I’ve never seen so much activity on a band in my life as I get with this antenna, and I’m coming in 59 to the west coast on 10 watts now! My second contact on the antenna was in Chile!

I found a design for a 20 meter “Compact Vertical Dipole” in this year’s (2008) ARRL Handbook, given to me for the holidays by my very understanding wife! (update: Read the construction notes here)

This dipole is suspended about 6 feet above ground, has two 10 foot steel conduits for radiators and is fed through the pvc separator in the middle. The relatively short height is made up for by capacitance wires which you can see on the top and several more along the bottom. It took me about 6 hours to construct including trips to the store and hopefully it will last the winter at least. If you want to build one, steel conduit is cheap but not likely to last a long time due to its weakness, use aluminum instead if you can get it. Early testing shows an SWR of 1.5:1 or less across all of 20 meters, no tuning needed.

The biggest difference however is the noise level. I am living in a ham’s nightmare neighborhood with power lines above ground on both sides of my house and tons of noise. My other “HF Antenna” the rain gutters previously written about collect it in droves too.

This vertical dipole has such a great signal to noise ratio, it’s really something!

Here are a few pictures. The antenna almost fits entirely inside my tree, it would even be invisible had last year’s ice storm not demolished half of the tree.

Just a note to anybody who is interested, KD0BVK is now known as AI1P (alpha india one papa)

The old man signed off
For the last time

He laid down and took his last sip
Of the air he had filled with life

A sorcerer of the nighttime winds
Wizard of the invisible voices

His life was long and his mind acute
Until the end of good repute

His silent key rests now on my desk
That shining, powerful talisman of air

Waiting for another magician to tap it
To once more make _._. __._ heard from afar

The old man rests
But his key talks on

—
Poem originally published at darkpoetry.com
C 2007 Matthew Steven

It seems that the many people who have been looking for a php beautifier now have a very nicely done perltidy work-alike in Magnus Rosenbaum’s new phptidy program.

It does have a few user-friendliness issues- just make sure your PHP is compiled with the tokenizer built in or it will not work and it will not tell you why it doesn’t work. Also edit the phptidy.php script to change some default variables or the javadoc style comments it so nicely auto-generates may have the author name in them wrong. After that, if you like the default formatting you’re done.

http://cmr.cx/phptidy/

I also tried PHP Beautifier but it created code that was way too compact to read clearly by default and required the use of specific filters to alter these spacing choices. I found the default settings of phptidy to be just my style and I am sticking with that for now.

Try also:
http://beautifyphp.sourceforge.net/

Both of the projects could use a little documentation, but if you read the source you’ll figure it out pretty quick.

I almost forgot to post this considering how busy I have been since it happened.

For producing what most of our competing classmates considered the most impressive project in Software Development Methodologies our team was awarded the best project complete with a signed certificate from the Dean of the College, Dr. Carl Chang. My thanks to my teammates Joe Coleman, Adam Ryan Lee and Bader Al-Sabeh for all their work and dedication attending all those meetings and meeting the goals. Thanks also to Dr. Mitra and all the students in the class who gave us your support. It was great fun.

Other than the prize I take away a sense of the fun that developing software with a team can be, a lot of lessons about managing projects, and a nice batch of independent C++ classes that I will be able to use for other projects I have on my to-do list.

Original story here

Thanks to my friend Kevin Anderson, we can all download a nice jazz set from a recent performance at PSU. The recording quality is excellent, and the songs are pretty good too, with a few odd little additions you wouldn’t usually expect, but that’s Jazz for you. See for yourself.

http://www.jjcarlsen.com/PSU

Setlist:
01 On Green Dolphin St..m4a
02 Afternoon In Paris–Speak Low–Afternoon In Paris.m4a
03 Laura.m4a
04 Dont Get Around Much Anymore.m4a
05 Birks Works–Under Paris Skies–We Three Kings.m4a
06 Summer Samba–Bye Bye Blackbird–Summer Samba.m4a

Ok, this has been revised again because Amazon simply doesn’t have most of the things I actually want…

Here are some ideas based on how good I’ve been, and how rich Santa is this year. In truth this is sort of a “things I plan to buy eventually” list for myself too.

Cash is the best gift. No gift certificates or “cash cards” please!

GOOD BOY!
8-10′ lengths of strong telescoping fiberglass tubes, each one should fit into the other to make a total of 30-40′ (~$80)
100′ of RG-8U or RG-213 type coaxial cable. (~$70)
A set of very nice quality drill bits, carbide
A non-warlike president

VERY GOOD BOY!
http://www.gigaparts.com/store.php?action=profile&sku=ZAM-ALS-500MR
http://www.gigaparts.com/store.php?action=profile&sku=ZMF-989D

SUPER GOOD BOY!
http://www.gigaparts.com/store.php?action=profile&sku=ZIC-746PRO

UNBELIEVABLY GOOD BOY!
http://radio.tentec.com/Amateur/Transceivers/TT588

Otherwise…

Here’s a short Amazon wishlist.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/3K5RKI5WA1TNY

73s and happy holidays.

With my recent ticket upgrade to Extra I decided to apply for a shorter vanity call sign. The criteria that I wanted was something very short.

Both short in length and short in Morse code so that I could spend a little less time on my cq’s and all transactions. A few dits/dahs will probably add up over a lifetime.

So I wrote a few scripts to parse out the callsign info published by the FCC. I wrote a weighting algorithm for calculating the total number of dits and dahs in the morse code version of each callsign and sorted them by that weight. Interestingly the shortest callsigns in morse code terms (10 binary characters) that are currently available are the 5 character types in the General/Technician class level. Though there are only 7 of them as I post this!

Also a surprising number of A*** signs are available, around 1500 4 letter Extra class callsigns in total.

I decided to make a job of it and I added filtering so that the rules published by the FCC for no-no callsigns were respected, further reducing the junk level, and made a nice web interface for people to download them with.

Since it took me some work to set up I am charging a small fee for the service which can be paid by Paypal, after which you can immediately download the information. The callsign lists will be updated automatically every week.

You can try it out here:
http://www.geniusweb.com/callsigns/order.php

After finishing the program I noticed that I had made a number of mistakes in my own vanity application since I used a primitive version of this for my own purposes before adding any of the filtering that’s necessary to toss out signs I’m not qualified for. Still it looks like I have enough good ones in there to get something useful. Anyone downloading the polished lists will get just the right stuff and avoid the mistakes I made!

I too salute those who are always ready to deal with disaster:

http://www.kptv.com/weatheralert/14776224/detail.html

Today I passed my General exam, missing one question and then my Extra class exam missing 2. So I’m now able to operate on all ham bands and modes, and will soon be certified to volunteer to administer tests to new operators.