall the experience of youth. And I have a zoom meet-up every weekend with Tinderbox users, many of them in Europe. There we all are. Seeing and hearing each other in remarkable fidelity! But it doesn't offer the kind of thrill that plucking a signal out of the ether from thousands of miles away in a little box attached to a little aerial does. Don't ask me why.

Back in the day, it wasn't exciting enough to keep me doing it on the regular. It was often cold in the basement, always damp. I did enjoy the hum of the radios, a separate Hammerlund receiver and I forget the brand of the crystal-controlled transmitter. The faint smell of ozone, I guess. But it was kind of like work. I probably spent as much time listening to hams on sideband, wishing I could just talk. You had to have your General Class license (or Technician if you just wanted to work VHF/UHF) to use single side band (SSB).

I eventually let the hobby go, much to the disappointment of my parents perhaps, who spent not inconsiderable sums of their limited income on my gear. Uncle Robert helped me get it at a hamfest, because there was no way we were were buying that stuff new. The only thing I still have is the code key.

Anyway, I've been looking at other radios of similar vintage, including the GE 7-2290a. My finger has hovered over the "Buy Now" button a few times. It's not unreasonable money, but then I'd have to ship it off to get re-capped. And in the end, I'd know what the experience would be like. Not superior to the RF-2200. Definitely looks cool, but I don't have a house where I can set up a display.

I've got a GE Superadio I and II inbound, a Sangean WR-11, which is just a tabletop radio but I like the design. I let the other Monarch RE-760 (the Godzilla radio) go, price was getting a little dear; but I may still keep an eye out for another one. (Writing that last sentence seemed to wither the desire even more, so, probably not.)

It's easier to get your license today, no code requirement. I live in an HOA so antennas are a challenge, and we have a small rf-unfriendly house, so no possibility of my own "shack." But mobile seems to be where most of the action is today. Small, low power radios, portable antennas. Thinking about it.

But I think I'm fortunate that I've learned a little bit about myself, such that I think I'm pretty much done buying radios. Going broke, thrifting. The RF-2200 is just about perfect for me. Small enough to not take up much space in the command cave. Good enough to want to actually use it. And it looks great.

I think the GEs will likewise be welcome here, though I may have trouble finding someplace to put them.

Here's a little video of most of the objects of my obsession. I have no interest in the C.Crane, likely a fine radio. But I have the RF-2200, and will have a Superadio I and II; and almost bought the 7-2290a.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 05:45 Saturday, 18 March 2023

Governor DeSantis made something of a revealing statement in the closing of his State of the State address, "Keep the compass set to true north."

There are many things in that address to take issue with, but this particular construction got my attention immediately.

You see, DeSantis likes to make something of a deal about his brief service as a JAG officer in the United States Navy. I liked the JAGs I met in the navy. We had one on the staff of Cruiser-Destroyer Group Twelve when I was assigned there, and we were good friends.

As a JAG, he actually went to sea, deployed. To the best of my knowledge, DeSantis spent his entire time in the navy ashore somewhere. If he ever went to sea, he might have learned about "compasses."

In the navy, a "compass" refers to the magnetic compass, a device that has helped guide mariners for centuries. A magnetic compass points to the north magnetic pole, which is not "true north." To determine one's course based on "true north," one must make certain corrections to the reading of the magnetic compass, accounting for phenomena known as deviation and variation.

A sailor, a navigator worth his salt, doesn't "keep the compass set" anywhere. It points to the magnetic north pole. The device one "sets" is the gyrocompass, commonly referred to simply as "gyro." Nowadays we have GPS, but I'd guess that helmsmen still steer by gyro. Gyros have to be "set" and given time to "settle" if they've lost power.

So the whole phrase just irritated me because it displays the ignorance of a man who wore the uniform for the sole purpose of serving his selfish ambition. That whole schtick may work with the uninformed, but he's not fooling anyone who actually went to sea and was responsible for the safe navigation of a ship.

But what about it as a metaphor? What's he saying there?

I guess it's a more frothy way of saying "Stay the course!" Implying though that "true north" is some special, superior value to which one must adhere ("keep the compass set").

But even that's wrong, which is unsurprising, given the shallow vanity of this odious figure.

The utility of a compass or gyro is its ability to give you some knowledge of your direction over time. Even if the compass isn't set to "true north," but you know the error, you can still steer the correct course to arrive at your destination.

The problem is the destination, the direction the state is headed; and if he's elected president, the direction the country will be headed.

There is no "true north" in DeSantis's moral compass, apart from the direction his blind ambition is driving him.

DeSantis is a poser. A fake. A fraud.

That doesn't make him any less dangerous.

