brainwagon

Readers of my blog and twitter feed know that I’m a fan of Jim Lahey’s “no-knead” bread. If you haven’t heard of it, just do some googling, or go ahead and buy Lahey’s book “My Bread”. The basic idea is to make a very wet dough with just a tiny amount of yeast, but rather than kneading it to develop gluten and structure, you basically just let the dough rest for 12-24 hours, and then bake it inside a covered heavy iron dutch oven at 500 degrees, covered for 30 minutes, and uncovered for 15.

Here’s a loaf I baked tonight (which uses sourdough instead of yeast, but same basic idea):

I’ve taken to baking a loaf of this a week. I start the dough on Wednesday night, bake it on Thursday night, and I bring it to work for a little group perk for my coworkers. I like it sliced up, and then toasted, with either some peanut butter or maybe some home made jam that my manager likes to bring in. It’s just so… civilized.

Nevertheless, it doesn’t seem like everyone agrees with me. My friend Lou has apparently not figured out how to do it: I think I’ll have to either visit him, or maybe make a good youtube video showing how I do it, and see where he’s going wrong. Of the dozens of loaves I’ve made, I’ve only had two real failures: both by “over rising”, once because I let the dough get too warm and it just kind of exploded, the other where I let it go too long, and the second rise just… didn’t. Not sure what he’s doing wrong. Anyone have a difficult time making no-knead? I’m at a loss.

But some people seem to just hate the idea of no knead bread. Witness this article from Slate
telling you that no knead bread is just wrong. To do so, the author likens it to “no-kissing sex”, and that this approach lacks “interaction” with the bread dough, and besides, kneading bread is faster.

Look, you can make bread however you like. I’m under no delusions that my bread is superior to bakery bread, and I don’t have the skill to make many varieties. I even will say that my bread is likely inferior to the Anderson’s bread. But it definitely is better than the processed, sliced stuff you get at the megamart, and just the fact that it’s relatively simple does not mean that it’s not worth doing. And I think it’s comical to claim that it takes more time to make than kneaded bread. My bread takes five minutes of work on Wednesday, and a similar amount on Thursday. Yes, you have to plan ahead for this bread. But I work for a living. When you get home at six or seven in the evening, making a loaf of conventional kneaded bread is just not in the cards. But starting some dough before going to bed, and baking it the next day when you get home is easy.

I could criticize Anderson for not making bread the way they do in the (excellent) Tartine bread book. It’s certainly more involved, and judging by the loaves made by my manager with that method, clearly superior to my own bread. But it takes a lot of care, and a lot of time, and even a fair amount of skill. Until my own skills develop, I’ll be happy to eat my simple bread. It’s good.

I’ve already got a couple of software defined radios: a nice SDR-IQ from RFSpace which covers up to 30Mhz, and an original Funcube Dongle Pro which covers from 64Mhz to 1700Mhz. I like both, but I must admit: they were fairly expensive. Still, in some ways they have spoiled me for conventional receivers in at least one way: they allow easy exploration of the RF spectrum. Just tune through the bands, looking for signals, clicking to tune. Awesome.

But I’m always on the lookout for cheap gadgets, and there is a recent crop of USB gadgets which (while not specifically designed for radio experimenters) have been recently adopted to put a software defined radio within the reach of many more experimenters. These come in the form of “DVB/FM receiver dongles”. Originally designed to allow you to tune in FM radio and DVB-T (the European standard for terrestrial digital TV), but with the right software can be hijacked and use as a more general radio exploration gadget.

I’m just at the beginning of my exploration of this stuff, but here’s what I’ve done so far.

First of all, I ordered one of the dongles. You should be able to get one for about $20 or so. I chose to get one from Deal Extreme, an interesting Chinese exporter. Based on some misinformation, I chose this EZCAP EZTV645, which was $19.20 shipped. Note: I do not recommend this particular radio. You can probably find a better one. I was misinformed into believing that this radio contained the “Elonics E4000 tuner”, which is generally the preferred tuner to use. Other good tuners are apparently the R820T. This one contains an FC00013, which certainly works, but is generally considered the least desirable and has the smallest tuning range. It would also be good to get one which has a standard MCX antenna connector, to make it easier to replace the absurdly comical antenna that it ships with.

