FY 2019 budget requests shutdown of NIST time stations

The natural "life-cycle" of any community like that seems to basically come in three stages, the first stage is you have the bleeding-edge adopters i.e. when CB radio or Usenet was new only people with $$$ and a fair amount of technical skill could access it.

Then there's the "Golden Age" where the barriers to entry are a bit lower, the medium becomes a bit more popular, but not popular enough such that you have a lot of troublemakers spoiling the fun.

Then comes the decline where the barriers to entry drop further still, meanwhile word gets out to the masses about all the "cool stuff" happening there and everybody wants a piece of the action. The "cool people" mostly get run out by hacks, trolls, weirdos, and troublemakers.

It happened with CB radio in the US. Then Usenet. Then MySpace/Frienster. Internet dating sites. And is currently happening with Facebook and Twitter.

That is very true!

The US is so car-centric and getting a license to drive so trivial that you really have to put in an enormous amount of effort most places to actually get your license pulled for any significant amount of time. Like seriously injure or kill someone or multiple drunk driving offenses, eventually that will get the law around to it.

If you have $$$ it's almost impossible to not get someone to sell you car insurance at some price, just on property damage numbers alone. If you've caused seven wrecks and a million in damage someone will still probably insure you (at some price.)

In my state there's a "high risk" pool insurance for drivers who are so dangerous that no insurance company will take them on the open market, they get plunked into a pool of junky fly-by-night insurance carriers who agree to be in the pool as terms of doing business in the state, and they pay a very high rate but they do get insured again. You don't wanna have a wreck with one of these people because their junky policy holder _really_ hates to pay out.

IMO the reason all-male "secret societies" like the Freemasons etc. were created, with all those secret rites and initiations, was not because they hated women or were up to anything particularly egregiously "bad" but as a pre-emptive measure to attempt to prevent the community from declining into the third stage. That is to say it was more aimed at screening out men who were troublemakers or not serious about contributing something of value.

John Larkin wrote

You know GlowBallWorming will melt all that snow soon right? I was reading this week that hey expect Switzerland to be snow free soon. That will likely kill tourism there.

bitrex wrote

I still have an old Florida driving license, took an hour to get.

When back here I changed it for a Dutch one.

In all those years I only made one dent.... in neighbors car, he was parking it on my ground and I could not get out.

Renewed it last year, no problem.

bitrex

It is very quiet here on CB these days, I was an early CBer, got pulled over in the middle of the night by the Amsterdam police once, when we were using walky-talky (spelling?) Walkie-talkies, antenna sticking out of the car window, they thought we were working on a robbery or something... Got the sets back later. There were big meetings in Amsterdam, lots of people, cool! Bulletin boards... All gone. I wrote packet software for it, build some hardware, file transfers, a lot of fun, big antenna on the car...

all the way down, baycom packet radio modem card... TCM3105 1200 Bd modem chip.

My first QSO on what was it 7 MHz was also without license, double sideband, but with more power than most ever had :-) They were close though... Street corner...

I only got the full license to experiment really, seemed a fair thing to do. Was there first, left first.. passed.

The bad thing is that when I did the exam it was free once you got your license, now they want 25 Euro (or something) administration costs from me every year...

Not fair play...

That may have been by design, or maybe the groups with those rules were the only ones that survived for long.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

Last season, Squaw was open through July.

Here's me skiing at Sugar Bowl, July 4, 2011.

and other people.

800 inches of snow is a pretty good year up there. There are snowpack records going back into the 1800s, and there is no big long-term trend.

I'm forcing myself to get into shape for November. Our new company location encourages hill climbing, enforced exercize.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

John Larkin

Yea, seems climate change works the opposite way there, things getting colder?

Tough looking, I tell you I have never been on skies in my life, and it does not attract me at all. Many people here go on winter-holiday to Switzerland, many come back with broken bones, the son of the previous queen died after getting hit by an avalanche there.

I do some biking, and that is is, worked the garden for a large part of the day. Used to swim a lot in the past.

Must be warm there :-) Could be a reason to go for some...

Maybe to get your mind of 'tronix doing some sports may actually help to get ideas.

But I do think that much of that sports stuff that gets promoted as 'good for your health' is just bull.

You can get surplus rubidium references for a hundred bucks or so on eBay, and those are dramatically more accurate than WWV/WWVH except at very long time scales or very short ground-wave propagation distances.

GPS-disciplined oscillators are noisier but have better long-term accuracy. WWV/WWVH do encode stuff like leap seconds etc., which could be handy if you have the right hardware.

I'd be okay with losing WWV/WWVH, but would much prefer to keep WWVB.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

http://electrooptical.net 
http://hobbs-eo.com

It's like being a bird, riding the rolling slopes like a hawk rides the air. I've learned a lot from skiing, about danger and commitment. Stand at the top of that mountain as long as you want, but when you push off, go for it totally.

The death rate is low, below 1 PPM/day. Stay away from trees and it's much lower.

I don't enjoy exercize as such, but it certainly gives me more ideas and more energy. I park in the morning in a place that forces me to hike up to my car to get home.

Sitting all day and clicking a mouse is certainly bad for your body and brain.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

Fun: trigger a scope from one and look at the rise of another at, say,

5 ns/cm. Check that a few times per hour.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

I have a Playboy magazine from 1978, the year I was born. Aside from the women in looking a lot more like women do in the real world and not whatever robot CGI creations that started getting put in men's magazines in the 1990s, it's full of ads for CB radios.

The hardware got cheap and they started selling it to the "lowbrow" crowd, as it were...

this is a public service announcement from Boston, MA on the importance of exercise:

I don't know. I checked for Jordi Puig-Suari on QRZ.com and found nothing. Robert J. Twiggs is KE6QMD. I found 6 licensees named John Hines and could not tell which one ran the project for NASA. So, we have one non-ham, one ham, and one unknown.

There have been about 800 cubesats and nanosats launched so far. One major incentive to having the project revolve around ham radio is access to ham radio frequencies, which simply requires coordination with one of the satellite groups, and is much less difficult than trying to obtain commercial satellite frequencies. It's also much easier to obtain practical hands on RF experience via ham radio than through a commercial project. In my limited experience, most of the technical people in the RF field held ham radio licenses, although many were inactive. I was inactive for about 12 years while I was doing marine radio design. After 8+ hrs/day of radio, the last thing I needed was more radio when I arrived home.

For example, the US Naval Academy chose to use ham radio frequencies instead of military frequencies: Incidentally, the current popular satellite frequencies are in the X-band region (10.0-10.5GHz for ham radio).

Most members of the Metricom/Ricochet engineering team were hams, who used ham radio frequencies to prototype their early systems. I've attended 3 or 4 presentations on cubesats, but since they were all sponsored by ham radio groups, the presenter was always a ham.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

I dug a bit deeper and am fairly sure that John W. Hines is KG7HTL. So, of the early cubesat pioneers, we have 2 hams and 1 non-ham.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

This should offer a clue as to the use of ham radio in cubesats: The bands most heavily utilized are either wholly or partly ham radio allocations: VHF (145-146 MHz) UHF (536-438 MHz) S band (2.4 GHz is ham radio) X band (10.0-10.5) is ham radio)

The remaining heavily used band, UHF (400-402, 425MHz) is a federal allocation.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

Phil Hobbs

The problem with the Rub-it-in set (I have one) is that it takes a lot of power (to heat the oven in it). Also warming up time is maybe up to a few minutes. Not very usable for portable stuff.