Hi Everyone & Happy New Year! With the turning of the calendar it’s natural that one reflects on the past & thinks about the future. In my case these last few days I have found this to be especially true. As I am encountering two milestones in my life. One, being my reaching age fifty, which if I start weeping about again I’ll short out the keyboard (again) & the other being me celebrating my thirtieth year in Amateur Radio. What drew my attention to Ham Radio was severe weather and the weather nets. For a moment, lets journey back in time, to when I first heard of Ham Radio. It was 1973 & I was a 15-year-old kid interested in meteorology. There was a tornado warning & my sister Diane called and said “tune around 146 on the dial & you can hear the Civil Defense talking about the storm.” Well, she was partly right, they were talking about the storm. Something called the Alabama Emergency Net X-ray with a weird call sign W4CUE. <stron Continue reading →

“Tis the season to be grumpy, tra-la-la-la-la La-la-la-laaa” Christmastime is a special time of year, which brings out both the best and worst of us all. Once upon a time I worked in retail at Sears and at Christmastime I saw some amazing sights and shining examples of weird human behavior. Strange it was, for instance, seeing supposedly otherwise well balanced people, standing in the freezing cold at 4AM for After-Thanksgiving sales and then later seeing some of the same merry souls being carted away by the police for engaging in a donnybrook over a doll whose head resembled a derriere. And, then later hearing that people were mystified as to why their children were crying and hiding from the Big Derriere Headed Doll’s leering glassy eyed stare — Evil Cabbage Heads from Hades. Or, seeing people, who looked deceivingly intelligent, ignoring the warnings that “Ma’am, the reason this DVD is priced like a piece of junk is that it IS a piece of junk”, them buying it anyway & then soon and very soon returning it & jumping the salespeople for them having sold them the piece of pre-warned junk. Also, I saws Continue reading →