Signal to Noise

17:25 Thursday, 23 March 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 59.79°F Pressure: 1018hPa Humidity: 89% Wind: 3.44mph
Words: 882

Both GE Superadios arrived, separately of course. The photos in the listings didn't include the battery compartment, so although both bodies looked in decent shape, and both antennas were present, I wasn't sure if I wouldn't be finding damage from battery leakage in one or both.

It turns out that the SR I did have battery damage. The terminals had corroded away. I didn't open the cabinet, so I don't know how much may extend into the interior of the radio, but the batteries were at the bottom and the radio looked, from the amount and distribution of the dirt and dust still on it, like it was stored upright. It still worked on AC from the cord, so that was encouraging.

The SR II looked slightly better. There are a couple of small blemishes in the speaker grill paint that can probably be touched up, and the chromed plastic tuning knob shows a couple of blemishes in the fine knurled lines around the circumference. Not bad for something over thirty years old!

As it happened, I decided to have both radios refurbished at the same time. I corresponded with Chuck, and he seems to think he can repair the battery terminals. That was important to me, because the interior of Saul Haul is an rf-dirty environment. In a better world, house current would come in two flavors: 110v AC for high power requirements, and low voltage DC for all the rest, like LED lighting.

Compounding the noise problem is the aluminum foil IR barrier on the roof decking, it's also an rf barrier. While FM radio from the local stations works pretty well everywhere in the house if the radio has an antenna, everything else struggles, to include cell phones.

So to do any sort of "band scanning," since it's forbidden to mount anything as hideous as an antenna on your house or in your yard (exceptions for satellite television because they have a better lobbyist), you have to go outside. Which, thanks to Mitzi's new screened enclosure, is a comfortable proposition these days!

I checked out the SR I on AC outside and it worked fine on FM. Since the cord is fairly short, and the only outlet is below the window that has my Ambient weather station in it, on AM it was also picking up noise from the weather station. I think, or hope. We'll know soon I guess. I guess I could have unplugged the weather station too. Oh well.

If you want to find out how well a radio works, one place to start is to see how well it receives local stations, which leads to the question, what are my local stations? You can find the answer at this web site. Enter your Zip Code and you'll get a list of AM and FM stations whose service areas should cover your location. They're in two tables, with FM displayed first. The lists are sorted by predicted signal strength at your location.

Select all the data in the first table (FM), launch a spreadsheet (I used Numbers), and paste the table into the spreadsheet. In Numbers, I created a second table for the AM stations. The links in the station call letters should come over. You can click on those and get data from the FCC about the station, which is pretty cool.

I tried using these tables on my iPad, sitting outside and discovered something I guess I already knew. The touch screen uses capacitance as the touch-sensing mechanism, and an antenna is nothing more than one element of a capacitor (both elements if you include ground). So my radios were picking up all kinds of noise from the iPad's screen.

So print your tables. But first, sort them in ascending or descending order by frequency. I didn't do that, I'd scan the dial, check the freq then look at the table, which involved a lot of visual scanning up and down the table. And the frequency scale on many old radios can be off by a little or a lot, so it helps to scan the radio up and down several kHz or MHz for closely spaced signals to figure out which one is which. You may be picking up signals not on the list, depending on the sensitivity of your radio, or propagation conditions.

If your radio can receive all the signals in the list, then it's at least a decent radio. If it can receive more, then it may be better than decent, or propagation conditions are better than usual. This is the fun of "playing radio!" Which is it? Do I have a "super radio," or is vhf ducting taking place?

Anyway, what I have to do now is go through and populate the lat and long position of all those stations and then calculate the line of sight distance to Saul Hall.

Next little experiment is to take something like this page at Wikipedia, a listing of all the 50kW radio stations in the United States, and see which ones I can receive. Read the legend carefully at the top of the page. Not all 50kW stations broadcast at that power level at night.

Anyway, something to look forward to when you're retired, right? Thanks for dropping by.

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Blood Money

18:52 Thursday, 23 March 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 58.91°F Pressure: 1019hPa Humidity: 91% Wind: 4.61mph
Words: 484

The local blood bank comes to our community regularly and I donate. It's convenient and they give you a $20 gift card! So when they were here on Tuesday, I dropped by after taking Mitzi to the airport and gave a pint.

