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description= Originally a pair of views on gaming, it s now musings by Redbeard on video games (mainly MMOs), board games, RPGs, and other geeky hobbies.;
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august, mmo, rpg, the, 27, 2025, tuesday, 2024, podcasts, blogroll, links, my, adventures, over, airwaves, part, wednesday, 26, saturday, 31, thursday, june, 23, 2016, pages, reference, youtube, channels, blog, archive, blogs, in, mothballs, past, pc, contributors, labels, on, beautiful, blue, danube, this, is, london, nothing, lasts, forever, just, an, ambulance, chaser, working, away, as, memes, go,
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Text of the page (random words):
the transmitter but don t turn it on unless you ve got it hooked up to an antenna or it ll fry the circuits i made a mental note of that tuned into one of the local am stations on the hallicrafters radio and got back to work when my day ended i went back to the radio and began flipping to different bands surely if there was any radio that might receive shortwave stations it was this one lo and behold something came out of the radio it was in spanish but it was better than nothing i got an actual shortwave signal so knowing now that shortwave radio wasn t a myth i did what i usually do when confronted with a problem i was eager to know the answer for research i went to a bookstore at the mall and roamed the stacks until i finally found what i was looking for in the electronics and hobbies section i then visited the radio shack at the mall and picked up another book so i had this as my haul if you re old enough and into science electronics you might recognize the publisher of the one on the right tab books yes it still exists as an imprint of mcgraw hill education the radio shack book was very light on details but it did provide a basic framework on shortwave radio the other one the complete shortwave listener s handbook was much better overall it provided me with real details as to how radios worked and more importantly how shortwave radio worked i also learned that those old portable radios such as the one my parents had were terrible for shortwave reception the book also explained how the shortwave bands were active at certain times of the day the higher frequencies in the morning afternoon and the lower frequencies in the evening night and broadcasters would take advantage of those differences to change the frequencies they broadcast based on the time of day finally the book recommended the world radio tv handbook to get access to the current listings of shortwave frequencies okay i thought back to the bookstore i couldn t find the world radio tv handbook but i did find something that looked like it might be almost as good i haven t kept all of them but a few are worth keeping for sentimental value as the cover says the 1989 passport to world band radio in it s own way the passport to world band radio was even better than the wrth because there were easy to follow reviews reviews of shortwave stations both reception and content and there was a huge section in the back showing the shortwave band activity in a graphical format if you zoom in you ll see some old stations such as radio moscow and radio yugoslavia from the 1989 passport to world band radio using the 1989 passport as a guide i learned to surf the bands and listen in while i was working the professor i worked for finally tired of hearing shortwave all the time and told me to listen when he wasn t around i also learned that in the absence of a real antenna just using random wire as long as you can make it is your best bet so i did what any self respecting student would do cut some wire from the huge spools in the basement storage of sherman hall the basement that at one time was a student run nuclear reactor and ran it out of a second floor classroom and down to the basement i then brought the wire into the lab i worked at and to the hallcrafters radio and it was like magic the bands opened up and i could hear all over the world the thing was i really couldn t take that radio home with me i did ask the department chair if i could have the radio and he said is there a department tag on it no i replied he just gave me a look as if to say there s your answer the thing was i couldn t justify taking it back to my dorm it was heavy and my then roommate would not have been amused living on the eastern side of the us radio australia was always a more difficult station to catch from the 1989 passport to world band radio that fall i resolved to buy a shortwave radio of my own and since i now had a dorm room to myself i didn t have to worry about annoying any roommates thankfully one of the best rated portable shortwave radios could be found at my local radio shack it s the one on the bottom left definitely not the one on the right from radioshackcatalogs com that page from the 1989 radio shack catalog was right up my alley there were shortwave radios a cb radio base station and some handheld cb radios but the focus of my attention was the realistic dx 440 a radio shack rebrand of sangean s ats 803a it may have not been the highest rated portable radio of its era