dcn. jquinby's scribbles

I think I finally have my head around most of CQRLOG, and especially its integration with LoTW. Parts of the UI had baffled me, but someone on /r/amateurradio set me straight and I think I’m good to go. I can definitely see how the hooks into fldigi will be useful once I get into digitial modes.

Had a chance to run the local ARES net last night, which is always a gas. Not nearly as nerve-wracking as the first time. Twenty-nine stations participated, which is pretty good. No major errors, except realizing afterward that I probably didn’t ID as frequently as I needed to. Will definitely have to keep one eye on the clock, or just follow along with the repeater when it IDs.

In other hobby news: the bees are getting out and about on our recent warm days. It looks like both colonies came through the winter well, which is a good sign. It looks like we’re headed for another cool spell, but I’ll be getting an order in for frames and foundation anyway. They’re working something - I saw white-gray and reddish pollen coming in. Dandelions are starting to show up, but not seeing much yellow stuff come in. The grey is probably early maples. The red is likely henbit, but none of the henbit on our property is blooming yet as far as I can tell. As usual with bees: who knows? Probably somewhere else.

During the Skywarn classes, the trainer mentioned that we our current El Nino pattern portended a mild winter followed by active spring weather. Active in terms of convective weather, which is what we were learning to identify and report. I am hoping this sets us up for a repeat of 2013-2014, which was an epic year in terms of honey production. I pulled nearly 8 gallons out of a single colony and got fooled into thinking it would like that every year. They showed me.

I significantly adjusted the 20m legs and re-tied them so that they’re not quite on the same plane as the 40m, hoping to reduce any interaction. Success! The radio is showing under 1.5 across the band, even before letting the ATU do it’s thing. I seem to be good for 40, 20, and 15m. I’ll probably add 10m for the sake of completeness and then lay off multiple trips to the attic while I’m ahead. Now it’s time to nerve up and actually key the mic a few times. O_o

…at least according to the meters. After some sanity checking from a couple of youtube videos and the Amateur radio subreddit, I shortened both legs by about 5" and now have a good, sub 1.5 SWR across 40m! Frustrating though it was at first, I learned the process of tuning/pruning, which should be useful for future antenna work. If I can pick up an inexpensive SWR meter at a hamfest, I probably will, but the meter in the radio is going to suffice for now.

Will work to re-add the 20m legs soon, but not right now. I’m done with the attic for a day or two.

The ham tickets are frequently described as a license to learn. The impatient guy in me just wants everything to work. On the other hand, trying, failing, and getting better is one of the actual points of the hobby and it’s good to be regularly reminded.

It turns out that my dipoles are wonkier than I thought. Possibly way wonkier. I finally figured out how to effectively use the SWR meter built into the FT-450D and both the 40m and 20m antennas are reading too short. At the low ends of the bands, the readings are pretty good. At the top end, they’re off the chart, which is not good at all.

How did I finally get an accurate reading? A commonly suggested setting for operators using external tuners is to map the C.S button onto the front to the SWR setting. Once this is done, pressing C.S will generate a 10 watt CW tone for as long you hold it down. The procedure is covered on page 16 of the fine manual, by the way. This kick-starts the external tuner and you’re off to the races. In my case, the constant signal on the internal SWR meter turned out to be enough for me to see that things were not optimal at all.

This is easily fixed, in principle, by splicing some more wire into them and then trimming back as appropriate. In practice, it’s not so simple, since it means returning to the attic and we all know how much fun that is. In any case, another possible culprit is an anti-static-electricity component built in to the Alpha Delta center insulator. I found some information on a forum thread that said it could make tuning screwy, and as the antenna is basically indoors, it’s probably not necessary. I can yank it easily enough to see if it makes a difference.

So I learned more about the radio, my antennas, and the rudiments of tuning them. I’ll call that a win.

Reviewing the FT450 docs and scrounging around online, I think the SWR readings for the 40/15 and 20 meter elements are good, and if not good, at least acceptable. I tried to make contact another station on 20m yesterday, but the band was fading fast and he lost me in the noise. Band conditions seem to be pretty good in the morning and mid-day hours, which are unfortunately when I also have to work. If I can pull it off without crashing through the ceiling again (since the most recent sheetrock repair is actually still drying as a type this), I’ll carefully add elements for 10m as well. That should about do it for the time being. Then it’s just a matter of, you know, actually making some contacts.

I had the radio connected to an old and pretty flaky Macbook for rig control. It worked, but was sort of meh. Probably a little more interesting when running stuff like fldigi, so a Signalink is probably in my future.

…in “Amateur Radio.” After a couple decades of putting it off, I got my Tech and General licenses this past summer.

