RadioActivity

Life is Good!

Right now, I work the evening shift, I'm always off by midnight. I also have a funky schedule where I'm off Friday nights. Friday nights have become a thing in my house where we have supper together, and watch a family movie. Right now, we're going through the Star Wars series of movies. We just finished Episode III and couple of weeks ago, and Episode IV last friday. The kids have really enjoyed it. Their friends at school talk Star Wars, so it's good for them to have a frame of reference.

After Episode III, everyone went to bed, but me; I was wide awake. I decided to head out to the shack, and was glad I did. I made several contacts very quickly, and came back inside. Soon, I was in the bed, before midnight even! I did discover that my NoGA Twin Tube 80 is out of commission again. I'll have to trouble shoot that later. Winter's over, so 80 is getting noisy again. Last week,

I got my log caught up, and even found time for a few more contacts. Slowly but surely, I'm logging contacts this year. It's got to get out to the shack and enjoy myself. Sometimes I just clean off the desk (there's always a mess). Sometimes, I just check the tuner setting for the W3EDP. Occasionally, I check into the SoCARS net (10360 is my bus ticket number).When school (for me) ends at the end of April, and I switch jobs, my availability to do things will change too. I hope I can go to field day this year!

Life is Good!
On to the next project, I need to get another antenna up. I'm still working on it. When I can. Not stressing out about it. Still working on portable operations. When I can. Like I said, I'm keeping things fun.

Things I've Learned

I Learned some interesting things about JavaScript.
It started with an assignment, and I just had a moment to hack out what it was I was discovering during spring break last week.
First thing:
When using JavaScript, you have to be mindful of your objects. It's very easy to change them, because when you pass an object to a variable, you pass the reference, and not just the values. In other words, the variable is the object, and not a copy of it. I captured this behavior in the screenshot below.

Screen shot of JavaScript and output

Another thing I learned:
Double quotes can bite you. When using a button to perform an action, I was having difficulty passing a parameter to a function. The reason why is because I had to pass the parameter using double quotes (it was a string id of a page element). I discovered that when you create a button, it's best to pass the action of the button in double-quotes. I then had to pass the parameter in single-quotes The code looked something like this:


getComp is a function I wrote to display the attributes of objects, hal2000 is the object whose attributes I will display, and conComp is the id of a p tag in the HTML of the page. I use it to display the object's attributes.
If I left out the 'conComp' part, and modified the function so it wasn't necessary (I hard coded a particular ID in place), then worked just fine. I even tried to single quote the second parameter, but that didn't work. The only way the javascript would run right was to Double quote the whole action parameter, and single quote the string parameter passed to the getComp function.

I'm more than halfway done with the school year and I'm learning a lot!

Valentine

Love is a battlefield
Love hurts
Love me tender
What is love?

I'll tell you what love is.
Love is nothing to take lightly. I don't know how I feel about having a day devoted to "love" and having the primary color for the day be my least favorite (red).
That's right, I don't like Valentine's day because red is my least favorite color.
And it's a made up holiday designed to sell candy and cards.
No card can express how I feel about my wife.
How could it?

it was literal love at first sight. I knew when I saw her that I could marry her and be happy for the rest of my life, or learn to be content as a single man knowing I'd met the one, and said no. It's a strange thing to relate to you.
A better color for today is green,  because green represents growing, and I want to grow.
I don't want to be content with who I am. I'm not worth my wife's affection, she makes me grow. That's what love is.
Growth.
Love always will be. According to the movie "Interstellar" gravity and love are transcendent to this plane of existence. I don't know about gravity, but I do know that love certainly is. It's the one thing God said we will have when we die:

1Co 13:1-13  If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.  (2)  And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.  (3)  If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.  (4)  Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant  (5)  or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;  (6)  it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.  (7)  Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  (8)  Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.  (9)  For we know in part and we prophesy in part,  (10)  but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.  (11)  When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.  (12)  For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.  (13)  So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Love never ends.
One day we'll be faithless (for we shall see), hopeless (because we'll have won our rest), but we'll never be loveless.

You can't be loveless if you're going to be with The Father.

To Do Lists and Task Priorities

Things for me to do:

1. Update everyone on what's going on in my life, I'm busy
2. Finish out the Two articles I have written about antennas
3. Update LOTW to include my final entries from last year, and the QSOs I've had so far this year.
4. Clean out the Ham Shack, and demo it
5. Update my BASIC blog with a few Communion meditations

Update on What's Going On!

