swalberg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICDRBVaH6Rc is an earworm of a song exactly about this.

Would something like this work at much lower frequencies? Being able to see RF at 3-30MHz would be fantastic for hunting RFI in the amateur radio HF bands.

This reminds me of https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...

Neil Gunther extends Amdahl's law to the Universal Scalability Law in https://www.perfdynamics.com/Manifesto/USLscalability.pdf (pdf). He uses it to help model a system's scalibility.

GUE Fundies is on my bucket list. I don't think I'd be interested in cave diving or deep stuff where I need helium, but the level of skill that tech divers show is something I want to be able to do.

Father of 3 here, first two were home births, the third had complications and ended up being a hospital birth. I was initially skeptical for the same reasons but the first meeting with the midwife convinced me that they were taking every precaution and had the training to deal with whatever might come up.

The majority of births are simple if you let them be and the midwives go to great lengths to make sure the conditions are right for a successful event. In the case of our third we hit some conditions leading up to the delivery date that disqualified us for a home birth so we seamlessly transitioned into the hospital system (where the midwife still delivered the baby)

Was just talking about frequency references last night -- the ARRL Frequency Measurement Test is this Thursday evening

https://fmt.arrl.org/

The meteors leave a tail of ionized particles that people on the ground can bounce RF off of. Ham radio operators use this, e.g. the MSK-144 mode. Pretty cool to hear/see signals and know they were bounced off the tail of a meteor!

My first celebrity crush as a kid. She's also in _Revenge of the Nerds_. Those two movies made young-me think that being a geek could be cool.

The NFL passes net income back to the team owners. The taxation is generally the owner's problem.

I didn't realize they licensed private tour guides. My son's scout troop went to Gettysburg and joined one of the NPS tours. The guy kept a whole lot of teenaged boys engaged and interested for what was at least 2 hours and several miles of walking. I've been on tours of other Civil War sites and that was by far the best.

I don't know any part numbers but have a look at what the Morserino does (https://www.morserino.info/) or this reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/ag7xpi/projec...

How are the ergonomics of that key? Between the switch with the spring and having to hold that in your hand to use, I'm wondering how accurate the keying is? One suggestion might be a flat pad with a capacitive switch so you could just tap things out without even moving, but maybe the key works for you.

Either way, a fun idea!

73 de Sean N3RTW

Sorry... DX is short for a distance contact, so someone outside of your country. There are 340-odd "DX entities" defined, some of them incredibly rare (Bouvet Island, North Korea), and people spend their lives trying to get the ones they're missing. Other people will gather a group and raise funds to go to those places so that they get on the air.

Contesting is when there's an event, usually over a weekend with a set of rules and a point system for contacts. People get on the air and try and get the most points by making contacts. Big contests might have 10 or 20 thousand people all over the world participating and top competitors are running 2 or 3 radios simultaneously to get rates of over 400 contacts an hour. But there's also smaller contests such as QSO parties where a State tries to get people from every county on the air and people from across the country try to work them. Or silly ones like the Zombie Shuffle at the end of this month where people make up funny names and exchange them at low power, low speed Morse code just for fun. https://www.contestcalendar.com/ shows all the contests and gives you some idea of the variety.

Since some of the less popular countries tend to get active during the big contests, many DX'ers will enter contests just to find a few more.

Hams have privileges on 2200m, too! At those wavelengths people are using big loading coils. Saw a video last week of a guy in Alaska with a sizeable loop in the trees and was putting in about 1 KW to get 1W EIRP.

WSPR is all over the ham bands. There's people making relatively small, hydrogen filled balloons and trying to see how long they will stay alive. They're using WSPR on 20M to broadcast their telemetry (search for Traquito).

DX'ing and contesting. I enjoy making quick contacts with people all over the globe, and sometimes having to go to a map to find out where they are.

Contesting is also fun. There are a variety of modes. I got into RTTY contests lately. It's a bit of a thrill to work through a bunch of callers or to snag a rare multiplier.