Current gear:

• Yaesu FT-60R HT
• Yaesu FT-450D
• Kenwood TM-V71A
• Uniden BCD396XT scanner
• Mobilink TNC2
• Elk 2M/440
• Diamond NR770HN (for mobile work)
• Diamond SRH77CA
• Homebrew 40m dipole

The FT-60R goes with me when I fly. I also use it with the Elk for working satellites and the APRS digipeater on the ISS. When I’m not working satellites (which is not often, because it’s cold outside right now), the Elk sits up high in my office feeding the scanner. It works extremely well for both applications.

Satellites are a ball to work, by the way. I’m just a wimp when it comes to the cold. My first attempt to hit the UHF digipeater on the ISS made it into one of KG4AKV’s Space Comm videos.

The TM-V71A resides in my office most of the time, though my truck is wired up appropriately for a mobile installation as well (hence the mobile Diamond antenna). When it’s set up at home, the Kenwood feeds an Ed Fong Dual-band J-pole in the attic. I run an RF->IS iGate most of the time via Xastir on one band; the other VFO scans local repeaters. I took the NWS Skywarn classes, then joined the local club and ARES groups to help out during the bad weather (read: tornado) season.

I play around a (very) little bit with SDR in Linux, generally for decoding digital stuff on FM.

The HF rig is new. For the dipole, I picked up an Alpha Delta center insulator, some good coax, and a big roll of wire. Owing to the peculiarities of our property, it also has to live in the attic for the time being. My first contact was about 500-some-odd miles away, so it seems to be working pretty well. I want to get some more contacts under my belt and then start looking into some of the digital HF modes.

Until I put my foot through our bedroom ceiling fooling around with it. In any event, my attempts to add 20m elements haven’t yielded a whole lot of luck quite yet. I probably need to invest in an SWR meter to make sure things are tuned correctly. As it happens, the local club meets in a couple of days. I’ll ask around and see if anyone has one they’d like to sell. I tried to hand-build my first satellite antenna awhile back and could have used one then, too.

In reality, Advent is a preparation for the threefold coming of Christ; that is, it is commemorative of His historical coming in time, it prepares for His mystical coming into the hearts of men now, in the immediate present, and it looks forward to His final coming in the general judgement at the end of the world. \ — With Christ Through The Year, Bernard Strasser, O.S.B.

Complaints about the over-commercialization of Christmas go back at least as far as Lucy’s sotto voce revelation to Charlie Brown about the “big eastern syndicate” that was running the whole racket. Annual complaints about Yule-creep have become an annual tradition unto themselves. It wouldn’t be Fall without that creeping tension as everyone waits for the first note of Christmas music to show up, like the first swallow returning to San Juan Capistrano (though in point of fact, they’re actually hitting the road for Argentina in October).

All eyes are peeled for the first sighting of decorations for sale, reliably in the larger craft and hobby stores around Labor Day. Strings of orange lights are now par for the course in Halloween decorating, and forget about Thanksgiving. If you take part in any of the local Turkey Trot 5Ks on Thanksgiving morning, you’re as likely to see as many people dressed as elves and reindeer as you are pilgrims and Indians.

So it’s no wonder that by Christmas afternoon most everyone is done with a capital D. Box it up and get it out of here so we can at least sip our New Year’s cocktails in peace before grunting our way through the interminable grayness of JanuFebruMarch.

The antidote to the three month Blitzenkrieg is Advent. Dr. Russell Moore recently wrote about this recently in a piece on Christmas carols generally and hymnody in particular. The opening anecdote:

This guy started by lampooning one pop singer’s Christmas album, and I found myself smiling in agreement on how awful it is. But then he went on to say that he hated Christmas music across the board. That’s when I started to feel as though I might be in the presence of the Grinch. But then this man explained why he found the music so bad. It wasn’t just that it was cloying. It’s that it was boring.

“Christmas is boring because there’s no narrative tension,” he said. “It’s like reading a book with no conflict.”

Now he had my attention.

The narrative tension comment caught my eye. If ever a moment was pregnant (pun intended) with narrative tension, it’s the mystery of the Incarnation, that moment when the Author of the story shows up in its very pages to show the other characters a way out. It’s simultaneously the climax and opening the greatest story that ever was. To put it in Shakespearean terms: we’re reading Act III, the traditional high point of action in his plays, over and over without participating in either the rising tension of Acts I and II or the denouement of Acts IV and V. We’d get pretty sick of Hamlet if we only watched him stabbing Polonius over and over.

If Christmas lacks narrative tension, if it feels incomplete or somehow inauthentic, one response is to restore it to its proper context within the larger drama. Not only can we approach the day itself refreshed, the pent-up joy of preparation demands more than a single day from us. How much extra time? Would twelve days do it? The Church in her wisdom seems to think so.

The days are shorter and the weather (at least in this part of the world) tends to be less agreeable. We owe it to ourselves - our sanity if no other reason - to take time, slow down, and enjoy the meditative and, yes, penitential relief that Advent offers. We diminish the joy of Christmas not a single bit by taking time to prepare, slowly if possible, but at least mindfully if not. This is written, incidentally, not in a silent fortress of Christmas rectitude. We’re playing the music here, too, and goodness knows that the Christmas cookies from Trader Joe’s showed up about a week ago.

