Yeah…besides being a convenient place to stash a half ounce of bud, which we don’t, but let’s pretend, the lowly sandwich bag may be my salvation when it comes to putting a mag-mount antenna on my wife’s car.
Check this out:
Well, still a pretty weak justification for CB you gave. You could get the same stuff from local ham ops on 2mtrs as you pass by.
So what I am writing about, I am SCANDALIZED you don’t know how to avoid scratches from the mag mount on the paint. IT IS SO SIMPLE. Just put a zip lock sandwich bag on the roof and put the mag mount on that. No scratches. Stays on just fine. At least up to 80mph in my experience. (my deceased partner Judy had a mag mount on her Jeep Cherokee fyi).
Myself, I detest mag mounts. On all my cars which have been a number, I ALWAYS just bored a hole and put a Larson 5/8 or 1/4 wave mobile antenna in there so I could use 2mtrs. My CRX SI has it on the back spoiler, works great. Nice Kenwood mobile in the car. Don’t do HF mobile now, years ago I did in my MG TD with a webster band spanner antenna.
If I wanted to use HF mobile I would DRILL A HOLE. Like I said I detest mag mounts. I confess I do have a 5/8 wave mag mount for my 2mtr base station here at home. BECAUSE I have a metal roof. So…putting an unused mag mount 5/8 up there was a real simple way to have a nice 2mtr base antenna. And I can hit all 12 repeaters in our very large county with it. Cool. (Humboldt County BTW),
Have a nice trip. I still like your airplane.
I still like the airplane, too, and I’m still only 80% committed to the car. All it will take is the right-sized box and zing! the plane it will be, provided there is a PERFECT weather window. I’m all about flying when I can, especially over the beautiful Rockies, but even a hint of clouds and I’m back to the car idea….but we still have some time to run on that.
I did have a “Hold it, dude!” from another fellow ham (with an Extra Class ticket):
G,
Don’t know if you are aware, but the app “RepeaterBook, free on Google Play lists repeaters by distance starting with the closest one to your phone. It also provides all the info you need to access them.
Hold it, dude: When we’re traveling, there are still huge areas with a) no cell phones and b) no repeaters. So if we needed the 2-meter HT and we’re not in cell range…you following me here? No repeater directory?
Oh…and one other fellow ham admitted that lots of the repeaters have moved or put on tones for access, so that’s screwed up the accuracy of things.
The only sure-fire bet for perfect communications on the road would be a mobile kilowatt on the Maritime Mobile net on ‘20 (14.300 USB thanks for asking) or a sat-phone and even then, neither one of those will work well after EMP, at least for a few days….
Although the cacophony of 14.313 will likely persist through it all…
Seasonal Hotel Prices
Speaking of our plans and going north for the heat of the summer, this hasn’t been a bad one, at least so far. Normally, by this time of year, everything is dried out and ugly around here, but this year things look pretty darn good.
I did find that hotel prices are a heck of a lot more seasonal than I thought including (especially?) those on the road from Texas to Washington where places like Moab, Utah have hotel prices pushing $200 bucks for some at this time of the year.
With the airplane, we would do three days of flying (4.5 hours per day) and we’d overnight in Dodge City, KS and Sheridan, Wyoming and then KSHR to KGEG via KMLP. So two hotel nights and with the option to overnight at KHLN (Helena) if Mullan Pass gets socked in.
The car route would have overnights in Amarillo, Loveland, Colorado or Ft. Collins, then Ogden and lastly Baker City, Oregon…but that’s four overnights and schlepping everything – and five days of driving and missing Spokane where we have relatives.
Even using the AARP discounts, the seasonality of the hotel prices pushed things another couple of hundred in the direction of the air machine. So a word to the wise here: The earlier you can make travel plans, the better.
Electric Body Readings
Reader Rick, a regular contributor, pointed to the story of Waldo– an old sci-fi story by Robert Heinlein foresaw new electrics of some kind.
The jury is out on whether the “waldos” was a notional precursor to “smart” nano tech.
Pardon My Paranoia…BUT…..
But I have a big internet provider and all of a sudden, some of the graphics and links on my home page (over here) stopped working. A call to the company (CenturyLink) resulted in the helpful customer service rep telling me that they had “an issue” but he walked me through fixing it.
And this gets me to the point:
Right now, you likely have your local ISP default IPV4 internet settings. And, this means if someone has a problem with their dynamic host control protocol (DHCP) you might find sites *(in my case WeatherUnderground and Drudge to name two) just “disappeared” and no amount of “fixing” would bring them up.
Google’s public DNS IP’s are 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. but if you really want to expand your horizons a bit, you might want to use a DNS which is perhaps a bit more discrete.
A good article on Practically Networked mentions my fave: OPENDNS and there are others as well.
If you’ve ever found the Internet gives you ANY errors in pages not being served (including and especially UrbanSurvival and Peoplenomics!)_ check out the DNS settings.
In my case, it came back to me that I’d written this up on the old site content (somewhere) but I haven’t put it out lately…and when one computer was hitting the net (my mothership/master control machine) and others weren’t, the answer quickly became apparent…
Our independent views are pretty damn independent and no doubt have pissed off a few (how shall we say this?) entities so one way to make sure you’re getting the full range and experience of what the internet has to offer is to use a third-party DNS.
Oh, and take your paranoia meds, lol.
And for the Truly Paranoid…
Rumors are going around that CDC and DHS are planning for a mass casualty event here in the U.S.
Like the administration needs help, so far? Between Insurocare and Bordercare, we don’t seem to need much more…but the big decline will likely be 2016-2017 when the outgo from stocks and savings will ramp up with elders tipping further into gray and sipping more green…and without a bunch of greater fools to buy stocks…
Say, any of them immi-kids on the border have eTrade of ‘MeriTrade accounts yet?
But just as a social note, it’s interesting how the doomporn would takes their cues from contemporary telly.
The series The Last Ship: Phase Six / Falling Skies: Ghost in the Machine [HD] is a little confusing: The first half is the pilot for Last Ship while the latest in the Falling Skies series was the second half.
Frankly, I couldn’t get past the baby/kid-centric crap early in FS, but Last Ship was decent through last night’s epi.
(Suits seems back in the groove now, too…)
OK, have a fine weekend, Peoplenomics tomorrow (Shall we built a neural network to predict markets in a spreadsheet?)
Write when you break-even
George george@ure.net