AmateurRadio.com

For someone as plagued with HF band interference as me this sounds like a sick joke or an April 1 spoof that passed it’s read-by date. The Electromagnetic Compatibility Industry Association (bet you didn’t even know there was one) has announced a contest to see who can detect interference furthest from a power line adapter installation. Yes, really. There are two prizes: the Long Distance Award (LDX) for the person who detects interference the greatest distance from the installation, and the Most Typical prize (MTY) for the entrant whose detection distance is closest to the median value.

Well I suppose when interference blots out HF entirely we need to use our radios for something. I believe a CQ WW Wi-Fi contest in the offing. You collect SSIDs for multipliers. Double points if the network is unencrypted.

This isn’t original, though I’ve edited it a bit. It was sent to me as one of those chain emails, so my apologies if you have already seen it. But I thought it was so true, I just had to share it. I think everyone should read it.

To all who were born in the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s and 60s!

We were born to mothers who smoked or drank while they carried us and lived in houses full of asbestos. They took aspirin, ate blue cheese, raw egg products, bacon and processed meat, tuna from a can, and didn’t get tested for diabetes or cervical cancer.

Our baby cots were covered with bright coloured lead-based paints. We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets. We rode in cars with no seat belts or air bags. We rode our bikes without helmets or shoes.

The shops closed at 5pm and didn’t open on Sundays, but we didn’t starve! Our only take away food was fish and chips – no pizza shops, Burger King or McDonald’s. We ate crisps with salt in them, white bread with real butter, drank full cream milk and soft drinks with sugar in them, but we weren’t overweight because we were always outside playing!

We rode bikes or walked to school and didn’t get abducted. Our teachers would hit us with canes and gym shoes and bullies ruled the playground. It didn’t harm us.

When we wanted our friends we would just walk or ride round there and yell for them. No one was able to reach us all day. We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.

We collected old drink bottles and cashed them in at the corner store to buy toffees, gobstoppers, bubblegum and bangers to blow up frogs with. We would spend hours building go-karts out of old prams and then ride down the hill, only to find out we had no brakes. We built tree houses and dens and played in river beds with matchbox cars. We were given air guns and catapults for our birthdays. We fell out of trees, got cut and dirty, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo Wii, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 999 channels on satellite TV, no video/dvd movies, no mobile phones, no personal computers, no Internet, no Internet chat rooms. When we wanted to make friends we went outside and found them!

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility and we learned how to deal with it. And you are one of them. Congratulations for surviving despite so many difficulties!

I have been browsing for information about various circuits recently. Two books that are often recommended are “Solid State Design for the Radio Amateur” (which is now quite old) and its successor “Experimental Methods in RF Design”. I decided to get a copy of the latter and was gobsmacked to find on Amazon.co.uk that only used copies are available, priced from £557.14. No, that’s not a misprint, it’s about 800 bucks in real money.

I clicked over to Amazon.com and found the same book listed as available new for a slightly more reasonable (joke) $600.00, or I could buy a used one for a whisker under $500.00. Who are these sellers kidding? Do people really pay $600 for a book that was published by the ARRL in 2003 with a cover price of about $40? I wish I’d invested in a pile of them – they would have been a better return on my investment than my shareholdings (sick joke.)

I browsed down the Amazon.com page to see the usual stuff Amazon tells you about a book and found that 37% of people (rich or insane people, presumably) buy the item featured on the page, while 36% buy “Experimental Mathods (sic – not a joke) in RF Design” for a mere $42.70. That’s 36% who can’t spell, I guess, but I can live with a misprint in the title if it saves me $550.

But seriously, what’s going on here? Is “Experimental Mathods” a pirate copy using a mis-spelt title to avoid copyright infringement? Is a joke being played on somebody? If I buy it will I receive something other than what I expected, like searching for “mammaries” instead of “memories” on Google? I’m off to confused.com.