I poke around eBay, looking at old radios. Sometimes I want to see what they're selling for because there's one up on Goodwill. If there's something I'm interested in, I'll add it to my Watch List. I may not be interested in buying it, I may just be interested in seeing what it sells for.

I guess sellers find out when you've added something they're offering to your Watch List, and sometimes they'll offer you a discount. I've taken advantage on one or two of those, and I suppose that data is shared with sellers as well. Who knows? At any rate, I get a lot of discount offers.

I almost took one for a Sony ICF-7601. The particular listing I'm talking about shows it as an ICF-7601L, but the photos all indicate that it's not an "L" model, which deleted shortwave band 1, and added a longwave band. It's listed at $100, and the seller offered me 15% off. So I searched on recent completed listings and found that that radio often goes for much less than that, with all the accessories!

What piqued my interest was a web site about Sony design, so I'd been thinking about adding a Sony portable to my collection. The 7601 is a fully analog radio, with no digital display or processing of any kind. Mixed reviews. Good to great sensitivity, average selectivity, gets overloaded on an external antenna, not a hall-of-famer by any means, but a decent radio.

So I made a mental note to keep an eye out for one. Not the $85.00 one either.

Well, then I saw a Tecsun R9700DX, and damned if it didn't look just like an ICF-7601!

I don't really fully understand this radio manufacturing business. Who actually designs and builds what, who's an OEM, who just slaps a badge on whatever's on offer. The ICF-7601 was still being sold in some markets well into the 2000s, so someone was manufacturing it for Sony.

Well, to make a long story short, the R9700DX looks like the same design as the ICF-7601. So, it's not a Sony; but it's not 30+ years old either. It's an all analog radio that gets the same kind of marks the 7601 seemed to get. It's small, not tiny like a C.Crane Skywave, has an illuminated band/frequency display and it's $59 at Amazon.

That's not the lowest price it's been offered at Amazon either. It had recently been sold for ~$45, so $59 wasn't exactly a deal.

But...

I did have that $20 Amazon gift card. Blood money.

$43.85 delivered. Should be here tomorrow.

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Death of DP Review

20:12 Thursday, 23 March 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 59.31°F Pressure: 1020hPa Humidity: 91% Wind: 4.61mph
Words: 140

So Amazon's killing DP Review. Unsurprised. Pretty stupid taking down the site though.

I haven't been spending much time there lately, so maybe that's a clue, I don't know. I did go to my profile and looked through all my bookmarked posts in the forums. I downloaded web archives of the pages I thought were useful.

Then I went to the micro four-thirds forum and checked the list of most-bookmarked posts to see if I had missed something that might be useful. I downloaded web archives of a couple of those as well.

Everything that has a beginning has an end. Yours and mine is coming too. (Are? Verb agreement?) Until then, we have web archives.

(FWIW, I'm killing time waiting for a crew to come insulate our garage attic. Gate has notified me they're on the way.)

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Spice of Life

07:23 Saturday, 23 March 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 63.37°F Pressure: 1002hPa Humidity: 94% Wind: 5.75mph
Words: 557

The E-PL7 is inbound and should be here on Monday. Caitie was here the other day, and we were looking at Canon mirrorless cameras. She does some semi-professional work as an adjunct to her salon work. She's had a couple of product promotion shoots for, I think, an advertising firm. They don't pay much, but she enjoys the work.

I'd given her my E-M10 Mk2 over a year ago and encouraged her to shoot with it and find out what it can do. But film, and then medium format film and now full-frame digital have all turned her head and she's never, to my knowledge, done very much with little Oly. I offered to buy it back from her to help pay for a Canon body, but she said she'd return it to me.

I don't need the 10, but I'd like to have it again. I don't really have shelf space for it, but I can make room if I have to.

The biggest thing I'm missing in my photographic endeavors is subjects. And that's mostly because I'm kind of lazy. Well, not "kind of," I'm just lazy. If we go out somewhere, I bring a camera because there'll be something different to shoot. But I don't go out just to shoot. I should probably change that.

