KD3Y

Final modification. I added a brass rail and shortened the base. I think i'm happy with it now.

I preferred black. Lowes only has white. But yeah black would be better. I'll keep a check and see if they get some in. Maybe its a "supply chain issue" as they like to say nowadays.

I got the urge to do some modifications, Jim. Added a QSO card holder and a USB charging station. Going to have some little brass plates made for the "East Coast" time and "Greenwich Time" at the trophy shop. What you think?

Amateur Radio has to compete with the Internet. Most of the younger people don't want to bother with talking on a radio. They want Tik-Tok and cell phones. Your point is valid, but I think most younger people aren't going to want to go back 100 years with their technology. If it doesn't have WiFi and a camera on it, they just aren't interested. I got my boy at Ft. Bragg that I VE'd his exam earlier this year and got his ticket. He walks areound with his DMR radio and a hotspot so he can talk on his "radio".He wouldn't do analog for nuthin. Why go to Cali in a coverd wagon when you can drive there in a Lambo? LOL

One of the Marine Raiders Jim. Must be nice to be able to "ham" while you're zooming along at 800 mph in your buggy! We had one guy in our club a few years ago stationed at Cherry Point MCAS. He flew the EA-6B Prowler that does the electronics countermeasures missions. He'd always pop on the repeater and say hey when he was flying and training. I don't know anything about them but apparently he has the technology to tune in and Xmit easy enough without a lot of configuring like I'd have to do with CTCSS tones and offsets and such. I think he said the electronics on the aircraft could figure out all that on it's own and configure itself somehow.

How cool is that? "First OSL while under way!"

Yes Jim. I agree. The ones I dont like are the sneaky ones. Such as is common with a lot of the domain registrars I used or have used. "Only $4.99 per year!" Then way down at the bottom of the page, in text one pixel tall where they know 99% of people wont see it..."$4.99 for the first year. Auto renews at the regular price of $39.99 per year" or like some I've seen, "$4.99 introductory offer. Auto renews at the retail price at the time of renewal" Which literally translates to "we gonna charge you whatever we feel like next year." One of the most abused punctuation in the English language....the poor little asterisk! *which means, "everything you just read about our offer is a f-ing lie." When you run your business honestly and with integrity, you don't have to hide the details in front of an asterisk, or use the page footer for mouse-print.

Something else that pees me off more than advertising on some sites that I would like to support, but refuse to is the "auto renew". As if they somehow feel justified to entitle themselves to reach into my wallet and take what they want. I mean, if I went to the burger joint and ordered a big whopper, then everytime I went back to their joint they automatically just charged me for a big whopper....WTH? I'M THE DECIDER (to quote a once popular President). I decide what comes out of my account, how much, and when. Not the other party. I hear the "who wants to be bothered with renewals" WHAT? It takes 0.25 seconds to click a button once per year to renew. That's literally NO TIME out of my life. So that's a BS excuse for them to self-entitle. Ya know what I hate worse than "having to renew"? Having to argue with a site for 6 weeks over the phone and email about why they keep charging my card after I told them to cancel, then having to get in my truck and drive to the credit union to cancel my card and having to wait 10 days for a new one to come in the mail so they won't..CAN'T... keep charging it over and over after they've told me 136 times via email that they've cancelled the "recurring charge". I belong to several forums that I would support, but not by giving entitlement to stick their hand in my pocket whenever they feel like it. If they are "auto renewing" then that means my card data is stored on their server somewhere waiting to be hacked. Yeah yeah yeah, I know, "We use the latest industry grade encryption". Well......... Target was using "the latest industry grade encryption" when they had their data breech. Wells Fargo was using "the latest industry grade encryption" when they had their data breech. Yahoo was using "the latest industry grade encryption" when they got breeched. So was Mariot Hotels. So was Experian. So was Equifax. Heck DoD was using "the latest industry grade encryption" when they got breeched. When you get a letter from the U.S. Department of Defense telling you your data, including all your family members data that you had put on your security clearance application was compromised (READ: not even the most powerful government on the planet can protect your data stored on a server somewhere), then you understand there is no such thing as "the latest industry grade encryption". Hell, 99.99% of e-commerce site owners don't have a clue what "the latest industry grade encryption" is, that's something thats automatically added to their website when they copy and paste that shopping cart on their website.