The easiest way for many people to get started on Windows is likely to download SDR#, an open-source C# software defined radio program. On Windows, I recommend downloading the sdr-install.zip file, and using it to fetch all the goodies you need. You’ll then need to run “Zadig” (also downloaded) to install the right drivers, but I followed the instructions, and it worked fine, with one minor caveat: I have a Windows 8 laptop, and the drivers that you need to install are unsigned, so they can’t be installed unless you boot the Windows 8 machine in the special mode that will allow you to install unsigned drivers. Annoying. If you’ve never had to do it before, you can just google for the instructions, I fused this page as a guide, and it worked fine.

I haven’t had much time to play with this yet, but SDR# seems very nice (it also supports my SDR-IQ and Funcube Dongle, so I could in theory use it for all my SDR needs). Here’s a quick screenshot of it tuning an FM station:

You can clearly see the FM signal as well as the Radio Broadcast Data System (RBDS) which the receiver can also use to decode sogn titles and the like. Pretty neat.

One thing that sets these cheap dongles apart from the Funcube Dongle and the SDR-IQ is bandwidth: you can actually set this dongle to receive up to 3.2M samples per second, which means you can decode signals which are too wide to decode on the other radios (like DVB-T) or can search huge sections of spectrum at a time.

I haven’t had much of a chance to do more with this radio yet, in particular, I’ve only used it with its pathetic antenna inside my stucco-house and at work inside a metal framed building, where none of my HTs work very well either, so I don’t know of its sensitivity. But I’ll try to keep you all posted.

The other day I was in Ham Radio Outlet, and while strolling around I noticed a new VHF book published by the RGSB. And for some resaon, it made me think: I’ve got three different dual HTs, and an FT-817 which can work on 2m/70cm, why aren’t I doing more on VHF/UHF? I had a lot of fun operating via AO-51, AO-27 and SO-50, as well as the various APRS satellites, but except for SO-50, those have all gone black, and Fox isn’t due for a few months yet. I haven’t found repeaters to be very interesting overall: the sort of abstract social nature doesn’t seem all that exciting, and they represent little in the way of technical challenge. I like the idea of meteor scatter: I’d need to upgrade some equipment and build some antennas, but that seems reasonable. 2M weak signal SSB is probably something that would only pay off mobile (my home location is in a bit of a valley) but has some construction opportunities in it (antennas and the like). I’ve recently heard of coming Digital TV downlinks from the ISS, but haven’t got a clear idea of what hardware will be needed for reception.

I thought I’d toss is out to my readers: are there any VHF/UHF activities that you are participating in or would like to? I suspect that there are people who would like to have some new ideas, either because of limitations of their license class or their home situation, which may not favor large antennas. I’m also interested in hearing about any Bay Area groups who may do unusual activities on VHF+ frequencies.

Over on Facebook, I read a rather disturbing story about an Ohio humane officer who shot a litter of kittens within earshot of children. As someone who cohabits with an American shorthair (more later) this story is quite disturbing to me on multiple levels.

But rather than dwell on this, I thought I’d use my internet soapbox to tell you the story of my current cat, Scrappy.

I don’t know whether Scrappy was feral, or merely homeless, but back in 2004 I was working outside in our backyard when a skinny, bedraggled looking cat nervously edged up to me. He was emaciated to the point that he just looked odd. His face was all drawn and his fur was matted. He meowed at me with a rather plaintive sound. I found him something to eat, but he wouldn’t let me get close. Over the next few days, I got him some proper dried cat food and water, and fed him outside. He returned regularly, and began to look healthier. And prettier. We slowly started to move his food dish inside, although he was still an outdoor cat. After a while he’d spend an hour or two in the house, and would let us pet him. Our neighbors next door also would fed him, and he became a regular feature. Eventually, we named him.

