The World's First UrbanSurvival Site
From our house to yours – a very merry and cheery. This is a good day to keep your emotional guard up, though. The play on human emotions doesn’t take time off. Though, at times it should. First three Christmas Day points of life in the Outback? Right at dawn, the sound of a heavy rifle. No doubt a deer being taken. We’re not big on hunting, preferring aged prime rib roast to all that …
A Convenience Store Based Antenna Ham radio operators world-wide would love an antenna that is cheap, easily built out of locally available parts – and outperforms both standard dipole antennas and other commonly-built wires. Well, here it is…. After almost a year of modeling our ideas for a “Super Antenna” the design was locked. It was built and put on the air during the CQ Worldwide contest last week. It was a pile-up buster. (To non …
Ear Yee! Ear Yee! Hear all about it! This is a fine weekend to work on your home sound system, isn’t it? We are going through a modest upgrade to the home studio here at UrbanSurvival in order to get back into podcasting with gear that sounds (slightly) better than run-of-the-mill podcasts. In the process, you might enjoy a walk-through of several audio/sound concepts that may immeasurably increase your enjoyment of the “hi-fi” experience. Whatza …
Site Work Done — (Yes???) Done!!! (?) OK, Frisbee – check it out. UrbanSurvival should be loading a bit faster now and says on all the fancy software ‘meters’ it’s working. Links seem to be there, people comments and remarks are appearing…and so forth. It will take a little time to move around the web, as these things go. That’s because of caching of sites that takes place (they claim ‘invisibly’ but that’s a crock – …
While we’re waiting for the market to crater tomorrow… [May load slow due to length and a zillion graphics] This may be a bit on the “longish” today, so if you need to pee or get coffee…better do that first. We’ll wait for you…. Four topics this morning: Best first ham radio stations, how to bug-out program a 2-meter rig, one of our “Lost Industrial Arts” discussions of tool sharpening, and last but now least …
Why is it 4:15 AM and why is Ure running antenna models? The answer is simple: The end of summer is upon us. When the weather cools down, things here heat up. Hot coffee on a cool more, clear head, and a zillion ideas to run down. But first…. Goodbye Swamp Cooler A couple of years back I did all the science I could throw at the problem of cooling the shop down for summertime …
If you were to drop by for a cup of coffee in real life – you wouldn’t be welcomed. We’re still “hot zone” mode out here. If you follow the virus numbers, looks like 18-million will be passed tomorrow. And 19-million this coming week. Thursday? Dream Shop Progresses Up early this morning to take advantage of the cool (<70) morning out here to rearrange the shop. Takes time and actual work. A good part of …
My bad. I missed Ham Radio Field Day. It was last weekend. As happens the last weekend in June each year, amateur radio operators (include from our club in town) and my buddy The Major‘s club is up in the Seattle area; he and some buds headed for the hills and remotest of places. From which the contest called Field Day revolved around how many contacts, in how many states and countries, a small team …
One of the great lessons of management is knowing when to “hire an expert.” Well, Brian at our hosting provider, EMWD.com is the Man today. All of our server-side woes are fixed! “Hi George, I found the problem and fixed it. You had a .htaccess file from a plugin called WebP Express (https://wordpress.org/plugins/webp-express/) that was preventing those images from loading. The directives in that file had limited browser support which explains why it was working …
As everyone is (or should be) aware, there will be more “demonstrations” and “protests” this weekend on the pretext of the George Floyd death. Unfortunately, subversive and anti-American organizations of all political extremes will likely use the genuine expression of “peaceably assemble” and “free speech” as a justification for riots and further insurrection attempts. We believe because of this, that we’re in a time of elevated risk to the Internet. Here’s how the internet operates: …
Ure is a gen-u-ine QRQ Extra Class Ham Radio geek. QRQ means high speed Morse Code and some of us believe it enables a “direct digital” part of the brain. Extra Class because there’s no higher certification offered. And geek? You don’t need help on that part… What is a Super-Antenna A Super-Antenna is something anyone can make and easily deploy, costs less than $200-bucks, and has amazing performance. Super-Antenna I, which I put up …