Well now, we have a few random (I did say random in the title, right?) items to muse on, so here goes...
1. The Es season sucked. Should I repeat that? NO? Well, it did. I thought last year was bad; this is worse. This Es season really does reek of stagnant pond water. There was one meh FM opening early on in May that gave me 5 new loggings (and the total logged during the event was perhaps 10 stations). Then it all dried up. Looking over my log I did log one station on June 27th and that was it until July 13th when I logged an amazing three stations, all relogs. Oh come on now. Is this what we spend 9 months out of the year waiting for??? Forget it.
2. Back in the winter I began reading about taking a TEF6686 radio, creating a webserver for it and allowing people anywhere on the globe to listen to it. So I did it with the help of the TEF community on Discord. I have an HP laptop that serves as my webserver. It's connected to the radio and the radio is connected to a fringe antenna in my backyard. The laptop has Ubuntu on it, so the webserver software is linux (you can do it with windows but it seems more complicated to me). I think it's fun. Now I have to work on it to display station logos when you tune in a station.
The address for my webserver is http://216.49.128.236:8080/. You can also get a map of all worldwide TEF webservers here.
3. What do you do when you have a j-pole whose SWR is off the walls, you know it's cut right but it just won't tune, when it used to tune perfectly? That's right, you go to YouTube to try to find an answer. Well I went and found one. I ended up removing the electrical tape that secured the coax to the mast and the j-pole and moved it away from the antenna. The stupid swr went right bacck to 1.2. Amazing.
4. You know, Narragansett is pretty good beer and it's just $7.99 a six pack at Stop 'n Shop. And it comes in pint cans. More bang for your buck. The brand has been around since I was a kid. They sponsored the Boston Red Sox games on the radio (this was before TV) and their slogan was "Hey neighbah, have a 'Gansett". Yeah man, have one on me.
5. Worst commercial on TV. State Farm, without a doubt. "Like a good neighbah, State Fahm is there." Sure it is. Go away, Arnold.
6. When, oh when, are we going to get RDS on SDRConnect??? I mean, it's a great program, but do I really need to run SDR# with an Airspy HF+ in a virtual machine on Linux just to get RDS? SDR++ is fine but I'm finding way too many bogus PI codes generated, even more than SDR#.
7. And lastly, HEY WINDOWS USERS. WINDOWS 10 GOES END OF LIFE IN 2025!! If you value your privacy and your data, stay away from Windows 11. Put all of your data on a USB stick and switch to Linux Mint or Zorin. Make the change away from Big Teck. Tell Microsoft to go pound sand. BTW, does this CrowdStrike outage tell you anything? It should. Do some research if it doesn't.
