HT-37 on AM

I was very pleased to find AM activity up around 7290 last Saturday.
And I was even more pleased to find that my old
Hallicrafters transmitter can do AM.
The panel switch says DSB, but it is really putting out AM in that position.
If Verizon restores our internet connection I will send out podcast
#130 tonight.

40!

In search of early morning contacts I converted my 20m dipole into a
40m inverted V.
Wow! 40 is wonderful! I'm running into lots of fellow boatanchor fans,
and am also talking to Italian and Spanish radio amateurs.
Internet should be fixed on Friday.

Great News! Internet outage!

Last week's snow storm knocked out internet service here.
It may be out for a week.
This motivated me to get back on the air.
I fired up my OLD HT37 and Drake 2B combo and have been
Having a ball on 20 SSB.
Every dark cloud has a silver lining.
No hay mal que por bien no venga!
Podcast 130 is done (via D104) and
Will be uploaded as soon as they
fix the fiber optic cable.
I'm sending this via Blackberry.

Tech Details on SolderSmoke's Theme Music

This will be discussed in the next podcast, so I thought I'd share some tech details on our theme music. From the artist, Maestro Moj:

Geeky details about the music:
In the homebrew spirit, I tried to make all the sounds with instruments which I had soldered together myself. These were a Formant music synthesizer designed by C. Chapman from the Dutch/British "Elektor" magazine, circa 1977, and a FatMan synthesizer kit from PAiA Electronics. I play them through an ancient Kustom 200 guitar amplifier, which I've caused to smoke at least twice. The beginning is my K2 being powered on and tuned across 80 meters. I cheated and used a real gong at the end which a good friend went to the trouble of finding and buying in China, but I fed the sound through a PIC Polywhatsit designed by John Becker and described in Britain's "Everyday Practical Electronics," December 2001.
If anyone wants to sing along, it seems to me that the words are: " - Sol-Der Smo-Oke, - Sol-Der Smoke (repeat over and over) "
Music, like all home-brew, is never truly done. Next time I'll try to get a theremin working again - there's a radio-circuitried musical instrument!
If my grandson has kept the site up, there may be garage band music of his and mine on MySpace under Mikeandtheceiling.

Enjoy!

Mark "moj" Johnson
W8MOJ

Our Kind of Contest: "Eight Pins, One Shot!"

Jeri Ellsworth has come up with a contest that will appeal to SolderSmoke fans: A design competition using 555 timers. Check it out:
http://www.555contest.com/

NASA NANO-Sail Found by Hams!

All is well with the Nano-sail spacecraft, and hams apparently helped find it:

“This is tremendous news and the first time NASA has deployed a solar sail in low-Earth orbit,” said Dean Alhorn, NanoSail-D principal investigator. “To get to this point is an incredible accomplishment for our small team and I can’t thank the amateur ham operator community enough for their help in tracking NanoSail-D. Their assistance was invaluable. In particular, the Marshall Amateur Radio Club was the very first to hear the radio beacon. It was exciting!”

The Marshall Amateur Radio Club confirmed deployment of NanoSail-D late Wednesay EST with reception of the 1200bps AX.25 FM beacon on 437.275MHz +/-10kHz Doppler. News Release: 19 January 2011 Huntsville, AL USA The Marshall Amateur Radio Club (@ MSFC) - WA4NZD late Wednesday afternoon confirmed ejection of the NanoSail-D sub-satellite. This loaf-of-bread sized spacecraft was carried to orbit late last year on an Air Force rocket as part of NASA's FastSat project. This is the first successful deployment of a satellite, launched from a satellite already in orbit .!. The only communication from the NanoSail-D vehicle is via ham radio with 1200 baud FM AX25 beacon packets. The WA4NZD team of N4PMF and WB5RMG, was listening on 437.275 MHz FM with the NanoSail-D Principal Investigator Dean Alhorn at the club station when the beacon was heard and susbequently decoded onto the screen. Please visit http://wa4nzd.wordpress.com/ for pictures and more links to the NanoSail-D project. They are asking for telemetry reception reports from all over the world to help fill in gaps. The battery is expected to last for only three days. Marshall Amateur Radio Club http://wa4nzd.wordpress.com/ NanoSail-D Dashboard http://nanosaild.engr.scu.edu/dashboard.htm NanoSail-D on Twitter http://twitter.com/NanoSailD

Voyager -- Still on the air after 33 years

The Baltimore Sun has a really nice article on the Voyager spacecraft, and on the guys who have been keeping them going for the past 33 years. Here's an excerpt:

You probably have more computing power in your pocket than what NASA's venerable Voyager spacecraft are carrying to the edge of the solar system. They have working memories a million times smaller than your home computer. They record their scientific data on 8-track tape machines. And they communicate with their aging human inventors back home with a 23-watt whisper. Even so, the twin explorers, now 33 years into their mission, continue to explore new territory as far as 11 billion miles from Earth. And they still make global news. Scientists announced last month that Voyager 1 had outrun the solar wind, the first man-made object to reach the doorstep to interstellar space.
Here's the link to the article:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bs-md-voyager-20110117,0,278380,full.story