He got his name because likes to fight with other cats. While he was timid with humans, he seemed to like to get in fights with some of the other homeless cats that seemed plentiful in the open space behind our home. One day, he didn’t show up for food. I found him in our garage, clearly in some pain, with his fur all matted and wet, and several fresh bite wounds. It was then that all my patience in trying to get to handle him paid off: I put him in a carrier and took him to the vet. That first trip was scary for me: while he struggled with me when I tried to put him in the carrier, he didn’t scratch or bite. Once he was in, he was simply terrified. He cried and very clearly was hyperventilating.

After his first (but not his last) vet visit, we got him all cleaned up and patched. The vet estimated he was maybe a year old or so. We got him all up on his vaccinations, had him microchipped, and found that he’d been neutered, although whether it was because he had a previous home or because he had been part of a program that caught and released feral cats in our neighborhood, we couldn’t be sure. Over the next few years, he got in a few more fights, eventually causing us to endure a painful week of howling when we finally made him a 100% indoor cat, and, minus some brief escapes where he still managed to find someone to fight with, he’s now a permanent fixture with us.

He’s a great cat. Smart, affectionate, and now that he’s fed and taken care of, rather handsome. He likes to spend time between my wife and me, on the footrest of our recliners, out in the living room where his scratching posts, or looking out the window. We’ve taught him to shake hands. I love him. I only wish he’d last forever.

Okay, that’s the story, now the sermon.

Cats and dogs are here because we humans like them as pets, or at least, because we think we do. Sometimes the reality of being a pet owner doesn’t mesh well with what we expect, and animals end up being abandoned or sent to shelters. The Humane Society says that between six and eight million cats and dogs will enter shelters each year. Of those, about three to four million will be adopted, but by their estimates 2.7 million adoptable animals will be euthanized. That is tragic. The story that started this post seemed monstrous to me, but the fact is that whether these kittens were shot or not, they very likely might have been euthanized, even if they were adoptable. Given the joy that my adopted cat-friend has brought me, I can’t help but be saddened by that.

So, I implore you:

1. First of all, if you choose to adopt a pet, be a good caretaker. Think hard about the commitment you have to make to the animal. If you question your ability to care for your pet long term, then buy a plant instead. Animals are living things, and require care and attention. Educate yourself on what it will take to be a good caretaker, and make an informed decision.
2. Spay or neuter your pets. Please. Really. This is just an extension of being a good caretaker. Spaying and neutring animals helps fight pet overpopulation, which is currently overtaxing shelters nationwide. There are other good reasons to do it, but to me, that will do as a start.
3. Please, don’t de-claw your cats. Lots of people think this is no big deal, but declawing is actually a pretty draconian procedure, basically equivalent to amputating your fingers at the endmost knuckle. It is far better for you to train your cats to use a scratching post and accept the occasional nail trim. Declawing cats is traumatic for them, and often can result in other behavior problems.
4. When you are getting a pet, consider getting a shelter animal. These animals are at the last stop, and are looking for a best friend. The Shelter Pet Project website is a great place to start. Until our animal shelters are empty, doesn’t adopting a pet make sense?

A few days ago I pointed at Mark Harrison’s Instructable on a 1 Hour Quadcopter. I thought it was cool, not so much because it could be built by him in an hour, but because it showed that quadcopters are actually not all that complex, and you might expect to be able to build one yourself. As I was mulling this over, I thought it might be nice to design and 3D print some motor mounts, just as I did for the Axon. So, I spent about 20 minutes tinkering an OpenSCAD version together, and came up with this:

And it took about 24 minutes and 4 meters of PLA filament to print:

The blackish bits on the top are an artifact of the previous user printing something using black filament, which took a while to clear out. The weight of this bracket should be about 12 grams, but I printed this test with 100% infill, and I think other model changes could result in a significant reduction in overall weight (I think all 4 brackets could easily be less than 25 grams, and probably be less than 18 grams). As soon as I test this against the real motors, I’ll be putting the revised model files up for download on Thingiverse. Stay tuned!