Short story: I've been working and going to college full time. Slightly longer story: I've been at Publix now 10 years. Last year I interviewed twice for jobs related to programming. Both were entry level jobs, and I was turned down for both. I believe that my lack of Computer Science degree was the main culprit for why I didn't get the jobs. To help alleviate that, I enrolled in and started taking classes at Florida Polytechnic University. Shortly after my classes began, I was given another interview, this time on my team. I landed the job! They are letting me start the job after the semester ends at the end of April. This has been a long time coming. I'll be a support programmer. I'll be on call, get woken up at Oh Dark:30, but mostly I'll be on dayshift, and I'll have weekends off. It should be great! I also get a raise.
Being back in school has been good for me so far. I'm learning a lot, calculus is fun again, I get to use a bunch of neat stuff, and I've even been given MS Office! Only bad part is that I'm always busy with school work. No real time to do radio, get outside, learn the programming languages I want to learn, etc. I'm busy. Very busy. I often wonder if I'm too busy. So far the answer is "not yet", and that's good. Somethings about being so busy have been a bonus. For instance: My oldest daughter is learning HTML because I have to learn it, and I showed her how it makes web pages work. She's getting a kick out of it. It's nice to discover that we could have this thing in common.
I'll say more soon, namely in my next blog about antennas. All this hard math I'm taking in school should be somewhat useful for building antennas, or at least that's my hope.

Work Parking Lot Portable

Tonight was the NAQCC Sprint, and I decided to attempt participation from the parking lot at work.
I didn't get any QSOs, didn't even manage to get out to the vehicle until after 10:15, but I did hear stations, and I called CQ NA a few times even.


This time, I reinforced an idea I've had in my head a while. If your antenna isn't set up in 5 mins, your risking time wasted. Next portable system will be like that. It may or may not involve a collapsable fishing pole. The other day I tried to set up my SLV in the parking lot, and the pole kept collapsing. I've been rethinking the SLV concept, and might make some modifications in the future. Last night I used my EFHW antenna. I didn't have a way to measure SWR, but every other time I've checked it out, it has been excellent!

I didn't make any calls, but I copied some fairly strong signals, and did manage to capture some spots on the Reverse Beacon Net.
Next time I'll try harder!

 All of these reports were sent from my SW-40 aka "The Killer Watt Radio"
I need a freqmite...
Not bad over all though, for a radio that was putting out less than 1.5 watts!

Testing, Gettin' My Shots, 50 QSOs.

Back to school!
I've already started taking tests, although the test I'm taking right now is a medical one. So far, so good. I also had to get a DTaP vaccine. I impressed the Dr by having all my old shot records. That's my Momma's doin' ya'll. She knows paperwork!

I'm nervous at the prospect of going back to school. I hope the classes I need are still available when my medical paperwork clears with the school. I'll be a full time student again, and it scares me a little. Calculus with analytical geometry here we come!

November tends to be a productive month for me ham radio wise. So far, I have 50 QSOs in the book. If I'm going to catch up to having an average of 1 per day, I'm behind, but seeing as how that I get on the radio in 20min - 1 hour snatches, I'd say I'm doing ok. I had 7 QSOs last night (including at least one new country!), and even got spotted on dx summit! If I had a better CW filter, I'd have more QSOs, I know I heard some DL stations, and a few others way down in the noise. Narrow filters and some headfones would have cleared that problem right up! When school starts, the ham radio stops, so I've got to get some contacts. I've got the next antenna post about the Skeleton sleeve dipole almost finished.
Soon it will be up!

PS,
never put your eggs on the same plate as a where you keep a one year old's eggs, she'll eat them all and just look cute.

Late Night Antenna Math

It's late, and I'm doing math, there ought to be a law :-)

I'm doing this partially because I want to know if I'll be able to study after work in the spring. How does my mind handle math in the wee hours of the night?

I'm not real sure, but I've been having some fun modeling some antennas!

Sometimes it helps me to see what the antenna looks like, then I can write down some numbers, and enter them into XNEC2C.
Main thing I've learned tonight is that you need to make sure you are running your wires the right way when you fiddle with their lengths!
I've included a github gist for this antenna below. 
***EDIT*** It should be noted that units in the file above are in Meters, not feet. Also: I think there's a way to go from XNEC2C to EZNEC, if you know something about the NEC Cards. I don't understand the process though.