Radio, Amateurishly

  If you attend—or attended—a church that follows a liturgical calendar, you are probably aware that Advent is winding down, and Christmastide is about to begin. Depending on the specific version of liturgical calendar you are using, there are lots of seasons, feast days, and holidays. Some are more important than others. Easter is a biggie. Without the Resurrection story, you have a philosopher with some uniquely helpful insights into how we should relate to each other; with the Resurrection story, you have one of the world's major religions. The Feast of St Crispin is of considerably lesser importance, one you might not have even heard of but for Shakespeare's Henry V .  Christmas has historically been somewhere in the middle. It's not even Jesus' birthday, as many of us learn at the age of four or five. The kind of record keeping that today we take for granted simply didn't exist in the first century BCE. Dates of birth just weren't tracked back then. The dat...

  SAN FRANCISCO—In yet another sign that Elon Musk's dedication to online free speech absolutism may not be entirely consistent, Twitter announced earlier today that it would be banning the use of the semicolon (;) in all tweets. Any Twitter user who includes the long-maligned punctuation mark in their tweets faces permanent suspension of their account, the company stated. A press release from Musk seemed to anticipate pushback to the new policy. "Some cancel-culture SJWs out there might think that this, like our ban on sharing publicly available location data," an apparent reference to an ex post facto Twitter policy announcement that ensnared the Elon Musk's Jet account, "is just an arbitrary way for me to throw people that I don't like off the platform. Well I'm here to tell you: they're wrong and I'm right (again). The new hardcore Twitter 2.0 demands that we use straightforward punctuation. Make up your mind whether you want to use a period ...

In the spring of 1983, the Radio Netherlands program Media Network featured an interview with John Branegan, GM4IHJ . He was talking about a constellation of amateur radio satellites that had CW beacons on ten meters. The beacons transmitted the satellite's ID, along with some telemetry data. The point of the interview was to generate interest among SWLs for monitoring and tracking low earth orbit satellites. It worked. I immediately wrote to Radio Netherlands to request a copy of Branegan's pamphlet Satellites for the Short Wave Listener . By the summer of '83—the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school and the last summer that I wouldn't have a job—I was actively tracking and predicting orbital passes of a half dozen satellites using nothing but pen, paper, a calculator, and my trusty Radio Shack DX-100. When I would tune in a satellite, the audible CW tone coming out my speaker would glissando up throughout the pass, unless I made continuous adj...