I remember reading about Chris Fenton’s homebrew Cray, which was impressive enough. It was implemented on a Xilinx Spartan-3E FPGA board, and eventually he got a Cray assembler written. It also is neat, because it looks like a tiny Cray:

But I wasn’t too interested in actually building one. But the gods of Internet surfing sent me back to his website today and I found two new projects of exceeding awesomeness:

The FIBIAC – an electromechanical computer

And the even more amazing, purely mechanical Turbo Encabulator:

As my only “value added” link, Chris makes reference to a book entitled “The Mechanism of Weaving”, which detailed the function of the Jacquard looms that were the predecessors of punch cards and early mechanical computers. His edition was published in 1895, but it turns out you can get an online copy from the Internet Archive. Very neat.

My mentor in all things remote-control, Mark Harrison has written a pretty cool Instructable on how his flying buddy Andreas built a simple but reasonable quadcopter in only an hour.

Cheap, Sturdy, 1-Hour Quadcopter

Here is the cool timelapse, ending with a short flight after fifty-one minutes elapsed:

Mark has more details and photos here, as well as some realtime construction video. Andreas originally did it as a friendly wager, but I think there is lots of good material here, not the least of which is just the inspiration of seeing someone build a quadcopter in a reasonably short amount of time, using equipment that isn’t very esoteric. Yes, you need the motors, props, ESC and flight control board, but other than that, it’s basically wood and screws.

Thanks to Mark and Andreas for posting this.

Addendum: Moments after posting this, I noticed this new video by David @ flitetest on constructing a tricopter from scratch:

If you are at all interested in RC stuff, flitetest is highly recommended: lots of cool information, lots of good forums, and even some cool kits.

This weekend was kind of a loss for computer/geek/rc airplane/ham radio, but it was off the charts fun for me and the missus. We did an unplanned day trip up to the Napa valley on Saturday, and then when I realized that I had left my lucky hat at restaurant, returned on Sunday to retrieve it, and ended up having a great brunch at Brix (yum) and then took a tour of the Bale Grist Mill.

The Bale Grist Mill is a fully restored, water-powered grist mill that grinds grain. We saw the sign on Saturday, and googled it that night, and decided to return on Sunday and see what the tour was all about. It was great: the miller was there leading tours, and spent about an hour talking about the history of the mill, and then allowing us to view all the intricate mechanisms inside that serve to grind grist (the seeds of either wheat or corn) into flour or meal. For a small donation, you can even cart away some of the resulting flour for yourself. Since I’ve been baking bread a bit, I decided to come away with some bread flour, buckwheat, spelt, and some polenta. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

The most interesting thing to me about the mill was how refined the design is. Our guide said that many of the elements for the mill would have been taken from the design published in The Young Mill-wright and Miller’s Guide, first published in 1795 (and available for download at the link!). Its author was Oliver Evans, who received an early (the third, apparently) U.S. patent for an automatic flour mill. It uses the power of water to move grist and grain around through a series of bucket elevators and conveyors. The mechanisms visible at the Bale mill seem rather antiquated to us today, but if one considers the times, they would have been positively cutting edge. The miller, working by himself (perhaps with some “dusties”, or apprentices), could have processed as much as a ton of grain per day. And since lanterns and the like were not allowed because of the risk of explosion, that was just as long as daylight lasted.

It was a lot of fun. If you are in Napa, consider stopping by (and donating money, they don’t receive any state funds anymore). I had a blast.

Like many people, I live in a development with a fairly restrictive HOA. This means that I have to be fairly careful to use largely invisible or stealth antenna setups. Because of a lack of suitable trees on my property, this means that I’ve had fairly compromised setups: I’ve gotten the most use from a simple 40m dipole which probably only averages about six meters in height.

