Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘ham radio’

Dah-Dit! Music for Ham Radio

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on December 25, 2007| Leave a Comment »

Today’s musical explorations rediscovered the Ham Band, with their charming album “Seek You”,, as Mike wanted it on his iPod. You can buy and download the album directly. Soulful ballads of “radio widows”, odes to climbing the antenna towers for maintenance, following the greyline, and more. Folk-country style mostly, with brief forays into rock.

Looking for the Ham Band, though, dimly remembered from some web surfing a year or so ago, we found the Iowa City Amateur Radio Club, which maintains a list of ham radio related music. The real gem there is CQ Serenade (mp3), a 1950’s big-band salute to the beat. As the site explains,

Maurice Durieux, VE2QS, an orchestra conductor for Radio Canada, assisted by F9KT, composed [CQ Serenade] in the early 1950’s. Durieux and Georges Brewer, then VE2BR, later wrote the English language version that appears here, and songstress Joyce Hahn (a stunningly talented vocalist), accompanied by Durieux’s orchestra, recorded it. It was available on 45-RPM records under the rather appropriate “QSO Records” label.

Best 73, enjoy!
KF6NBZ

Advertisement

Read Full Post »

Quick Quake Quack

Posted in activism, earthquake, ham radio, public service, real life, tagged , , , , on November 1, 2007| Leave a Comment »

For the curious, and those considering joining the happy-go-lucky ranks of amateur radio volunteers, here are 15 minutes of live SVECS repeater audio from the October 30th earthquake. One of the SVECS (Silicon Valley Emergency Communication Services) members was doing audio capture of something unrelated when the quake hit, and switched his input to get the repeater traffic. Note that I’m not on there; the traffic is local AEC’s, Area Emergency Coordinators, checking in to pass on reports overall from local nets like SPECS (Southern Peninsula Emergency Communication Services) or Sunnyvale ARES.

If this had been a serious earthquake, the dialogue would have been much more focused, and possibly somewhat grim. As it is, it’s a nice sample of folks following the standard procedures: creating a net, Net Control taking damage reports, etc. Mike and I self-activated, checked into the Sunnyvale SARES/SPECS network, and went to the main clubhouse to set up our comm station in case of damage here in our housing complex. It was a nice test run of our own procedures, and we found some things that need work– such as someone moving the Damage Report packets to an unknown location, and the portable antenna being moved to where debris would have hampered access to it in a stronger quake.

Read Full Post »

Dawn: Flea Market!

Posted in event, ham radio, tagged , on September 7, 2007| Leave a Comment »

We'll be setting up at the Foothill^H Onizuka^H DeAnza ham radio flea market, as part of an ongoing decrufification effort, including such festive riches as a double-NIC 1999 eMachine 500 running a clean OpenBSD install, a 27″ color TV owned by not one but TWO famous sysadmins, and MOAR!

Come on down. Say hi. Buy crap, err, stuff, err TREASURE, that's it, TREASURE. Cheep. Technical books. Serial cables. Null modem adaptors. A SPARC Ultra something or other. A genuine IBM Selectric typewriter, with multiple type ballz. Did I say TREASURE enuf yet?

Oh, and I'll be selling, and signing, copies of TPOSANA 2nd Edition at a hefty discount, so come on down for that too!

TREASURE!!!! (No, rly!)

Read Full Post »

Charming Domestic Scenes of the 21st Century

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on January 1, 2001| Leave a Comment »

The virtual camera pans across a balcony of potted plants in assorted
stages of winter dormancy. Passing through the glass doors into the
kitchen, it makes a sharp turn around the vase holding magenta
carnations and hovers briefly over a tabletop strewn with periodicals
ranging from Science News to Nuts & Volts, QST to Silicon Valley
Business Ink.

Our invisible point of view rotates and moves forward into the living
room, where cats and laptops recline seemingly at random on horizontal
surfaces of varying heights. It pauses before the open doors of a tall
cabinet, and focuses on a small personal shortwave receiver almost old
enough to drive. The old-fashioned LCD readout shows 5000 khz.

As the warm tones of WWV reach “8 hours universal coordinated time”, a
nerdy couple are kissing on the couch, breaking off with a wide smile.

Happy New Millennium!!

Cheers,
Strata & Mike

PS- If this sounds totally hopeless to you, we are probably too weird to
become good friends of yours, but we’ll say hi at parties. 🙂

Read Full Post »