that belonged to sony s icf 2010 but it was fairly well regarded and could easily be found at the thousands of radio shack stores across the country oh look the dx 440 on the top of the right hand page later editions of the passport to world band radio revised the rating upward to 3 1 2 stars from the 1989 passport to world band radio all i had to do was scrape up 200 to buy one that actually didn t turn out to be as big of a problem as i thought it would be since i worked about 15 20 hours a week for the physics department as a lab instructor and a lab assistant and the radio went on sale a lot one week in october i found it on sale for 179 and i somehow managed to scrape together the money got to the closest radio shack to campus i think i borrowed a friend s car and bought it before they closed for the night i still have the radio it s sitting behind me atop the bookshelf the strap is in storage but i have it too the box is long since gone however the clock is set to utc time i listened to shortwave religiously in the mornings before class and when i was in the dorm on the weekends and in less than a month later i was eternally grateful for blowing a month s worth of pay on the dx 440 because i had a ringside seat listening to the warsaw pact implode from wikipedia by sue ream cc by 3 0 https commons wikimedia org w index php curid 8377443 the day the berlin wall fell november 9th was just one of a series of events that proved to me anyway the relevancy of shortwave radio getting to hear the news reports at the berlin wall from radio deutsche welle the velvet revolution from the newly independent journalists of radio prague the broadcasts from the invasion of kuwait by the bbc world service in 1990 and the failed soviet coup of 1991 from radio moscow who defied the communist party and began reporting without the official state bias were all ingrained into my mind this is the version i remember this was back when the reds were the best team in baseball kind of hard to imagine that now but the 1975 and 1976 teams were two of the best baseball teams of all time it s weird really but if you re of the right age when a sports team was dominant you just accepted that things were always going to be that way the reds playing in the world series manchester united winning the premier league the new england patriots winning the super bowl the detroit red wings winning nhl s stanley cup it had long since been decommissioned and no it wasn t the sort that would create a nuclear accident akin to three mile island the isotopes used were very tame but the reactor did provide some power so no i m not gonna get cancer at least from that about a year later i was in that same classroom with a professor and two grad students talking about something and one of the grad students noticed the wire i d tied to a corner of the window what is that wire there for he asked looks like someone put that wire there as an antenna the professor replied with a look at me i feigned innocence but i knew i d been found out i still miss our classes together dr graham i m still not sure how that happened but while i did request a single i assumed that i was going to get stuck with a roommate i mean that happened for my sophomore year when the person i was to room with decided to not return to ud and that meant i was grouped with a freshman that was an interesting experience that day was also quite important because that was the day that my now wife and i started dating that was before i got back to my dorm and turned on the radio to find the reports about the berlin wall i was a wee bit distracted you know blaugust2025 posted by redbeard at 6 00 am 4 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels blaugust2025 adventures over the airwaves radio shortwave saturday august 31 2024 nothing lasts forever i don t know what life is like where you live but we ve been in the middle of a drought that s gone on for about two months we did have several days worth of rain right in the middle of the drought but it wasn t enough to actually break it the occasional thunderstorm hasn t exactly helped much either since the rain simply rolls off of the hardened earth and down the storm drains the heat hasn t been unbearable save for this week it s just been dry so with that in mind there haven t been a lot of reasons for me to work outside much i ve been taking a couple weeks worth of break from working on the deck because i needed to recover from helping my oldest move and i wasn t planning on baking outside in that heat this week so what have i been up to cleaning and organizing not exactly fun work per se but it is satisfying to see some of my stuff finally get organized we also have an electronics recycling coming up in a couple of months so i finally decided that it was time to clear out some spare parts and whatnot that i won t be using ever again such as 15 year old graphics cards from our old microsoft vista machine that is also going away that pc missed the last recycling day because i hadn t properly wiped the hard drive so i m not going to take any chances and will do that work sometime in late september that cleaning was how i rediscovered my old scanner and i ve also found some of the doodads