But at least for receive there might be an interesting alternative. PA0RDT has developed a simple active antenna which has intrigued me.

Here is DL1DBC’s excellent description.

This article points out something which may not be entirely obvious until one thinks about it: antennas designed for transmission and reception have different goals. A transmitting antenna is designed for efficiency: to send as much of the input power out as radio energy as possible. In this context, short antennas have a very low radiation resistance, so other losses tend to dominate, and you lose a lot of power as heat. But receive antennas aren’t concerned with efficiency: you really just want to preserve the signal to noise ratio of the incoming signal. As long as the noise generated by the preamplifier is low, it doesn’t actually matter how efficient the antenna is. A short antenna picks up less of the desired signal, but also picks up less of the surrounding noise. So, these antennas can work reasonably well, especially on frequencies where full sized antennas are impractical such as VLF.

PA0RDT has created a simple preamp circuit, including a way to power the preamp through coax so you can easily mount this antenna remotely, say 50 feet from your house, and avoid the electrical noise that dominates many active antenna setups. A very neat solution, and inexpensive.

Some more links: Scott built one, using the more ubiquitous MPF102 and 2N3904 transistors, instead of the recommended but harder to find J310 and 2N5109 transistors.

Peter Marx got an official one that was built by it’s creator, Roelef Bakker:

You can read about Peter’s experience here.

A neat little project. Roelef’s articles (esp. the second one) linked from DL1DBC’s give lots of details. Worth looking at, particularly if you are interested in VLF/HF/shortwave listening.

If you haven’t heard of Theo Jansen and his incredible walking machines, I can’t do them justice with words. Check this out:

His work is accessible from strandbeest.com. I find his creations amazingly cool.

And others do as well, even hamsters (although cats seem less impressed):

But while I’ve found these things fascinating, I didn’t spend a lot of time researching the exact mechanism, nor thought about fabricating my own. And now I don’t need to!

Check out this awesome link to get code to design variants, visualize them, and even OpenSCAD source code go generate actual 3d printed models. That’s just too cool.

In my previous post about the virtues of microcontrollers in homebrew radio, I had a comment from Lee, who mentioned that he operated a LowFer beacon on 187khz. I’ve been passively interested in LF operation under Part 15 rules for a long time, but haven’t really gotten involved with it much. Lee operates from La Crescenta, about 375 miles south of here by my estimate. He made this little video documenting his setup:

Pretty neat!

If you are interested, you can check out the Long Wave Club of America website to learn more about Part 15 operation. If any of my readers have any other up-to-date or interesting LF/MF part 15 links, I’d love to see them added to the comments.

As anyone who has followed my blog for any period of time knows, my interests straddle a lot of different disciplines and hobbies, and often find interesting bits of overlap where I find I can do cool stuff. Two of my favorite hobbies are tinkering with microcontrollers and with the low powered end of amateur radio, what we call “QRP radio”. A few of my previous projects (mostly related to beacons and sending automated Morse signals) have been in the overlap.

In the recent SolderSmoke Podcast #152, Bill, N2CQR recently took a tiny step into that overlap himself. He got himself Arduino, probably the most popular microcontroller platform, and used it to send out Morse, and then control an inexpensive DDS module to serve as a cool little VFO, complete with a rotary encoder to tune and a little LCD module to give the readout. Check it out:

Pretty darned cool. And both economical and useful. Bill was pretty sheepish about this tiny step into the digital world. In the past, he has expressed a greater comfort with radio circuits that are built from discrete components, such as diode mixers constructed with trifilar coils rather than the NE602 integrated circuits. After building radios with just a handful of discrete transistors, using even the simplest microcontroller which has tens of thousands (if not more) can seem like crass extravagance.

But I think he should cut himself some slack. Actually, not just cut himself some slack, but revel in the new direction his hobby has taken him.

