Radio, Amateurishly

I'm far from the first to use the process of weeding a garden as a metaphor. In fact, it's been used so many times that I had a hard time pinning down its origin. This seems a good time to reflect on gardening, and weeding.   In mid-April the apple tree blooms in muted pinks and white. Bees buzz around from blossom to blossom. The warm California sun will spend the whole summer saturating the leaves with enough energy to transform the remnants of those blossoms into fruit so that by early autumn—if I can keep the squirrels away—we'll harvest just enough to make an apple crisp.  What I have might not be enough to some to call a garden, but the collection of potted plants on the deck of my condo gives me the best of both worlds. I can enjoy nature and the process of helping things to grow in a way that's not nearly as labor intensive as maintaining an entire yard. It's no small part of the reason why I live in a condo. The apple tree is a mainstay; we've had it si...

  NEW YORK—Following a disappointing wild card series loss to the San Diego Padres after a 101-win regular season, the New York Mets announced that manager Buck Showalter will not be back for the 2023 season. Mike "The My Pillow Guy" Lindell will assume the duties of manager, effective immediately.  "We'd like to thank Buck Showalter for his service to this organization," Mets General Manager Billy Eppler said, "but in the end, he just couldn't seal the deal. That bit with having the umpire check [Padres pitcher Joe] Musgrove's ears was, if I may be so blunt, bush league." Asked if Lindell's lack of experience was a concern, Eppler replied, "What lack of experience? Mike is a legend. When it comes to batshit crazy accusations of the other side cheating, Mike is like nothing the Major Leagues have ever seen." Despite the temporal proximity to Halloween, the ghost of Billy Martin did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

  The Angeles Crest Highway is a remarkable bit of 1930s engineering that winds its way some one hundred kilometers along the ridge of the San Gabriel Mountains—the mountain range that rises to the north above Los Angeles—from La Cañada to Wrightwood. Much of the route traverses the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument (POTA K-4544), which was carved out of the Angeles National Forest in 2014. The choice of prepositions turns out to be important. The highway winds along the ridge, not on the ridge. On a warm-but-not-too-warm day in early July of 2022, my wife and I met up with a good friend of ours to drive the length of the highway and stopped about midway to spend a little time picnicking and activating the park. The good news is that the picnic spot we stopped at had excellent lines of sight to most of the Southern California basin, and I made enough contacts on 146.520 MHz to have logged a successful activation without even needing to power up the HF rig. The not-so-good...

  On July 6, 2019, I took the exam for the amateur radio Technician class license. I knew right away that I had passed, but I had to wait more than a week until on July 15, 2019, I looked at the FCC call sign database and found my name listed with call sign KN6DBC. My reasons for taking the exam were twofold. First, as a former shortwave listener (SWL), I was looking for ways to rekindle the enjoyment of using radio as a hobby in what is now, for all practical purposes, a post-shortwave world. Second, as a recent empty-nester, I was looking for opportunities to do some volunteer work. I'm a sailor, and have been around the water my entire life. The United States Coast Guard Auxiliary looked like it might be a good place to give something back to the community. Since I don't own a boat that would make a suitable Auxiliary facility, I thought that having the radio amateur license would give me a useful skillset that I could bring to the Auxiliary. Much has happened over the ens...

  What makes unoriginal ideas unoriginal One in a series that probably ends here   About a year and a half ago I wrote an article in which I tried to break down some things that I thought made a couple rock music recordings sound particularly good. Inspired by the liner notes from jazz albums of the 1960s, I wrote the article in a way that assumed the audience had more than a rudimentary understanding of music, but I stayed away from diving too deeply into music theory. Instead I looked at the subtle things musicians do to take the chord changes and the melodies that they already have and make them sound more interesting, what musicians refer to as musicality , or, more informally, feel . At the time, I promised that the piece would be one in an occasional series on what makes good music good. That series never materialized. When I wrote the article, framing it as part of an occasional series was intended to be a reference to a column that would sometimes appear in Harper's ...

Acknowledgement: I submitted what I thought—by the standards of a frustrated writer with no formal training—was a halfway decent first draft to my friend Nicole Bailey. Her pointed observations gave me the insight to take this story in an entirely new direction, one that I didn't even think possible. For Nicole's keen eye for substance an unfailing eye for style, I am deeply grateful. The rally came in the bottom of the sixth, with two out. The Padres tied the game at 3 on a homer by Fernando Tatís Jr, complete with his characteristic stutter step between second and third. Now Machado was on second, hoping to be the go-ahead run. Eric Hosmer, the Padres' somewhat maligned first baseman, made the short walk from the on-deck circle to the batter's box. It wasn't completely fair, Derrick thought from his second-deck seat. Hosmer's tenure in San Diego had been streaky and one could make the case that he had underperformed, but he could come through in the clutch. De...

  Preface It has become cliché to point out that with respect to social media, you are not the customer, but rather the product. In a narrowly focused sense, this is true; social media companies, just like traditional media companies, rely on advertising revenue as their source of cash flow. When a media organization's sales department calls on an ad buyer, the value proposition they're offering is typically a description of the size and demographic makeup of the audience they intend to deliver.  The description of social media users as product might be true but misleadingly so. For starters, it's a description of something we're already used to.  Broadcast radio has relied on advertising revenue since the 1920s; television's revenue model has been ad-based since its inception in the late 1940s. For print media, which traditionally draw revenue in roughly equal parts from readers and advertisers, it's been about half true for even longer. As shocking as it might...