you need to set up a shortwave antenna outside as i organized the parts i noticed i was missing a few items so i hopped on to my go to site for all things shortwave universal radio to see what the prices were to fill in the gaps on my supplies universal is in the suburbs of columbus a couple of hours drive away so i always felt good about supporting the semi local economy when i bought items from them alas this is what i found when i went to their online catalog you have to expand it to read it properly i knew that this day might come but november 2020 how did i not know this before now this isn t the first store that i ve supported that has closed its doors for the owners retirement boardwalk hobby shop on the east side of town shut down in 2020 2021 and if i had the money i would have loved to have bought the place to keep it running since i knew i didn t know beans about actually running a business let alone a game store i had to pass i first walked through that door in 1991 not knowing what to expect from davion m via yelp it hurts seeing this from the mt lookout business association but still i spent a lot of time in that store my kids grew up going there with me and marilyn one of the owners used to hold the kids when they were infants myra s dionysus a small mediterranean inspired restaurant near the university of cincinnati was a fun place to eat at from this article by citybeat that came out a year before myra s closed in 2014 it was in the storefront of a century old building a hole in the wall place really but it was one of the first places i d ever eaten at that had a heavily vegetarian menu when my youngest decided to become a vegetarian myra s became more than just a place to eat at but an inspiration when myra s closed because she was in her 80s and wanted to retire that hurt i couldn t begrudge her retirement years but i really miss that place at least myra s daughter has begun posting some of myra s old recipes at myra s kitchen legacy i ve made the hummus and it is dead on for what we used to eat at myra s these are all memories now i never quite understood when people my grandparents age used to talk about places that don t exist such as some of the theaters downtown but i do now it s both a blessing and a curse of aging i suppose to see things change and long for what once was but time does move on and new memories are always made we don t live forever so we shouldn t expect our world to remain constant either blaugust2024 posted by redbeard at 6 00 am no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels blaugust2024 boardgames musings restaurants shortwave tuesday august 27 2024 just an ambulance chaser working away one of the things that i ve been doing since my oldest moved out is clean part of it is simply cleaning the areas where the guinea pigs once had their cages but beyond that i ve begun moving stuff around as i clean so that i can finally give the house a thorough cleaning it s not had in at least a decade normally this is a spring cleaning sort of thing but since i m taking a short break from working on the deck and given the heat this week that s very much a good thing i ve channeled my energies toward making my space that much cleaner instead alas for me that means i ve been hit with nostalgia of a different sort right now i ve got this out of the basement cleaned up thank you isopropyl alcohol and currently scanning away it s a radio shack pro 2035 i acquired that from a yard sale before i began playing wow so probably sometime around 2006 2008 for the grand total of 35 considering the original list price of 449 99 in 1995 that was a pretty damn good deal for a while i wondered why the person was selling it so cheaply but a few years afterward i discovered why he sold what was at one time the top of the line scanner that radio shack had cincinnati police and fire were moving toward a trunked system which this scanner could not receive still there are quite a few broadcasts in my local area that can be received by this scanner so this afternoon i ve been hearing about all of the paramedic and fire department activity within several miles of my house i was never really a scanner listener although when i did that 8 month stint at radio shack we did have our then top of the line scanner up and running which made for very interesting listening when there was nobody in the store there was a mcdonalds about a football field away and the things people said into the hot mic while waiting to order at the drive thru made me realize i should keep my mouth shut while in a drive thru lane for a while these scanners used to be able to listen in on old style cellular phone calls that became a bit of a political problem early in the 90s when a scanner listener happened to listen in on a conversation between top level republican congressmen discussing strategy via cell phone and as a consequence of that leaked conversation a law was quickly passed banning the cell frequencies from these scanners that s not an issue now given that digital communications have advanced significantly since those days but it did highlight digital privacy issues even way back when i don t really...
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