In the strictest sense, QRP radio is just any communication which takes place with less than 5 watts of radiated power. But in the broader, more ideological sense, it means constructing radios which are simple, inexpensive and well optimized, without a surplus of useless features of whistles. There is a certain economy of design. When you look at VK3YE’s design for his “Beach 40” DSB rig, you have to marvel at the coolness of the design. Only 8 transistors, nicely documented in his videos. He draws the entire schematic out from memory while on the beach.

If your aesthetic finds this kind of circuit pleasing, the idea of injecting a microcontroller into the mix may seem like drawing telephone wires in the background of the Mona Lisa. But I’d submit that you can find aesthetic uses for microcontrollers in radios, even while being able to appreciate these great discrete, analog designs.

First of all, microcontrollers enable new and useful features. Even the simplest microcontroller can be used to send automated signals for things like QRSS beacons. Hans Summers super low power QRSS beacon can send a nice “shark fin” signal using only three transistors, but if you want to send your callsign, it rapidly becomes more difficult. Sure, you could strap a laptop or desktop computer to generate the modulating signal, but that seems very unaesthetic: hundreds of dollars and tens of watts of compute power just to drive a $5 transmitter with only a few milliwatts of output power? He actually sells a little preprogrammed microcontroller that will do the work, or you could get a K1EL keyer chip, but you are injecting a black box in your design, without any understanding or modifiability. But you could open that box up yourself. For the price of a pizza, you can get a dev board that will hook up to your laptop for programming, pull a few milliwatts of power, and dutifully key your transmitter. Once you get familiar with that kind of work, you can then make an embedded controller using just the raw chips: for instance, I have a few of these Atmel ATTINY85s that I got for $1.15 each (about the same as a 555 timer from our local Radio Shack) lying around for such applications. Add a crystal and two caps (or maybe even do away with the crystal, and use its internal oscillator) and your beacon becomes more flexible and more useful. Want to change the message? Have it send the current temperature or battery voltage as well? Piece of cake.

Second, microcontrollers are the easiest step into understanding computers. When I got my first computer back in 1980, it was already pretty difficult to understand the innermost workings of computers, although I did fairly master most aspects of my Atari 400. With modern desktops or laptops, it seems basically impossible. They have dozens of subsystems, with all sorts of interface and operating systems complexity. But these microcontrollers don’t have any operating systems, and because they are mostly self-contained, the total amount of stuff you have to learn is relatively limited. You tell the microcontroller to flip a voltage from low to high, and it does it, without drivers or intermediate layers. It allows the same kind visceral understanding and exploration that QRP is meant to stimulate.

Thirdly, just like the QRP community, it allows you to participate in a robust, vibrant community of experimenters. The people who are experimenting with Arduinos are kindred spirits to the homebrew radio enthusiasts. They want to take simple, cheap building blocks, and through the power of their understanding construct new, useful and novel applications. Even when their area of interests may differ from ours, you can learn from their skills and draw inspiration from their enthusiasm. And we might even find some potential hams in their ranks.

Don’t feel bad Bill: embrace your new digital skills. The more you goof around, the more applications you’ll find, and the more empowered you’ll be. Computers and QRP can co-exist, and even enhance each other.

Last year, Mark H (who blogs at Eastbay RC got me into the world of building RC airplanes. While my early attempts were limited in their overall successfulness (I demonstrated that I was awfully good at snapping props) I have been keeping up in my interest, and slowly acquiring more tools and hardware. Recently, I’ve had the opportunity to serve as a mentor to some local students and one of them expressed a desire to build his own RC airplane. I had recently been inspired by the great videos by Ed Orsine of the Experimental Airlines Youtube channel, so we decided that constructing an Axon, one of his designs would be a cool design to try:

A lot of it can be constructed with just Dollar tree foam and packing tape. But i recently got access to a 3D printer, and I thought it might be cool to fabricate some parts using that. A good candidate was the motor mount: we wanted the motor to be firmly held, with the appropriate 5 degrees of down angle. I just recently started teaching myself how to design simple parts using OpenSCAD. It bills itself as the “Programmer’s Solid 3D Cad Modeller”, and I couldn’t agree more: it plays right into my skillset. I’ve made an printed a few objects, and for these kind of purely functional 3D objects, I found it to be easy and straightforward.