Technically, I suppose, I haven't been "thrifting." That is, I've just been buying junk online at eBay and Goodwill, not visiting thrift stores.

Visiting thrift stores would probably be the wiser thing to do, online auction sites make it far too easy to surface other products than the particular one you're looking for. The good news is that items under auction often give you some time to think it over. That has saved me some money.

This most recent adventure was prompted by another semi-unicorn, the GE 2880B am/fm radio, later dubbed the "Superadio" (Yes, one "r.").

There are three variants, but only the first two are considered genuinely "super." There's a gent in North Carolina who will restore these radios, and make some upgrades. I've been in correspondence with him about the service. It's not inexpensive, but these radios are kind of unique in terms of the history of consumer portable radios, perhaps representing their finest expression in terms of receiver sensitivity and audio quality, albeit they are not stereo radios.

As luck would have it, two specimens were up at shopgoodwill.com at roughly the same time, auctions ending a day apart on Monday and Tuesday. Monday's was a Superadio I, which wasn't badged as a Superradio, as the subsequent models were. There was a sticker applied by GE at some point, labeling it a "Superadio," so most people consider it officially a "Superadio." The biggest differences between the I and the II are the addition of a tweeter in the II, chromed plastic controls and "Superadio" on the cabinet badge.

There are even two versions of the I, the earliest lacking external antenna connections and having no chrome on the any of the controls. The 2880B has chromed band and afc switches, while the originals were just gray plastic.

I'd recently been sniped on something I'd bid on, and this radio appeared in better shape than anything reasonable currently on eBay, so I waited until just before the auction closed and went in with the highest amount I was willing to pay. Turned out to be enough, because I won the auction for $25.00, significantly less than I anticipated! Shipping on this listing was reasonable, so the whole thing came in under $40.

Since I got it for less than half I was willing to pay, I figured I'd take a shot at the SR II as well. Looked to be in similar cosmetic condition. Neither listing showed the internals of the battery compartment, so there could be an unwelcome surprise on delivery, but both were supposedly "working."

Got the SR II for $22.00! But it was listed with a little Jensen handheld so shipping was more and "handling," but the whole package came in under $50.

Once I have both radios in hand, I'll have to decide which one to have refurbished first. I plan to do both, but I'll give my wallet a chance to catch its breath after I do one of them. The service is more than both radios cost altogether. But it's a technically skilled effort, and by all accounts it's a first-class job, so I think it's worth it.

Once refurbished, these radios should continue to perform well past my lifetime. Assuming anyone is still broadcasting analog signals by then, which is a serious question these days.

Goodwill stores vary in the promptness of their shipping, so it's uncertain when I'll see these. Hopefully I'll have them in hand by the end of the month.

In other old tech news, Adel, the gent re-capping my Panasonic RF-2200, received the radio and sent me photos and videos of the results of the work. It's been shipped back and should be delivered tomorrow. Looking forward to tuning around with it, and later comparing it with one or both of the GEs.

There is some discussion about the future of AM radio, as I suppose there has been for quite some time. What's driving the current theme is the desire of car makers to omit AM radios from new car models, claiming it's too hard to filter electronic interference from the EV powertrain. It's a bogus claim, and likely just a cost-cutting measure.

But what is the utility of AM radio today? Well, in New Zealand, apparently it was one of the only ways the government could get any information out following a recent typhoon, with internet service being down in many remote areas. In an era of increasing extreme weather events, AM radio may be one of the most reliable forms of long-range, broadcast media.

But will analog "amplitude modulation" survive? There are technologies to make medium wave frequency radio (the AM band) all digital. If that were to come to fruition, analog AM radio would go the way of broadcast analog television, and there'd be nothing on the "air" these old radios could decode in the medium wave band. And I suppose it's likely FM would eventually follow suit, if there were some government incentive or mandate to convert AM to digital.

For now though, as an old fart, it's kind of rewarding to obtain and enjoy these examples of old high-end technology, and give them a few, perhaps fewer than we think, more years of useful life.

I think a thoroughgoing analysis will have to wait for another day, but do see this film. It's a gem.

There's a lot going on, and it's lovely to look at. Bill Nighy is brilliant.

It's about losing your way, finding it again and living an authentic life, even if it's only near the end.

All any of us ever really have are each other, and moments to live.

Just checking some export behavior here. Nothing to see.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 12:29 Saturday, 11 March 2023

I can't say I've ever been diagnosed as having attention deficit disorder, but I do have a short attention span. Novelty seeking behavior, which the internet affords seemingly limitless rewards.

The Monarch RE-760 arrived and it cleaned up very nicely. Love the way it looks. I'll take a pic one of these days.

