Good Evening,
A long hot day. Today was the hottest day of the year at 88 degrees.
I am not sure what it got to in the valleys this is warm enough. Fire
danger is rising quickly. In the Cascades there are a number of large
fires with more being added each week. Lightning strikes are causing them
and they are fairly remote so it is not easy to get to them. Luckily that
also means there are few houses or structures around. Just miles of
forest, dry forest, with a lot of fuel ready to keep the fire going. Wind
gusts are high enough so the fire breaks need to be made very wide. It is
helpful to have a river or highway to help but the fire locations are too
remote for that. I am glad the deer hunters here are mostly loggers so
they know how to deal with any cigarette butts to make sure they are out.
One good thing is that the temperatures will get back into the low 60s and
high 50s in only a few days. One more day of 80 degree weather followed
by a day of 70 degree temperatures and then into the lower temperatures
again. I'll be burning a fire to stay warm in only a few days.
All the talk about Heathkit manuals has gotten me thinking. Many of
the things I have learned about procedural methods were influenced by
them. Written procedures for chemistry and physics classes. Log journals
for engineering and scientific notebooks I have kept over the years. And
the biggest one is the decomposition of modular structures down to
discrete, stepwise methods of construction. I can thank Heathkit manuals
and the Forth language for the way I write software. Ten years of writing
code in Forth from the late '70s onward followed by many more years of C
and other languages are all influenced by those manuals I used as a kid.
The Forth language only reinforced the good habits I had learned early
on. The stepwise deconstruction allowed me to factor the code into
modules, or words in Forth, and then examine them. Once I saw general
patterns I could refactor my code into reusable chunks which made writing
the next application easier. In Forth once you have written the first
code for a project in a certain regime you are extending the language such
that it is simpler to write the second app in that environment. By the
time you write the third it is just a matter of reusing the words you have
already written while only creating a few news ones which are application
specific. Fun way to work. Writing working code almost as fast as you
can think. Testing the new words is simple too. No test harness just
type in the inputs and then the word (function) and out pops the answer.
Propagation was good this week but, then, I have not tested them
today. The CMEs started striking last night so I will assume the bands
are pretty noisy right now. But once the string of CMEs stop whacking the
ionosphere we will have much better propagation for a week or so. Maybe
forty meters will support longer distance connections of more than one hop
in radius. Or twenty will go for three hops instead of just two. We can
always hope. Let's test it tomorrow and see what happens :)
If anyone is interested in acting as a relay station on either net
please email me. I will turn the net over to you for a few minutes so you
can call areas in my skip zone. It sure would prove helpful to those I
cannot reach directly.
Please join us tomorrow afternoon and evening.
1) Hail signs (first letter or two of the suffix of your call)
2) NCS help (as well as QSP/QNP <relay> help)
Sunday 2200z (Sunday 3 PM PDT) 14050 kHz
Monday 0100z (Sunday 6 PM PDT) 7045 kHz
Stay well,
Kevin. KD5ONS
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