N6QW -- Left Coast Radio

Less than 4 Weeks until 2021 --- Looking ahead to what is needed from Technology! December 7, 2020 Never Forget Pearl Harbor -- A Day of Infamy More things that I wished could be cured with a liberal dose of New Technology. Butt ... Pete N6QW We have seen some pretty amazing technology advances this year and many have or will directly affect our hobby. Today I saw a single board computer for sale on Amazon (~ $60) that is geared toward AI and has a built in high quality display so it will follow faces and do facial recognition. Imagine saying --tune 7.255 MHz so I can hear a bunch of supposed adults use profane and vulgar language. Boom, your rig does just that and tunes 7.255 Megahertz! Wow! But here are some technology things I would like to see come out in 2021.  A filter system implemented on January 20th 2021, that  for Trump, anytime he tweets or opens his mouth or tries to hold a rally it is automatically filtered from my computer, phone and TV. This would do much to heal this n

As 2020 Winds Down there is but one Conclusion ... Rolling your own rig is Over! 11/29/2020 Hackaday has some info that matches what I have said Ham Radio Needs To Embrace The Hacker Community Now More Than Ever | Hackaday ************************************************* Wow that should draw the ire of the homebrew community both far and wide. But ask these questions and see if you do not reach the same conclusion?  How often do you hear that some one is making contacts running a home constructed station? Or how often you personally work a station running a homebrew transceiver? Percent wise does it ever hit three percent? (One % would be a likely landslide.) The homebrewers as a set are mostly old timers wanting to live the glory days of yesteryear. But ask how many hams under 30, completely build their stations? Conversely most over 60 will say they used to build stuff; but state the eye hand coordination is gone. Those in between likely have families and other commitments and thus

  The Why you should Buy! Get an HL2. November 20, 2020 ~ Some Musings.  This is not about radio stuff! Next week we will start the Holiday Season with Thanksgiving and in about a month will be Christmas. Please follow the CDC advice about Holiday gatherings. Simply stated, DON'T travel or have large gatherings. But I want to reflect about a Holiday gathering on December 24th 1945. It was a celebratory day as just a week before I turned four years old and on that day, my Dad and four Uncles had all returned home from the war -- all were alive and looking forward to restarting their lives.  The first question I asked my Dad was if I was going to get a "knife gun" for Christmas which was the next day. He said something to me which I have never forgotten: "He said Petey, (the name I was always called, as his name was Pete too) you never want a knife gun, as it has only one purpose and that is to kill others." Fast forward exactly 20 years and in December 1965 there

 The HL2 = The Real Winner for 2020!     November 14th, 2020 ~ The Cool Stuff   The Computer I am using for the HL2 is one I built several years ago and it has a 3 GHZ CPU and 8 GB of Ram. The HDD is 1TB. I had installed Windows 7 Professional on it and thereafter discovered I had a fake copy of Win 7. So as I was thinking about improving the computer situation for the HL2 -- Boom it hit me --- convert this nice computer to Linux Mint 64. That was a huge success.  The MB is a Gigabyte and had two video output ports on the back panel, One was a standard VGA and the other a DVI. Rummaging through a box of computer parts, I discovered that I had a DVi to HDMI adapter. Now I could hook up a HDMI monitor to this jewel. I set about doing that but neglected to remove the VGA cable. Double Boom --like getting hooked up with the hottie cheerleader in high school! Now both monitors worked and I could move the mouse back and forth across the two screens. By some strange quirk I got the QUISK scre