Saturday, May 22, 2010

Gooch's Paradox or Of Course Its Working

The Ham Radio corollary to Gooch's Paradox is "RF has to go somewhere." This is often invoked to explain why exotic, high dollar, mystery antennas work at all; Lord knows your correspondent has put up and used some pretty marginal antennas, what didn't add to the heat death if the universe was able to convey information, even to some impressive distances. Trouble was, that some of that heat ended up in the finals of the radio and could convert your rig to a very expensive night-lite.

Gooch's actual paradox states that for something to be believed it must be observed and, more importantly, for something to be observed it must be believed. Kinda sounds like the world wide bailouts the earners have had to fund, or mortgage their progeny to fund, doesn't it? "They" keep telling us its working and have the "Facts" to back it up. As RAH said, TANSTAAFL.

73 de Rob

Sunday, May 9, 2010

How Ivan Denisovitch taught me to deal with bureaucracy

1) We have been prisoners longer than they have been guards.
2) Never loose your spoon.
3) Goodies from home are better bribes than treats.

73 Rob

Sunday, May 2, 2010

Ja Bolshoi Kulturni

Completed QSO with a RU this am, he couldn't copy my call so I gave it the try in "Ham Russian" ie numbers and a "spasibo-dasvadanya" and got a confirmation-that felt good. Also Poland, Montenegro, Bosnia and Switzerland. Nobody told me to get a "real radio." 73 de Rob