It works, but it's pretty deaf on the low end of the AM (or MW for "medium wave" for the radio geeks) band. I've got my eye on another one. If I'm successful, I'll pull the chassis out of one and see if I can restore its hearing.

Goodwill's online auction site is another rabbit hole. I've got two little nonsense radios inbound. One is one of those hand-cranked "emergency" radios. The other is an old general purpose, large portable with AM, FM and weather band coverage, which, frankly, I didn't need. Reasonable price though, comparing it to eBay.

Typing random search terms into Goodwill's site can provide endless hours of entertainment. I missed an opportunity to get a Tivoli Model One for about $50 last night; because one thing led to another ("Ohh! What's that???"), and I forgot about it because I didn't set up a reminder.

Snipers exist on Goodwill. The interface isn't as responsive as ebay, so it's tricky to time it well. And for some reason, most of their auctions end after my bedtime. So I slept on the Model One. It went for $36, which seems like a great price, but that can be deceptive with Goodwill. You always have to estimate the shipping cost before you bid. It varies widely. That particular store was reasonable, so the radio would have cost, with shipping and "handling," about $50, which I think was reasonable for that specimen. The finish on the cabinet was near perfect for a radio that was about 18 years old. There's a nearly identical one on eBay listed for $50, with $15 shipping, with a scratched up top. It's a local seller, so I might be able to arrange local pickup. We'll see.

There was a $45 Model One on eBay with $15 shipping, also in very good shape. Listing said it accepted offers. Seller had zero feedback and no other items listed. I submitted an offer for $40, and the item was taken down.

The cause of my distraction was part of an Elegoo robot car kit. I didn't know what that was, so I had to do some "research." It's an incomplete kit, but it includes the cpu. A newer version, complete, is $55.00 an Amazon, so once you factor in shipping on it, as a "spares" purchase, it's not a remarkable deal.

But I did end up buying a new one on Amazon. Why? I don't know.

I spent some time studying the manuals of my two Sangean HD radios. I have the tiny portable HDR-14 and a table top HDR-18. The smaller one has memory for 20 preset stations, while the HDR-18 only has 10. The 18 is much easier to program than the 14. It wasn't clear from either manual if you could store individual HD channels for a given station. It turns out you can. It can take several seconds for the digital channel to decode though, so give it some time.

I mostly use the digital channels with the local public radio station, WJCT. They offer three digital channels, one of which is the Electro Lounge, which I like to listen to.

The RF-2200 went off to be re-capped on Wednesday, should arrive at the service today, I'll check the tracking on that. Good communication with the guy who's going to do the work, so I'm optimistic.

Inside Saul Hall (our house) isn't a very friendly radio environment. There's a lot of electronic noise from the LED lighting, and the roof decking has an aluminum foil backing to help lower the temperature in the attic. It does better as a faraday cage than an IR barrier, in my opinion. But Mitzi's recently completed screened addition, with comfortably upholstered chairs, has made a nice space to play around with radios outside. Antennas will remain a challenge due to HOA rules and penetrations, but it's better than being inside the house.

Mitzi told me that a member of the women's club that she serves with on a committee is an amateur radio operator. That surprised me a bit. If so, and if she's active, it may facilitate making arrangements for taking a license exam. We'll see.

I've been keeping up with mailing a card to mom every day. I need to start paying attention to which photos I've sent her. I don't keep individual files of every card, just replace the image in the same file for a given card size. Feels pretty good getting some use out of these expensive photo printers I've had for many years.

In other news, I'm reading Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich , by Harald Jähner and Shaun Whiteside. It's less sensational than Savage Continent, which I stopped reading about halfway through, but equally depressing.

There must be a whole area of academic study on the matter of "truth and reconciliation," for lack of a better term. How human beings come to terms with their inhumanity to one another, even if those terms are largely unsatisfactory. We have our colonial past, killing and displacing indigenous people, and slavery, which we seem largely incapable of confronting. The Balkans, Rwanda, Cambodia, South Africa, Armenia, the list goes on.

It feels like the general response by those responsible is to ignore it, bury it, suppress it.

Perhaps thereby, inevitably, to repeat it.

"Never again?"

Germany, publicly at least, appears to be the exception. But I'm not sure how genuine it is.

A post for another day I think.

I'll close on that happy note, and go take a walk. I think I'll need pants. It's a little chilly this morning.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:31 Saturday, 11 March 2023

Crossed the street to walk on the multi-purpose path since the landscapers were edging the sidewalk. (Noise and smell.) So it was easy to spot this little blue heron.

Crossed the street to walk on the multi-purpose path since the landscapers were edging the sidewalk. (Noise and smell.) So it was easy to spot this little blue heron.

