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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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never gotten any stations to come in either so that was what i thought of shortwave radio some radio band that basically was a waste of space my dad eventually replaced that portable radio a couple of years later with one that had vhf television audio instead of a shortwave band to him that was far more useful fast forward 7 8 years later and i was in my sophomore year at ud just beginning work as a lab assistant in a physics professor s research lab part of my duties involved working on the lab bench that the professor had acquired from the department of electrical engineering and to say that drilling and tapping holes in steel weren t a lot of fun is an understatement so to pass the time i looked around for a radio to listen to surely in this room with all of this junk there had to be something tucked away in one corner there was the radio in question didn t have those aluminum wings on the sides but otherwise this is the model the s20r sky champion circa 1939 from ebay at first i wasn t exactly sure if it was a radio at all but the bands on the main tuning wheel gave it away i plugged it in and turned it on and nothing i made sure the radio was on the regular am band and still there was nothing coming out another of the professors in the department saw me fiddling with the radio and took pity on me you need to set the switch on the right to rec he told me oh i flipped that switch and like magic the radio came to life there s a small bit of wire in the back for an antenna he added but this was part of the ham station we had in the building a what an amateur radio station the professor who ran it passed away before you started here so we dismantled it your freshman year he pointed out another device next to it from ebay this is 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 monday august 25 2025 meme monday dad joke memes yes dad jokes because i m a dad and there s plenty of jokes abound i m here till thursday try the veal from imgflip from memebase and punhub ah star trek and dad jokes you never know if worf actually got the joke from imgur although my wife is usually a bit better sport than this but yeah been there from pinata farms my kids do make me proud about their dad joke prowess from reddit and mematic sometimes the dad joke is visual can t remember where i found this one and yes i was a proud dad when the kids started making these jokes from reddit blaugust2025 eta added the reference for the last meme posted by redbeard at 6 00 am 2 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels blaugust2025 meme monday memes sunday august 24 2025 time marches on my wife and i met our son and his partner for lunch today at our local bookstore and afterward we wandered the stacks i espied a few boardgames that the store had for sale and i immediately felt a bit wistful it reminded me that the first boardgame store i visited here boardwalk hobby shop had closed during the pandemic the owners had decided to retire and like i said in a previous post i couldn t begrudge them that the day before i was out as an advanced scouting party for getting my youngest a new laptop as her current one is far too old and slow to handle windows 11 and i needed to reacquaint myself with how the various brands and models handled naturally i went to microcenter and afterward i stopped by my nearby friendly local game store flgs yottaquest i wasn t there to buy anything because laptop you know but it was good to simply roam the store and watch the steady flow of customers into the place those included a couple easily old enough to be my parents and they weren t there just because their grandkids wanted to visit but to actually buy something themselves i took this pic last fall when there were leaves everywhere even on a nose or two time marches on but i hope that some things continue such as good bookstores and game stores having spent the last 12 years buying laptops for the kids i ve seen a lot of trends such as the decline of hp in terms of quality holy hell are those laptops flimsy and the rise of acer as a viable brand i remember when acer s aspire line used to be nicknamed expire because of how poorly powered and built they were but hp has certainly passed them on the way to the bottom in terms of consumer grade stuff i still refuse to touch dell because of my own personal experience with the brand courtesy of a work laptop that refused to have it s fan spin unless it sat perfectly flat tilt it just a hair and the fan would simply stop working and i won t get into the overheating problems with that laptop either that was my experience as a kid when i d drag my grandparents to a video game arcade or a bookstore blaugust2025 posted by redbeard at 3 34 pm no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels blaugust2025 boardgames books family musings self saturday august 23 2025 wait what was considered beautiful in 2004 okay i ll admit that i wasn t expecting to be writing this post when i sat down on friday morning before work but things happen well this happened i ve been watching angelika s videos for over a year now and her focus on items such as clothing art style and other things in mmos and rpgs mainly elder scrolls and wow are interesting to me so when she decided to focus on the standards of beauty in wow primarily wow classic i was interested in her take on it the biggest takeaway for me was how she viewed vanilla wow through the lens of what was considered attractive and stylish in 2004 which was when the game released i ll be honest in that i couldn t tell you much of what was considered in at the time because our youngest was a year old and overall the years 1998 2005 were a bit of a sleep deprived blur then this morning this dropped i haven t watched the trailer either i haven t watched a retail wow trailer except for dragonflight since mists back in 2012 so i can t speak to it myself but i found her critique very interesting in that blizzard is basically going generic as far as the blood elf look if you looked at liadrin you d not know it was a blood elf from wow she just looks like an elf not a warcraft elf of course that s not enough because apparently there s a big divide on the reaction to the trailer people either adore or despise it with not that many opinions in the meh middle which is pretty much standard for anything in retail but a lot of the hate is focused on liadrin s look and how masculine she looks the pictures i ve seen of her simply don t look like her masculine or not liadrin has a specific look to her that dates back to tbc like angelika pointed out and blizz moved away from that oh well nothing i can do about that but ye...