The basic idea is to make a little plastic bracket that can be mounted at the end of a piece of 5/8″ square wood which is held with mounting tape inside the main fuselage. It took me about twenty minutes to design, and it went through a couple of minor tweaks before it got to it’s final form. And here it is, mounted in my student’s plane:

Mark H. thought it might be of interest to others in the builder/RC community, so I placed it up on thingiverse. Feel free to download it and print it, and let me know of you find it of value.

Motor Mount for the Axon

If all goes as well, we’ll have our first maiden flight of our resulting aircraft, and video and pictures coming soon.

Or not.

I find a lot of editorializing about amateur radio to be, well, curiously off the mark. For instance try checking out Dan, KB6NU’s well meaning article about why you should upgrade to a General. I mean, that’s what the title is: Why you should upgrade to a General. The reason I find this article so astounding is that despite the title, Dan doesn’t actually provide any reasons why you should upgrade to a General. The entire article presumes that whatever reasons you think you have for not upgrading, they aren’t valid. I find that a tiny bit presumptuous. But what’s really odd to me, is that there certainly are reasons to upgrade, he just didn’t bother to tell you any.

The most important difference (which underlies most of the others) is that you have access to spectrum which is unavailable to Technician class licensees. While Technician class licensees have all you can eat privileges above 50Mhz, they are pretty lean on the HF bands. With a General, you get full access to big hunks (but not all) of the spectrum below 6m, and this opens up a bunch of possibilities for communication. From SSB to RTTY to digital modes, you can participate more fully in the broad range of HF activity. The General exam is not a particularly difficult test, and you get a big bang for the buck. I’ve enjoyed WSPR, JT65 and beacon activity. And of course building and QRP operation. And just a lot of shortwave listening too (hey, no license required!)

But perhaps you don’t want to do any of that. Perhaps EMCOMM on VHF+ is your thing. Or maybe you like mountain-topping with 2m SSB. Or microwaves. Or APRS. Or D-Star. Or satellites. Or ATV. Or meteor scatter. Or EME. Or just hiking with an HT, or keeping in touch while on the road. I’m frankly okay with that, and I wish more hams were less concerned about what other people were doing, and simply got on with doing more of what they like in ham radio. Then, we wouldn’t have to scold and cajole people into upgrading: they would either be interested, or not. With the wide variety of interesting activity accessible to hams with Technician class licenses, it does not strain my credulity to think that it might be enough for someone.

When someone asks you why you don’t have your General or Extra class license, ask them how many moonbounce contacts they’ve made. If it is zero, urge them to upgrade their skills.

It is with a sense of deep sadness that I heard of the passing of Ray Harryhausen this morning. If I were to pick two things which influenced me as a kid growing up in the 1960s, it would have been the Apollo Space Program and the films of Ray Harryhausen, although at no time did I ever imagine that my own path would lead me toward a career in the film industry. What I found truly astounding about his work is that (perhaps by necessity) he excelled at all facets of his craft: from sculpting and character design, to animation and to the technical innovation necessary to make stop motion animation plausible in films. His work was always at the cutting edge of what was possible in special effects, and in spite of decades of progress they still remain vibrant films, important for their technical advances, but also because they are just fun to watch. Ray visited Pixar on several occasions, and while I didn’t get much personal time with him, I did get to thank him for his work and for helping to serve as inspiration, and he was kind enough to sign a copy of his book for me.

Pixar gave a nod to Harryhausen by naming a restaurant (curiously a sushi restaurant) after him in our 2001 film, Monsters, Inc. I doubt that there is anyone in the animation or visual effects industry who wouldn’t name Harryhausen as inspiration for what they do. So long Ray, and thanks for the films.