I should also mention Parks on the Air. I like going to parks and within a few minutes have people calling me. Or to hunt for other people in parks. Almost like a contest and DXpedition rolled into one.

N3RTW

It is cool and still gets updates. One thing to note is that almost all the information comes via a ClearSky API, so I'd often find that the data didn't line up to more official sources. Not egregiously so, but sometimes I'd go double check against sites like solarham.com or NOAA directly just to make sure (especially WRT R/S/G forecasts). Their spotting information is also super laggy, so you don't find out about how you're being spotted for around 5 minutes.

However, it is very nice looking and when I did have it up I did pay more attention to things like solar weather.

73 - N3RTW

Morse code is flourishing even without it being a requirement. People are discovering what a fun mode it is -- the low power portable people love the reach you can get on 5W, others enjoy the mental challenge, and it's prevalent in contesting.

You can be as connected to the past as you want in this hobby. It's at the point where we have people getting remote islands on the air by driving a boat onto shore that has a radio and an amplifier, raising an antenna, and then people can operate from either a boat anchored off shore or back home over Starlink. And they're doing it in Morse code, so you have this nice blend of the old and the new.

What I like about the hobby is that it can be a lot of things to a lot of different people. So the emcomm/prepper crowd is very interested in practicing communications for when existing networks go down.

That said, everything you do in amateur radio is in the open. So if you want to talk to your European friend, only the Sun can prevent you, but anyone can listen.

If you find the park reference you can submit logs to pota.app after the fact. Any qso counts.

It's getting more and more popular within amateur radio. If I look on the Parks On The Air spots page, there are currently 20 people in a park across the US doing Morse, and I know that when I go to a park I can knock out 60 Morse contacts in about an hour on one band since there are so many hunters.

Clubs like Long Island CW have thousands of members and run classes all day to teach people Morse and help with their operating skills. Just this morning I joined the weekly CWOps mini contest which is so popular they have it in 4 x 1 hour sessions. And that's on top of the 3 medium speed sessions on Mondays, and 2 slow speed ones.

There might not be as much ragchew activity but between contests, DXers, and POTA, there's CW activity all over the bands.

+1 to this. I started learning Morse with that same Google site and it's optimizing for reading, not hearing. Took me time to unlearn everything and do it properly.

I have one that I attached to an old antenna rotator so I can control it from the network. And another that monitors Github's status API and lights an LED when they're down.

Got a nice pair of Github socks at re:invent for showing a pic of that last one at their booth!

It's a short form of "best regards". In message handling there was a table of numbers that could stand in for phrases to save time. That one made it to common ham lingo.

I just got my green card after 9 years of living on a TN. I've got a family -- my kids have spent about half their lives in this country.

Even though I was in legally and knew eventually things would work out, there's not one week that went by where I didn't think that if I lost my job I'd have to leave, or wasn't given a reminder that we're foreigners and could lose it.

To be in the country illegally and be fearful of losing it all at any time, or to claim asylum only to know there's a court date coming where you could get kicked out, well, I don't wish that on anyone.

Does that apply broadly to PhDs or just tech related ones? I'm thinking specifically about a PhD in Political Science, dealing in tech adjacent national security topics.

My PERM was certified in August. Took a little over 16 months because it went to audit. Timelines on PERM shot up around the same time as I applied and have been steadily getting worse.

Filed I-485 in November, approved in 4 months and a week. So once your date comes up, they seem to be moving quickly.

Yes, you'll want to google for the "Visa Bulletin" to see the current dates for different countries. India and China are currently backlogged.

At the same time, the political climate and even the person you get reviewing your application could make a difference. I was denied the first time I applied for PERM after the officer combed through the supporting paperwork to find problems. Was it my lawyer's fault? Did my employer make a mistake in the job search? Was it because it happened in the Trump years? Who knows.

I used to run a small payroll company in Canada, everything was done in Rails.

Call it brute force but every time the rules updated I'd run scraper against the CRA calculator that would calculate payroll across a variety of provinces and pay ranges and output it as rspec. Then i could test that i was compliant and hadn't missed a rule or typoed a value.