The point is that a little leavening goes a long way.

I finished Mary Eberstadt’s It’s Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies last night. It probably seems pretty easy - maybe laughably easy - to dismiss Christians who see themselves under attack as just the latest round of election-year fearmongering. There they go again, with the culture war stuff, and so on. I believe Eberstadt lays out a pretty good argument in response, heavily footnoted with references and citations:

Professed belief can be professionally dangerous, depending on where you work. It can be existentially threatening, if you happen to live in parts of the middle east. If you’re an organization providing charitable services, you may be put of business soon. A parallel between some of today’s discourse and the witch-hunting, red-baiting, and daycare-abuse hysterias of the past is slowly becoming clear.

I have to confess at the outset that I am probably not the intended audience of the book. The court cases, cultural touchstones, and news recaps are featured heavily in most of my daily current-events reading.

I have just finished reading R.R. Reno’s Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society, and will probably be chewing on its thesis for some time to come. Something has gone deeply, fundamentally askew in American society, but it wasn’t until I read through his assessment of meritocracy replacing the democratic in fits and starts that things began to snap into place.

Those who look to place his book into quick service of either liberal or conservative viewpoints are likely to be disappointed. Progressive liberalism may take the lion’s share of space, but conservative libertarianism turns out to be not too far removed - both share the same telos: man as the measure of all things, utility, and radical plasticity.

Both claim large portions of the one-percenter crowd, and both fall disproportionately hard on the lower and middle classes.

A careful, humane argument is laid out for Christians remaining as active leavening in society, rather than withdrawing from the public square. Whether this is a meant as a rebuttal of the so-called Benedict Option remains to be seen, though I’d be willing to bet that the sort of intentionally orthodox Christian communities described in Rod Dreher’s writings could serve as exactly the sort of leaven, salt, and light that Reno describes (and Christ demands).

The haves: one-percenters who have the social capital, wealth, and opportunities to navigate and prosper in an increasingly rootless, global economy. The have-nots: everyone else, trying to live out the American dream of general prosperity and self-fulfillment. Compare the middle-class jobs of our parent’s generation to those of today - many have benefited from worldwide productivity and falling prices of goods and services. No one can seriously argue against the technical progress the world has seen. This progress, though, seems to have come at a substantial price, a bill that is being presented over the course of a couple of generations.

Cultural values that have generally worked to preserve the fundament of society have eroded away, even while they’re still practiced at the upper end of the spectrum. To take but one example: however much lip service is given to the fluidity of family structure in popular culture, in one-percent-world, very few children are born out of wedlock. As another case: educational level is the strongest predictor of professed religious belief. The highly-educated, credentialed professionals most likely to be successful in today’s meritocracy are also the most likely to be found in a pew on Sunday.

And for everyone else? Once the family as an atomic unit of society has eroded away, so too do the social networks - the social capital - that provided the sort of safety net that is largely taken for granted at the top end. In the absence of this network of networks, the void is quickly filled by state programs of one form or another, and so the cycle continues.

As he’s admitted in a recent First Things podcast, some of the arguments are complex, but I think they’re cogently laid out and while there might be a temptation to despair, Reno rightfully reminds us that as Christians we are called to try, not succeed. Our ultimate end is not to be found anywhere on this side of the veil of death. There may come a time when America is no more, but the Gospel is for all eternity. In no way does this require withdrawal. There is work to be done - the works of mercy would be a good place to start. Challenging every new thing with the question and how does this affect the poor? would be next, provided we can see through specious justifications for the status quo.

Reno’s book has me thinking about Romano Guardini’s The End of the Modern World, a different sort of polemic written for a different time. Guardini’s book deeply informed Pope Francis' encyclical Laudato Si - indeed, Guardini is cited frequently throughout the entire document. It’s a relatively short book, and one I will probably be revisiting shortly. T.S. Eliot’s The Idea of a Christian Society, which served as something of an inspiration will probably also get a look.

In any case, two thumbs up for R.R. Reno’s Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society, for whatever my thumbs are worth.

I started my reading project with the intent of re-sharpening some mental tools and perhaps acquiring a few new ones in my attempt to make sense of the insanity playing out on the national stage, which insanity seems to me something like a shadow-play cast by the rest of society at large. The temptation is to superficiality, but I think this does a deep disservice to larger questions. The trick is to forswear the immediate flash and noise - the glamour - and look a little deeper, a little closer.

Eight-plus months in, I can slowly begin feeling ideas - which is to say these questions - growing more concrete. This is to say nothing about answers, of course. I intended to start with a framework, and however dim it still seems in my mind, a structure is nevertheless forming. All men by nature desire to know, after all. I don’t pretend that this project will provide any answers. It will certainly not spell an end to the questions. First principles seemed like a good place to start.