I should probably set this up and do a glamour shot with a "real" camera, but I wanted to do a quick post. This is a Panasonic RF-2200 multi-band radio, as mentioned recently.

Arrived this afternoon. I'm afraid the seller didn't package it very well. It rattled when I removed it from the box with the thin amount of bubble wrap. Three plastic stand-offs had broken off in the cabinet. They don't seem to be essential, I believe they just offer more rigidity to the cabinet. I'll glue them back into place if I have to.

The SW band switch knob is present, it just doesn't remain firmly on the shaft. I believe I can fix that as well. It has to be removable though, to service the radio.

I put four D-cells in it and tried it out in the backyard. Got reception on all bands except SW1, likely because it was nearly noon.

A gent on eBay offers a re-capping service specifically for these radios. Opinions differ on the necessity for re-capping, but I'm persuaded that it would be money well spent on this radio, so I'm going to have it performed.

The good news on this particular radio is that the AM ferrite bar antenna locks into place, and rotates smoothly with a satisfying ticking sound. The whip was photographed as extremely bent in the listing, but I was able to correct most of that. The interior of the cabinet is clean with no evidence of corrosion or battery leakage. Could probably do with having some dust blown out.

I'm excited to have this radio, and look forward to listening to it.

This is why AI will destroy humanity. Skynet becomes self-aware, discovers what everyone is texting about it. Game over. Daniel Jalkut

Or something.

I am the master of the meaningless non sequitur, if that's not a tautology.

Obliquely, opaquely, I am referencing my lack of productivity here.

It was a busy week. We had guests Friday and Saturday, the place needed to be straightened up, taxes prepared and I have a new hobby/passion/obsession - old transistor radios.

I more or less declared RSS bankruptcy this evening, skimming through more than a couple hundred posts, starring a few in what I expect will be a vain hope of revisiting.

Apologies to one and all who missed the marmot.

So, some updates:

Spoke to mom this morning. She's received three of seven cards I've sent so far. She reported that I didn't have her correct address, despite the fact that I've been shipping radios and little grab-sticks and the like to that address since she moved there. Correction made. Hopefully the rest will find their way to her. Judging by her smile, I think she likes them.

There's a blog post I meant to revisit and link to about how Gen-Z doesn't know how to print. Forget Gen-Z, I've forgotten how to print. I used a different card size for one card, which required a new envelope. That consumed more than an hour of one morning; and entailed a robust degree of salty sailor-talk. I finally got it to work, but I have no idea how I did it and I'm not certain I can replicate it again.

I need to take a more deliberative, investigatory approach to solving these little dilemmas, and make clear notes.

Figure the odds.

Somehow I stumbled into the radio thing again. Cameras, computers, calculators, and radios. Oy. I have a couple of transistor radios from the 60s to the 70s on hand. First was a Panasonic Panapet 70, the "ball and chain radio." Got a blue one for Christmas as a teen. They're ridiculously expensive for what they are today, because there's no price for boomer nostalgia. I bought a white one that looked pretty nasty. Fortunately, it cleaned up pretty well. Still works about as good as I recall it did when it was new.

I have a really bad looking yellow one on the way, with a cracked bottom. Some guy here in Florida was selling the bottom half of a red one. Problem solved.

My most exciting acquisition is a Hitachi TH-841. Mine is in slightly better physical condition than the one in the link. No chips, but a small crack I can fix, though it was advertised with no cracks. I also paid significantly more than that etsy one, mostly because I'm a dumbass. But I'm learning.

It has cleaned up quite well, and it works fine. It's six inches long and three and half high, so it doesn't take much space on a shelf where it looks quite cool. These radios have a much larger ferrite loop medium wave antenna than a more conventional "portrait" handheld. Not always the case, so it pays to check.

I've got a much larger radio, the Panasonic RF-2200 inbound. I will play around with it a bit before I decide whether to send it off for refurbishment. Jay Allen knows more about radios than I do. I can clean, but I don't think I can align. There's a guy who offers a service on ebay, specifically for this radio, so I may go that route. We'll see.

Finally, there's a Monarch RE-760 on the way. Delayed, apparently, by UPS. Probably get here tomorrow. I like the style, but what especially attracted me was the brand name, Monarch. I get kind of a Godzilla vibe with this radio. Might display it with one of these, which I have, because of course I do.

If there's any good news to report, it's that I've successfully talked myself out of buying five, new to me, contemporary multi-band radios in the last several days. None of them offer anything I can't already do with the six I already have, which are some very good ones, to say nothing of the six or seven I gave to my son and his boys.

Anyway, I expect "this too shall pass." But for now, it's an amusing diversion.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 19:36 Sunday, 5 March 2023