As much as I dislike power poles, and I do significantly dislike them, at this point it seems like trying to use anything else is like trying to use different AC electrical plugs and sockets. Seems like a lot of hams, well, went ham over them and made them into a de facto amateur radio standard.
I've been doing some dramatic simplification of my get back on the air plans. I was gonna go for one of those Blue Sea Systems distribution panels but now I think I'm only gonna need two power connections.
And instead of a linear supply I decided on this switcher. Eventually I wanna completely redo this room and a 5 pound supply is easier to find furniture for, lmao. I figure since they put the powerpole connections on the front may as well use them.
Yea, deciding to go from a 7610 to a 7300 and deciding that said 7300 will be more than enough radio for me kinda started a domino effect.
"Do I really need X or am I just buying it to have it?"
So instead of a bigger radio, samller radio, Same with the supply. Instead of a yuge stable of antennas, just 3-6 well-selected ones. Instead of Bury-Flex, RG8X.
And instead of a "cluttered complex shack" look I never liked, beautiful simplicity.
I submit that this is how you actually make progress: build popular support for your good platform and then win primary elections on it while building a wide coalition with people in the party you’re running with.
It's much more effective than trying to threaten your way to power, yell at the Democrats you want to vote for you, and say you want to take over the party from within.
I'd also add that if you don't vote, politicians have no reason to try to appeal to you. If only Coke people vote, no candidate is gonna try to attract Pepsi people, it'd be a waste of time.
People who choose to be prima donnas and refuse to vote unless a candidate passes their purity tests are never gonna get what they want because they aren't active voters in the first place. If you owned a shop, you would never try to attract people who ideologically refuse to come in your shop.
The Austin City Council passed a massive housing bill that dramatically cut the minimum lot size down, changed buffer zones, encouraged more density near transit, and more. This will directly lead to more affordable housing.
Austin’s City Council includes 3 alumni of Run For Something: Vanessa Fuentes, Paige Ellis, and Zo Qadri. Elections matter. And so do people stepping up to run.
I hope they've reduced square foot minimums too. A lot of the homes built in the 40's-60's are impossible to build now because of them, despite their size being a lot better from a cost perspective and the fact that many people don't want large families or lots of stuff like they used to.
Got all of the elements cut and crimped. Need to make up some radials and get the hardware on the mast. My assistant has decided she isn’t as interested in helping me with that today, so we will get back at it tomorrow. We’ll know what we have when it’s off the ground and ready to tune.
Nice to see another operator who actually follows the science and crimps. I learned in industry that soldering is more likely to cause premature failure, especially when it comes to wires. And that no, crimps don't corrode, it forms a cold weld and if your crimp joint corrodes you did it wrong.
It's possible to do it right, but you need to do what I did and go through an actual IPC soldering course. Even then it's slower and more dangerous. Just crimp folks, it's better for everybody.
Yup, if you do your crimp right the wire itself will break before the joint will. And the wire or cable will require replacement due to other factors before the joint does.
Sidebar: NASA and other aerospace were able to cut hundres to thousands of pounds of weight off their vehicles when they switched to crimping. All those little solder blobs add up when you have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of connections.
In some respects, these modern MAGA muttonheads are a direct result of some liberal orthodoxies. We made “do your own thing” a prime directive for 2.5 generations. So their grandparents did. And their parents did. And now they do. And here we are.
I've thought that the (now old) line "make the personal political" eventually leads to MAGA. MAGA is a bunch of people who took their personal problems and prefudices and made them overwhelmingly political.
Morally correct or not, the one thing this repugnant MAGA virus has changed in popular culture is the number of non-violent liberals repeatedly suggesting that strategic political assassinations might have some pragmatic value in saving America, if not the entire planet.
I've had some tense and terse discussions over the past couple years because apparently I'm old fashioned and out of touch when I say "killing anybody is bad, mmkay?"
Hooboy... the largest left populist movement in the world is wild.
“No cause can justify such degradations that dirty the memory of the victims of the #Shoah and of the Righteous who saved #Jews at risk to their lives,” she said"
It's absolutely despicable. I used to be a lot further left than I am now (I've taken to saying I'm a liberal, not a progressive) and there was always this vomit-inducing undercurrent of antisemitism in it.
I began to wise up and close to door on that kind of politics last year and then October 7th happened and that welded the door shut.
I've also had to divorce myself from the LGBT community over it. So much antisemitism there too that was emboldened by Oct. 7th.
As a young fella just getting into #jazz in the late eighties my first impressions of David Sanborn were that he was corny and overly smooth, in an unhip bag I didn't dig with guys like Metheny and the Breckers. Then he blew my fucking mind with the Night Music show and I've respected him ever since. There was almost no really cool weird music on TV in 1988-90 except that show, and man, Night #Music was legit!!! Nick Cave, Bongwater, Pere Ubu, Miles Davis...
Media’s breathless, hysterical, round-the-clock, clickbait coverage of the protests is yet another example of how the fourth estate has abandoned any and all responsibility to inform and educate in exchange for advertiser-luring clicks.
I am still waiting for the major part of the media to own up to their role in helping to elect Trump in 2016. Their coverage of everything else has been failing us all and this is no different. A large portion of people have also apparently learned nothing.
In my history classes, we were taught to spot yellow journalism and sensational journalism.
I pretty much only read wire services anymore because the rest falls under one or both of those two. Even sources I came to trust went into a death spiral in 2014-2015.
The presstitutes are looking for easy money nowadays and stoking the flames of chaos is the easiest money there is.
I gripe about New Mexico and trying to get anything done, but credit where credit is due. Maggie Toulouse-Oliver, our Secretary of State, has done an incredible job fortifying and modernizing our voter registration and voting systems. I was able to change my voter registration online in 5 minutes. Securely. Big fan.
Here in PA it's super easy too. Takes me a little longer than 5 mins but most of that time is going to my purse and digging out my driving license to double-check the ID number.
I registered to vote at the DMV when I got my license so I never registered with an actual form, but helping people with the online registration form, it's just as easy as changing an existing one.