Carl Blare

To the Admin and Moderators behind the curtain, I no longer find a “Log Out” choice.

Have I been “Logged In” for all eternity?

Is it “house arrest”?

Way back in about 2006 member Yves Roy calculated a very interesting chart showing a table of values for designing a loading coil for use with a 3-meter AM antenna under Part 15.

http://www7.brinkster.com/yvesroy/10ft-antenna.asp

I didn’t mean to keep you waiting but it was time to shut down all the part 15 transmitters, and that requires a long roundabout trip through the Internet Building.

I will describe the shutdown routine in a minute, but it was only by brave chance that we made it to the end of the schedule, because of storms passing through the area.

At midday the only weather symptom was a dark sky, still and brooding. Our programming was streaming to the world and radiating on four frequencies.

The weather map held steady for hours, a tornado watch zone from Kansas into mid-Missouri, but not moving closer.

But about 3 PM the yellow tornado grid shifted right on top of us here on the Mississippi River at the Illinois border. Stillness continued.

At 5 PM a huge rush of wind rattled everything and rain swept around, so I prepared to leave the air for equipment safety, but the intervals between static pops on the radio and the arrival of thunder were relatively long, so I did not eject.

Calm returned although distant lightning continued.

Sign off time was reached at 7:30 PM and I crawled under the big World Desk to turn off the AMT3000 at 1550kHz.

Next the full length of the building to the Upper Management Lounge where the AMT5000 was putting on 1680kHz.

Then back to the Vacuum Room to shut down 107.1 FM, which feeds the signal for 1680.

Not done yet, as we descended into the deep archives underneath the building to close the carrier current station at 970kHz, broadcasting experimentally with 1/4 Watt.

After all that I faced the task of sitting here at the keyboard describing everything, which is still going on.

Th programming today was excellent, as usual, but the only way anyone will ever know about it is if I tell them in person. There’s no way anyone was actually tuned in to these feeble signals.

But I was. It was the best radio on the dial for me all day, and that’s why it’s an absolute necessity.

The AMT5000 from sstran.com has all the high end features, including a power control for setting the final RF amplifier stage to an exact 100mW.

For fun, during early hours before the official broadcast day begins, I like to set the power input to the final RF amplifier down to minimum, which I’m guessing comes to about 40mW.

I could do the math using the simple formula provided in the Manual, but maybe tomorrow.

Prior to starting the internet stream and going to AM full power, we sometimes air the Alex Jones Show to get some idea how dire things are in the world, and this program comes in just over the morning skip from WPRR in Grand Rapids, Michigan, or KRJO in Monroe, Louisiana.

My radio is 36-feet from the transmitter, and if anyone else is receiving the broadcast they’d have to be within a hundred feet. Very private.

The world is only what we see.

The world seen by another might not agree, and so we turn to part 15 broadcasting as a place to focus our particular world view.

A personal radio station can be very satisfying, until you try to explain to a distant neighbor that you receive a station he can’t.

In the sublime world of perfection brought by part 15, as we enjoy the ideal radio station of our own making, we stand apart from a common world where mass programming drags down average quality.

Perhaps it is apart 15, a radio medium that puts us apart from the ordinary.

Some mentions are made of solar collectors and battery systems for part 15 operation, and I have a few energy subjects that have arisen in conversations with associates.

I was asked about electric “smart meters”, evidently a subject on a recent Coast-to-Coast show, and a fear that they are being forced on the entire world population without choice and produce fire hazard and health risk.

That was the gist of the program according to what I was told, although I am not informed on the matter.

The smart meters are presumably part 15 instruments as I believe they have two way transmission capabilities of some kind.

What is true about smart meters according to members of this part 15 community?

On another energy matter, I notice vast amounts of vegetative yard waste disposed every week which it seems to me should be compacted and converted into useful energy by some home assembly-line D.I.Y. project.

What do we know about such a thing?