Man when I got that Zoom 36K modem (serial port) and that desktop got hot-rodded with 32mb RAM and a 100mb hard drive I thought I was the stuff! LOL Imagine of you could look forward to today from back then and see what we have now, wouldn't it blow your mind? I remember in the Army in the motor pool they had the computers with the 5 1/4 inch floppy drive and to order parts they had a gadget they would dial the number then lay the phone receiver into the device (it had a rubber cradle on it) and it would send the data and order the parts by modem. You could hear the noise as it sent the data over the phone line, Then they'd save the floppy for the "backup" each day so they had a record. There was like 20,000 5 1/4 floppies in that metal cabinet. LOL We thought that was like from the year 2050 stuff! And I remember when the first gigabyte hard drives came out and I thought, "Why in the world would anybody ever need a 1 gigabyte hard drive." Remember them? Windows wouldn't even see the whole gigabyte, you have to section it out into smaller partitions to use the whole gigabyte.

I don't "contest" per say. I make contacts on some of the nets for my own WAS map and QSL card interest Unfortunatley, 20 meters has seemed to morph into the contest band lately and all I hear is guys screaming their call sign with an RST and then moving on to the next one. I don't enjoy pile-ups of 100 hams all screaming into their radios at the speed of a TV commercial disclaimer. "W3GZZ I copy five nine. How copy? 59? Roger" , "WNXTZ I copy five nine. How copy? 59? Roger", "KXFTT I copy five nine. How copy? 59? Roger".... that's all. over and over and over. Like a recording. And there's no way every dang station your talking to is 59. They can't even slow down enough to take the time to give an actual RST. I feel some of these contests are bordering on "pecuniary interest". After all if I have to send you $4 for a cutesy certificate, aren't you really just selling certificates on the ham radio bands?

Great idea, Jim. Thanks. So tired of the ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads everywhere. In my opinion, If your product/service can't earn you a living without harassment revenue from your customer base (victims), then your product/service sucks. A good product/service will support itself. Now I like the vintage ads. They had class and weren't all up in your face like todays annoying ads are. I can't imagine any mentally stable person "appreciating ads" How brainwashed by big corpa do you have to be to get to that point? By the way, I never knew you had ads. My ad blocker blocks them so I never saw them. I think a lot of web owners problem is they act like they're the only guy on the Internet. What I mean is, I'm a member of about 40 different groups, forums, websites, etc. If I paid each one of them $9 per month "membership" to remove their ads, that's a car payment every month. There's just no Internet group/forum worth "upgrading" to remove ads, as I'm still ging to be ad-bombed on the other 39. I miss the old Internet of the 90's. Yeah I was sitting there with my 9600K baud modem for 3 minutes waiting for a website to load, but it was generally a harassment free, ad free, pleasurable experience before big corpa came along and ruined the Internet with ads, paywalls, data mining, and marketing. If I was king of the world, the first order I'd make was the Internet be totally un-commercialized and businesses had to go out and actually work to earn their income. In fact, corporations would be banned from the Internet because they don't know how to earn their income without exploiting a customer anymore.

How about a "virtual wall"? Does that count? http://www.kd3y.com/qsl.html

Hello from Coastal North Carolina, Paul. Welcome to the group. I'm still working on getting my "associates degree" from the Rare Ones. I enjoy talking to your boys down in NOLA. https://therareones.net/ 73 de Anthony, KD3Y

Hello from the Graveyard of the Atlantic, Brian. Steampunk, Scuba diving & woodworking? We have lots in common. Welcome to the group.

Hello from Coastal North Carolina, Scott. My boys, Gary (NG9T) and Nick (NG4NAG) are big into the POTA. Never got into it myself though most of the coast here is National Park and the Croatan right here in my back yard is National Park. Welcome to the group.

Thanks Jim. It isn't the email address that I care about, email accounts are free. The website in question allows you to use your email (or any email address) as a user name and then select a password then click "create account". But they don't send you the email where you click on the link to verify its your email address. It's the fact that the email is my call sign that annoys me. If anybody is surfing that site and sees "kd3y@..." and recognizes a ham call sign, then they'll think it's me and that I'm a wierdo. Well I am a wierdo but not like that. 🙂 It's almost like identity theft as there's only one legit "kd3y". I learned about it when I received an email welcoming me to my new account. It wasn't any sort of thing I would've ever signed up for and it'd be embarassing if anyone thought it was me. 40 meters was big and wide last night! I got Canada, Russia, and Belgium. Russia and Belgium was scratchy and weak but Canada was loud and clear. I only have 100 watts. Pretty amazing with nothing but a homemade dipole. I usually can barely hear Canada and they usually vive me a 22 report or something poor like that. 73, KD3Y

NOTICE (12/10/2002) I believe my email got scraped or phished or phased, or whatever they call it now. If you receive an email from any email address with "KD3Y" in it, IT IS NOT FROM ME. Maybe not such a good idea to use one's call sign as an email address. 😞

Awesome video. Never can do too little to get the younger kids into amateur radio. The hobby is going to decline if all us old goats don't do our best to recruit the younger generation. We have a lot of competition what with the Internet and streaming and tik tok and all.

