Stuff & Nonsense is a catch-all category for random stuff that doesn’t deserve a complete blog entry accumulated into a disorganized mess and put up here because I’m bored and/or feel guilty about not having posted anything recently.
Proposed Amateur Radio Licensing Changes Are Prelude to Apocalypse
The ARRL submitted a petition to the FCC to expand privileges for Technician class license holders on the HF bands and this will quickly usher in the end of the world as we know it. Or at least according to the curmudgeons over at QRZ and some of the other amateur radio forums. It isn’t, of course. It will probably have little or no effect at all on anything. Despite what the ARRL seems to believe, huge numbers of Technician licensees are not desperate to get on the HF frequencies so even if they did have access to them they wouldn’t use them.
The Move
Moving my stuff from the office to the basement is coming along far more slowly than I’d like because of various reasons. But mostly because I’m in no great rush to get it done and a lot of prep work has to be done before I can actually start moving things.
Things look a bit better down there, though. I’ve moved a ton of junk out of there and I’ve been working on prepping the walls for painting.
This house was built in two parts. The original house was built in the 1930s, and a large living room with a fireplace and full basement under it was added in the 1980s. The place where I’m moving is part of the old house, and, the 75+ year old basement walls aren’t exactly very attractive. So I’ve been patching and scraping and prepping for paint. I’m hoping to finally get some painting done this weekend. Once I get that done I can start re-wiring that area to put in about a dozen 120V electrical outlets and at least one 240V line. There is already electrical wiring there, but the outlets are located in inconvenient places. The wiring in the office will be left alone except for the 240V line. We’ll disconnect that one just so no one ends up trying to hammer a 120V plug into that 240V outlet.
Later: Got that one wall finished finally. I didn’t think I was ever going to get it done. It’s the worst of the bunch and the rest will come along more easily. They just need to be scraped down and painted. Just getting that one done makes a huge difference.
Nice to see some progress down there after all of the delays. I don’t have any set schedule for making the move. Whenever it gets done, it gets done. And there is still a ton of my son’s old equipment to get out of that area. I had to start piling his stuff in my woodshop just so I could get at this wall and it’s really starting to clutter up the rest of the basement as well. He’s moving it as he gets time, but it’s a slow process
And while I’m on the subject of amateur radio, I had to take down my dipole antenna because one leg ran to a neighbor’s tree and that house just sold so I figured I’d better get the antenna down before the new owner shows up and wonders if I’m trying to electrocute his tree or something. Next time I see my other neighbor I need to ask him if I can run it to his tree. He probably won’t have a problem with it. He’s a radio geek too, but with CB and FRS stuff.
I’m not off the air. I still have the Comet antenna up, but it isn’t exactly very good. About the only thing it’s good for is high efficiency digital modes like JS8Call and FT8 and, if propagation conditions are good, PSK. And while it’s rated for 250 watts I’ve been hearing from people that when using digital you really shouldn’t put more than 100 watts into it, so I can forget about using my amplifiers.
Well, not that I ever use the amplifiers anyway. The tube amp hasn’t been fired up since 2013 and the other amp hasn’t been used in over a year. Should probably sell at least the tube amp one of these days.
I also need to get that GAP Titan antenna up finally! That poor thing has been laying outside waiting to be set up for way, way too long now.
Speaking of the neighbor’s house – When it first went up for sale we seriously considered buying it. It is an old house, easily as old as ours, and has never been well maintained or updated. We figured it was worth maybe $50,000 at the most, and if that’s what they’d asked, we probably would have bought it. The plan was to tear down the existing house because it is essentially worthless without about $40K worth of work, wait a few years and then put up 1,500 sq ft single level house for me and MrsGF when we were ready to downsize, and then sell this place.
But they were asking $80,000 for that place which was way, way too much, and they didn’t want to budge on the price. And there were some issues with the title of the house too. The owners had defaulted, gone into bankruptcy, and didn’t even know who actually held the mortgage on the place because that had changed hands. They were making payments to someone, somewhere, but didn’t actually own the place any more and didn’t know exactly who did, and, well, that was a mess I didn’t want to get involved with either.
So it sold now. For $50K. Sigh… To a house flipper. Oh, goodie…
Water Water Everywhere
We had near records amounts of snow in February, then rain, then more snow, followed by an abrupt jump in temperature up to 50 degrees, so, well, flooding. The state was under an emergency declaration for quite a while because of flooding. Low lying areas and and people along rivers were hit hard. The biggest problem was ice damming. When the ice started to break up and then we got the rain, the ice jammed up under bridges, culverts, etc. causing widespread flooding.
Chinese Pork Smuggling
The US Customs Service intercepted a shipment of about one million pounds of pork in more than 50 shipping containers that someone was trying to smuggle into a New Jersey port. The stuff was packed into many different types of packaging, including ramen noodle boxes and Tide detergent containers, and sometimes just shoved into spaces in between other products packed into the containers.
The big fear is African Swine Fever, of course, which is sweeping through China. While ASF doesn’t harm human beings, it is virtually 100% fatal for pigs and there is no treatment or vaccine. The only way to control outbreaks is to try to prevent the virus from spreading with quarantines and killing infected swine. Needless to say the US would very much like to keep ASF out of the country, but I suspect it’s only a matter of time before we start having problems with it too.
The question is why would anyone want to smuggle large amounts of Chinese pork into the US in the first place? There is little or no demand for imported pork in the US. We produce more than enough of it ourselves, and it’s almost ridiculously cheap here. How in the world were they expecting to make any money from smuggling a product into the US that we already have a surplus of and is at almost record low prices?
Anyway, that’s it for now. MrsGF and I are working out plans for what we’re going to plant this coming season and considering making some major changes to the landscaping, so we’ll see what comes of that. We’re starting to see things popping up out of the ground already. The chives are up, some of the early spring flowers are starting to pop up as well. The prep work in the basement goes on. Hopefully in a short time I’ll be able to get the bicycle back out on the road.
grouchyfarmer 