PROMORE... A Three Hour Tour

It was time to do a promo for HRN 451, to be titled New Rig… Who Dis?. David W0DHG was driving home (LA) from San Francisco. Gary K4AAQ anchored from the Studio in the Bonus Room Above the Garage on the North Side of Fort Mill (SC), in the Shadow of Charlotte, at the Foot of Mt. Belzoni.

A little over three hours later, they were done… apparently only because David arrived home.

David was in SF to visit one of his daughters. While they were attending an event, David’s rental car (good gas mileage offset rental price) was broken into, and his backpack with a PC and his AnyTone HT (in the trunk, not on the seat, so the thief was onto that trick) were stolen. And a window was broken. So much for savings. Likely his 2007 Toyota FJ, bristling with antennae, would not have been so assaulted.

No, it doesn’t take three hours to tell that story, so clearly there’s more. Probably about 45 minutes of real entertainment, sadly embedded in 3+ hours of ‘show’.

Oh, and ‘PROMORE’? That may have been a typo in the chat, or it may have been deliberate. Anyway, it’s a new way to label our extended ‘promo’ videos.

WARNING!! A Zoom issue caused David’s end of the call to echo everything Gary said. Gary - hearing his own voice which he loves - was good with that. Gary’s wife Cyndi KD4ACW, said it was ‘very annoying’. This Website agrees with Cyndi. Listen at your own risk 👂🔈🔉🔊. It clears up toward the end, but only so you can hear what you should have been hearing all along, if only they had hung up on Zoom and reconnected.

HRN 450: 25 MIles

25 Miles comes from a fairly frequent Facebook inquiry from non-hams (usually) wondering how they might be able to communicate over X distance with some kind of radio technology when ‘All Else Fails’ - no cell phones, no Internet, no nothing (maybe sat phones… we didn’t think of that). The answer changes as you fill in the X with different distances, and 25 miles is sort of the limit with non-ham equipment (say, GMRS or CB), even with a decent (but not super-high or elaborate) antennas. Yes, the devil is in the many details. We discuss various distances (but forget about sat phones… it just doesn’t come up.

Then we talk about Ribbit, a new ‘technology’ for generating a text-based data signal on a smart phone that can be sent over a variety of medium - radio, VoIP - with ‘acoustic coupling’ - just holding the phone up to the mic and hitting ‘send’. It’s early days, and the technique may be a solution in search of a problem, but sometimes it works. They have a YouTube Video demonstrating the technology.,

Note that we had some trouble with our YouTube stream (again), and I’ve uploaded the recording to YouTube to avoid the buffering. Instead, you get a too-long discussion about the problem. Feel free to fast-forward (like you don’t do that already).

HRN 449: Extreme Elmering (almost a clickbait title)_

It’s just us - Jim NO1PC, David W0DHG and Gary K4AAQ for the Halloween Eve show. So, Extreme Elmering? We talk about that, after checking out Kyle AA0Z’s recent Trivia show, and a story in the LA Times about hams in Taiwan maybe preparing for a showdown with China.

And a reminder that when we do a ‘Promo’ show, it’s not just to tell you we have a ‘real’ show coming up. We usually do a whole ‘nother show. 30 minutes… or more. This week is defiantly in the more category. So if this nearly 2½ hour episode isn’t enough, to watch the Promo.