When I was single, I went out a lot more socially. It's important to add that we didn't have COVID back then either. I'd much rather risk second-hand smoke at trivia than COVID, though I suppose a case could be made that they might be equally risky. And I lived in a place that offered a lot of interesting subjects. Here I live in an "interest" desert. A sterile void of suburban conformity. I can get out to the kayak launch point and do some wetlands and birds and what have you, and I should do that more often, but I like shooting other stuff too.

I guess I'm just talking to myself, trying to convince myself to get out of this neighborhood and bring a camera. The thing is, you have to go pretty far, as Nocatee is pretty much entirely devoid of interest, unless you're looking to shoot real estate marketing brochures. I should probably look for the absurdity. I usually like to look for wear, or decay, something that indicates the passage of time, which is, I suppose, a kind of story-telling. There is a lot of absurdity here. But that's in your face everywhere these days. Not sure I need to capture it in images.

Anyway, in the car in a little while to bring Mitzi and Judy to the airport. Mitzi is accompanying Judy back to New York because Judy has some understandable anxiety at the moment. They're going to wheel her through the airport to avoid the risk of a tumble. She's mobile again, but it's likely a few more weeks before her pelvis is completely healed, and it'll never be especially durable anyway.

Mitzi will stay with Judy for a week, and so I'll have the car and I should probably take advantage of that to get out of here and do something different.

We'll see. I'd say I'm a "creature of habit," and there is something to that. But mostly I think I'm just lazy.

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Partial Rainbow

09:01 Saturday, 23 March 2024

Current Wx: Temp: 64.33°F Pressure: 1004hPa Humidity: 94% Wind: 5.75mph
Words: 37

Not expecting much, I carried the silver E-PL7 with the 45mm/f1.8 mounted just for something different. Rainbow was a pleasant surprise.

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Thinking Out Loud

06:44 Sunday, 23 March 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 53.08°F Pressure: 1021hPa Humidity: 75% Wind: 0mph
Words: 441

Just to close yesterday's loop, Generac seems to have a solution similar to what I described yesterday. I haven't studied it closely, but it looked as though its PWRCell 2 system, minus the PV array, may be what we're looking for at Winterfell. More to follow.

This is about Captain's Log.

My tag list is growing long. It's not unwieldy yet, but it will be soon. I'm thinking about establishing a two-tiered tag system, with tier one being an overall category-type tag and tier-two being more specific. An agent for each tier-one tag would gather entries and sort them by tier-two tags.

Out of curiosity, I wanted to see what EagleFiler did with tags. It doesn't appear too sophisticated. I think the app relies on it Spotlight extension to index everything.

But that brought to mind the Johnny Decimal System. I was intrigued by it some time ago when Jack Baty mentioned it. So before I go too far in trying to establish a two-tiered tag system (the alliteration appeal notwithstanding), I should probably spend some time looking into JDS, as it may have some value in my application.

Of course, this raises questions about the value and scope the entire effort. I don't think I'm trying to create a "life-streams" solution a la Gelernter, though the resemblance is there. (Wow. Didn't know what right-wing nutjob he is.)

I'm also not trying to do anything as grandiose as TheBrain.

I'm not trying to manufacture "insight" here. I just want to be able to find stuff. And by "stuff," I mean things that I encounter that seem like they might be worth recalling someday.

Of course, this is problematic as well. As a retiree with too much time on his hands, perhaps too many things seem "worth recalling," which I will inevitably never revisit again. I have a cabinet in my garage full of little electronics kits that will probably have to assemble themselves someday.

I'm optimistic that the project at Winterfell will keep me somewhat focused, but will nevertheless involve a host of details and minutiae where the log may be useful. At least until we've built whatever it is we think we'll need.

A certain amount of yak-shaving is probably inevitable, but it feels like this tag effort might become that. Perhaps the solution isn't tags, or something as sophisticated as JDS, but good descriptive entry titles, and notes in the text with sufficient keywords to surface in an ordinary search. A little more time and effort at the moment of capture, and then during review.

That seems to feel right.

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