The Ek’s Files

I’m shocked and amazed. The liberal media (well, one person, anyway) has spoken out against gun control.

John Stossel, an ABC News correspondent and co-anchor of ABC’s 20/20, wrote in the Appeal-Democrat that people still die in a ‘gunless utopia’, and that we shouldn’t confuse gun control for crime control. Stossel cites studies that show that various gun laws around the country have completely failed to dent the gun crime rate, and points out that violent crime has actually risen since Washington, DC completely banned handgun ownership. To John Stossel I say, “Bravo!”

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I’m an Ubuntu user. I made the switch a few months ago. I like it, and I won’t be switching back to Windows. Ubuntu is great, but I’ve never been able to understand the near-religious fervor adopted by aficionados of linux (or Mac, for that matter) when they talk about their beloved operating systems.

Ubuntu isn’t that much better than Windows XP. My installation of Windows XP was always extremely stable, and I haven’t found Ubuntu to be superior in that regard. I made the switch more for philosophical reasons than anything. I was having a big problem envisioning myself running Windows Vista in the future. Vista contains nothing that I find compels me to want to upgrade, and seems to have been created mainly as a vehicle to generate sales for Microsoft. Not that there’s anything wrong with MS trying to make money, but in my opinion there’s little added value. Was I running an operating system or a marketing tool? So I decided to make the switch to Ubuntu.

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We had a little episode of insanity at my workplace yesterday. Mind you, this is a large company (over 100,000 employees), so insanity is probably more prevalent here than in other places. For obvious reasons, the identity of my employer shall not be revealed here.

It all began when someone sent an email regarding the status of one of our HR systems to the wrong email distribution list. Unfortunately, the distribution list that was chosen was a large one, and the contents of the email didn’t pertain to the vast majority of its recipients. My coworkers and I were among those recipients, of course. Those of you who work in the corporate world (i.e. Dilbert’s World) can probably guess what happened next.

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Here is the 4Nec2 input file for my shortened antenna model:

Short vertical NEC input file

I welcome any comments on the validity of the model.

Note that I make no claims that this is a super antenna. It works. It appears to suit my needs, given the constraints under which I designed it. I’ve documented my antenna design and building efforts here in my blog mainly so anyone who might be interested in learning about and using antenna modeling software like 4Nec2 might find the information useful. In my case, the model appears to predict behavior that’s consistent with the actual performance of the antenna. This is good–and cool.

It’s high time I posted a few pics of my new antenna. First, the loading coil. This was made from a stock MFJ inductor (3″ dia, 10 turns/inch). the center rod is a nylon rod I purchased from U.S. Plastic, and the brass fittings are 1/8″ NPT couplers and a nipple from McMaster-Carr.

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ars technica has an interesting review of an IEEE Security & Privacy article that argues that the massive electronic surveillance being drooled over by U.S. security agencies in the name of national security has the very real potential for making us less secure rather than safer. The issue is that, as massive amounts of data are accumulated and mined by our own intelligence forces, that same data becomes an attractive target for hostile intelligence agencies to use against us if they can compromise it. Read the rest of this entry »

Up to now I’ve been using XLog for logging ham radio QSOs in Ubuntu, but I gotta say I’ve never really liked it much. The user interface leaves a lot to be desired in terms of being unambiguous. I’d been using XMLog for doing my general logging under Windows–it’s a great free program that allows me to easily import contacts from my contest logger and exports to ADIF for sending to Logbook of the World. So, this morning I decided to see if I could get XMLog to run under Wine in Ubuntu 7.10.

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I was able to steal some time this weekend to construct the 20m shortened vertical I’d been designing using 4Nec2. It didn’t turn out quite like I was planning, but it’s good nevertheless. I used half-inch-dia aluminum tubing and a section of an MFJ prewound coil to build it, and I used construction techniques stolen largely from AD5X’s portable vertical design. The main differences between his design and my implementation are

1. I used a single 6-ft aluminum tubing section on the bottom instead of constructing multiple smaller sections.
2. I used another single 6-ft aluminum tubing section above the coil instead of the telescoping antenna.
3. My coil used only 3″ or so of the MFJ prewound coil, and I used a length of nylon rod instead of wooden dowel. Mine is also tappable with an alligator clip.
4. My antenna has a 30″ brass rod forming a tee at the top of the radiating element, as a capacity hat.

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