09:56 – It was 62.6F (17C) when I took Colin out around 0700 this morning, mostly cloudy. Barbara is off to the gym. We’re working on kit stuff this afternoon.
Barbara brought home a “Herd Starter Kit” from the golf tournament yesterday. It’s a small plastic bag that contains what looks like four Lima bean seeds with black spots on them. But the label assures us that if we plant them properly and keep them watered they’ll produce four heifers to get our herd started. No instructions, alas, on when and how to pick them or how to save seeds to ensure an ongoing supply of cows.
As I was looking up my own ham radio license in the FCC database yesterday, I had a thought. I started checking to see if various PA novelists were in the database. Franklin Horton is, although the FCC thinks he lives in Huntington Beach, CA. Chris Weatherman (AKA Angery American) is, under his real address in Umatilla, FL. Steven Bird is, also under his real address. I was surprised that Konkoly isn’t in the database. Nor is Forstchen, Akart, Craven, Mann, nor numerous other PA novelists.
Then I started looking up people who have prepping websites. Lisa Bedford (Survival Mom) is in there, as is Pat Henry. There are ten Creekmore listings, but none of them for M. D., nor is Rawles in there, nor several others that I’d have expected to find.
Being a good boy, I’ve played by the rules. I haven’t keyed the transmitter on any of my 2-meter/440 handhelds because I wasn’t yet licensed. So now the next step is to get these things programmed and working. The BaoFeng programming cables are a PITA. Supposedly, the name-brand ones just work, with Windows or Linux, because they have a current chipset. The cheap ones, including the ones supplied by most BaoFeng vendors, use an older chipset. If you try to use the cable under Linux, it just doesn’t work. If you try to use it under Windows, it downloads an old driver that screws up your Windows installation even worse than Microsoft screws it up to start with.
I do have one of the official BaoFeng cables that does work, but it’s buried downstairs behind stacks of furniture and other stuff. So my choices at this point are to wait until I can get to it or to program this UV-82 manually with the local 2M repeater frequencies.