San Antonio Hams

I watched this video and thought “Wow, KC3VO is like W2IK on steroids”, but after second thought, decided that even though W2IK likes to invent stuff like this that works better than the ordinary store bought stufff, but he wouldn’t be dumb enough run something like this so close to his own body.

At 1kW power, Bob Curry KC3VO (the inventor) says he gets 1 hour of transmit time, and about 15 minutes at the full 2kW power level. The antenna used for the demo was restricted to 500watts.  I checked out KC3VO on www.qrz.com and found that he lives only about 3 miles north of Washington, DC, in Adelphi, Maryland, and has a Honda Goldwing motorcycle set up for HF operations also.  He works as the full time commercial transmitter engineer for a high power UHF TV station, which might explain some of his need doses of high power RF signals in his body. 🙂

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Bexar County ARES holds its monthly meetings on the 1st Tuesday of the month, and rotates the location between the American Red Cross HQ (Houston St & Commerce St), and the SA City EOC down at Brooks City Base.   This month, about 18 members of the local ARES group met in the American Red Cross HQ and later toured the radio room. One member (Shane NS5D) was out supporting a brush fire that SAFD had rolled out to support with their command bus, and another member ( Ray AE5HN) responded to a Red Cross support call and had to leave the meeting early.

Focus for tonight’s meeting, led by Bexar County ARES EC David K5OLE, was the subject of Hurricane Preparedness, how much advance time to expect, how accurate of a guess re landfall center to expect, when to expect to be deployed back down on the coast for the recovery phase. The second focus was a planned antenna party for the morning of August 29th to take down and repair the dipole antennas at the Red Cross, then reinstall them on the roof.  Contact any ARES AEC for details if you want to volunteer to help.

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RadioShack is getting a marketing makeover. Starting August 6, the venerable electronics retailer will change its name to “The Shack,” a rebranding move designed to shed the last-century association with creaky radio technology and embrace today’s digital wireless world.

To celebrate the name change, RadioShack will conduct a “Shack Summer Netogether,” a live event featuring two 17-foot laptop computers in New York and San Francisco. Equipped with Webcams, the gargantuan notebooks will allow live video and audio exchanges between the two cities.

Wow, a 17-foot laptop? That’s bigger than some RadioShack stores I’ve been in. <rimshot>

Read full PCWORLD.COM article here

I got up early this morning to check the status of a remote restore that I was doing for one of my company’s clients.   Everything was wonderful until about 8am when my computer started making a strange humming sound.   The hard drive light lit up even though nothing was actively accessing the drives (that I had initiated), the light stayed lit like something was really going to town.

Then the light went off, and the noise stopped.  Whew!

Except when I clicked the link to my email program, it said “searching for program…”   What the heck?    And when I opened Windows Explorer, it told me that my “D”, “E” and “F” drives were missing.    Now I know I hadn’t approved any vacation time for my hard drives, and that 500gb drive was probably less than a year or two old,  but it was gone!

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