Radio, Amateurishly

The tradition of telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve is one that my family didn't practice. More to the point, I hadn't even heard of that particular tradition until several years ago when I read The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. Like any good ghost story, James' novel avoids deciding for the reader whether the story's events should be attributed to the supernatural or to the protagonist's own state of mind, a distinction that I argue doesn't matter as much as we might think. With The Turn of the Screw began for me maybe not an obsession with, but certainly more than a passing interest in, the Victorian Christmas Eve ghost story. Presented here then is my own attempt at a little entertainment as the long, dark, solstitial night of Christmas Eve draws near. Merry Christmas, if that's what you're celebrating. And if it's something else you're observing this time of year, Happy Holidays. To all my radio friends, 73 ES CUL. For their help in...

  The box that sat under the tree on Christmas morning of 1980 was of a size and weight that gave away its contents long before I tore through the wrapping paper. The artwork on the box boasted that I would soon hear "ships at sea", "ham band operators", and "news from major cities around the world". It was right. The Radio Shack DX-100 had OK sensitivity, so-so selectivity, and absolutely horrible stability. The tuning dial was neither accurate nor precise. Naturally, I straight up loved that radio. The three-band transistor radio that I've mentioned a few times piqued my interest; the DX-100 made me an SWL. For the first time, I could monitor SSB signals. The amateur bands, as some now-forgotten Tandy Corporation copy writer pointed out, seemed a good place to start. On a spring day in 1981, I heard an operator on twenty meters who was just beside himself with the joy he was sharing with a fellow ham. "Two meters is just great," he enthus...

  In the United States, the president is elected every four years by the people. Sort of. In an arrangement that might look somewhat byzantine to an outsider, an arrangement that resulted from compromises first hammered out by thirteen states at the close of the eighteenth century, the people elect the president through the states in which they reside. In recent years, a pattern has emerged where some states vote reliably for the candidate of one party while a roughly equal number of states votes reliably for the candidate of the other party, leaving about a half dozen so-called swing states that might switch from election to election. Each of the two candidates knows that their base states are effectively a given, and devotes considerable campaign time and budget to the swing states.  And so the choice of who holds the highest office in what is arguably one of the most influential countries on earth comes down, in a way, to a few tens of thousands of voters in a handful of st...