Yes. It's not automated like you'd think it should be, but yes the PSAP operator has the # to all other PSAPs and can make a priority call to another PSAP in an emergency. Sort of like in the military where a "flash" call preceeds all other tactical traffic in priority on the AUTOVON system. When the 911 operator puts an address in their 911 terminal, it shows them what PSAP serves that address, and if it's a commercial or residential address, and other information like who owns the property. But the operator has to manually call that other PSAP. Here in our e911 center, the county dispatcher is the PSAP for NC Marine Patrol, NC Highway Patrol, the Park Police (Outer Banks National Seashore), ICE (Port of Entry at Beaufort, NC), and DHS (the State Port in Morehead City), CSX Railroad Police, and the Marine Corps Police (Cherry Point MCAS). If there's a crime there you dial 9-1-1, not those agencies themselves, and the dispatcher contacts those agencies directly. There are boxes on the 911 terminal touch screen so when the dispatcher needs to dispatch those agencies, they just tap the box and they are connected instantly to those other "most often used" PSAPSs. That happened after 9-11 when no agencies could talk to any other agencies when NY was attacked. I believe it was the Patriot Act signed by George Bush that mandated that be federally funded. It also requires all cell phone carriers to participate in the e911 system by FCC regulation. Your cell carrier will put you thru to the PSAP nearest the tower you are connected to when you dial 9-1-1 on your cell phone, as well as sending GPS cords of your location and other info like your phone number and IMEI number to the dispatcher.

"Agency Interconnectivity" You dial 9-1-1 just like you normally would. The call is routed to your local PSAP. Tell the dispatcher your suspect your friend in Coloroado is having a medical emergency. Your local PSAP has the contact for every other PSAP in the country (usually the 911 terminal will pull it right up instantly by the address you give). So of course, you'll have to know the address of your friend in Colorado so your 911 operator at your local PSAP will know what PSAP to contact in Colorado. I'd go that route VS trying to google the number of some local police department. Your PSAP has priority with the phone companies and can get their call thru immediately to whatever PSAP services the jurisdiction where your friend is (the FCC requires the phone companies to give PSAPs that call routing priority). Some police departments don't even answer the "civilian" phone. My town, Newport for example, the Chief won't let the officer hang out in the office after 6pm. He requires him to be out patrolling (we only have one cop per shift). So if I dial the Newport PD after hours, it goes to an answering machine. I have to dial 911 after hours, and the dispatcher at the PSAP can contact the officer directly. Same way with the NC Marine Patrol and the Federal Park Police for the Outer Banks. The local PSAP dispatches them directly. If you know your friends cell phone # or landline #, the other PSAP can do things like break into a cell/landline phone conversation if your friend is on the line with another person, or can open the cell line to listen if it's an emergency if the phone isn't in use. The other PSAP can also locate your friends cell phone to within 50 to 300 feet if it's active, things us civilians can't do. Going thru 911 will always be faster than looking up the non-emergency number for an agency and doing it yourself.

🙂 Thats the brass hinges that were on the cigar box, Jim. I basically took the red cigar box and cut it in half on the table saw. I'll leave it for a while and see how it grows on me. LOL

I don't concern myself with water. That's one of the reasons that were at the top of the list as to why I bought this house...that and NO HOA. I have a million gallons in the back yard. Accorging to the Army Corps of Engineers, there's an underground river that runs under the area and it bubbles up through a crevice in the bedrock about 300 feet down. Next thing I did after buying the place was invest in a system that will pump water from the lake and filter it through a ceramic filter system that is rated to filter out all known microorganisms. If needed, I'd switch to my solar power for my water pump. So I'm set so far as water. I have an eerie feeling that in the next few decades, water is going to become a very expensive luxury. I've noticed the trend for the last few years of big corporatons buying up springs in Florida and other places. And of course, we've had to have a government permission slip to dig a well for decades now.

I'd knew I'd been hoarding those cigar boxes Bill gives me at the tobacco shop for some good reason. Yesterdays project was a dual-time zone clock. I'm still trying to decide if I like the 70's retro look or if I'll throw it away and start over with something more "steampunky" looking.

And of course, North Carolina has the best barbecue. 😁 Pa always said, "If you pull up to a BBQ restaurant and don't smell smoke, get back in your car and leave."

Cleaned up a little to make it sharper. ..