Al's Blog-o-Sphere

Well, I’ve been getting back into Ham Radio lately. With the pandemic stifling most things that are fun, I figured it would be a good activity for being social distanced. Little did I know which way it would go.

I had a good radio, my main radio, which served me well for over 20 years. I used it in many contests to make thousands of contacts over the years. I didn’t scrimp on it, I spent until it hurt, which at that time was a lot of money. I put all the accessories into it. Over the years, it needed some maintenance. It had a battery that died every ten years or so, and when it turned on and said “TILT” this time, I assumed it was time for a new battery.

I ordered a new battery, a li-ion coin cell. The original was the type that solders directly onto a circuit board. It’s hard to find the exact right one of those, but I ordered a holder as well. I figured I’d put the holder in once and from then on, changing the battery would be a snap.

But I put it all in and it did not fix the problem. I looked into the feasibility of sending it out for repair. I had shipped it to a fellow in Texas once before for work. he was about the only Kenwood certified repairman left. I looked him up and his web site said he had retired. But it referred me to a new service place, up in Minnesota, I believe. They did indeed still service my radio. For only $350. Shipping would be about $50 each way. I looked at the prices of used models of the radio, and they were barely getting $500.

I decided that I have had my money’s worth out of the old radio, the Kenwood TS-850SAT, and it was time to replace it with something new. But I didn’t want to spend the kind of money it would take to replace it with an updated equivalent. That would have taken at least $2-3000.

Kenwood TS-850SAT

Icom IC-7300

Instead, I lowered my sights a bit and found the Icom IC-7300. it was going for $1100 with a $100 rebate. It’s a modern style radio, a bit smaller th an the old one, but very capable. Many of the extras I had to add to the old radio came built in on it. How do they do that at such a low price? Well, technology. It’s a radio based on DSP – Digital Signal Processing. Most of the work that used to be done by stages of mixers and filters and amplification, is now done by microprocessors.

The 7300 has been on the market for at least 5 years, but I hadn’t been paying attention to it. It still looks like a traditional radio, but with a fancy touch screen that gives you all kinds of menus for settings and different ways to display what it is doing. It also interfaces with your computer, not through a serial port, like the old one did (with a special adapter) but through a USB cable. The computer sees a virtual serial port to control the radio’s frequency and other settings, just like the old radio, but it also acts like a sound card so that the computer has access to sound coming to and from the radio. This greatly simplifies using data modes.

So, I got the new radio and have been having a great time making it work and setting it up. One thing I found, that I already knew, but didn’t matter with a radio that didn’t work, was my antennas have deteriorated to the point of being almost useless. The only one that is even partially useful is my 40 meter vertical and there is something wrong with it, but I can still make some contacts on it. In fact, I’ve been using it on most bands with the tuner built into the radio.

My triband yagi, A Cushcraft A3S, had been out of commission for years. The center, driven element fell off. The U-bolt broke and the whole element came down. I can’t get up there to do anything, so that’s not going to change.

My 80 meter dipole, a high wire antenna that runs from a tree in front of my house to a tree at the back fence, just doesn’t work. All I hear on it is noise. I can see that one end was caught up in some branches and has unravelled, but not fallen down. But there must be something more wrong than that. Maybe the coaxial cable is broken, maybe the balun at the center is bad. It’s held up by ropes that go through pulleys, but the back one won’t let it down because it’s caught up in the tree branches. I’ll have to get up on my kitchen roof and pull the center down by the coax to free it up. But I’m not going to do that until spring.

The 40 meter vertical, I suspect has a bad coax, but I’m not yet 100% sure of that. It’s buried in the ground, and even though it is direct burial cable, that’s only good for so many years. I ran a piece of RG-8X to replace it, just letting it lie on the grass and that improved it somewhat. It’s time to replace the coax in the ground just on principal, but again that will have to wait until spring.

So, I’ve got a nice new radio, but can’t fully enjoy it right away.

I was hacked! Someone brute-forced their way into an account and did something that took the entire site down.

I had reports of a high number of failed log-in attempts, but hadn’t made it a priority to look into. So they finally got through before I looked into it.

It’s really pathetic that someone would go to all that effort to get into a site that is basically dormant and hasn’t seen an new post in months. But they use bots to do it, so they don’t care.

Usually, it is done to gain some kind of advantage in website rankings. Google and other search engines look to see how many other sites mention (link to) a site and boost the rank accordingly. So they like to hack sites to put fake links in to them to make it look like there is a lot of buzz about their page.

They also use links in comments to do the same thing. I have all comments held for approval, so they don’t show up. I cleared out several hundred spam comments yesterday.

So I got the site back up and running. They couldn’t really do much to it, but found a way to make it look like it was offline. I’ve changed passwords on every account and the one they got into no longer has any privileges. I can see what logins they try to use, so I know what they are trying. The obvious ones are gone. Let them fish.

And for what it’s worth, this page is so little used, if it becomes a problem, it will just vanish.

Frank as he arrives in Teeterboro, NJ

Sad News has not been a stranger to this blog. Once again, I have the sad task of reporting of the death of my son. Sons are supposed to outlive their father and bury him, not the other way around, but here I am for the second time. My second son, Francis, has died as the result of organ rejection after his lung transplant.


That sounds horrible, but a better way to put it is he lived five years longer because he received a transplant and they were mostly, wonderful, glorious years where he lived as if he never had a problem.

Like his brother before him, he was a Cystic Fibrosis patient and the disease had progressed to the point where his lungs were failing. Imagine life where you had to stop and breathe when you walk from the couch to the kitchen, a distance of ten feet. He had only weeks, probably to live if he had not had the transplant when he did.

The whole story is elsewhere in this blog. Go back and read it, if you are interested.

I don’t really feel like writing this, but for the sake of giving the end to the story, I am. It was a long voyage and most of it was wonderful. I got to spend a lot of time with Frank as we traveled back and forth from his Doctors in NYC.

We met up in Arizona one summer at his cousin’s wedding. He took the trip of a lifetime across country by bus, stopping to visit friends and make new ones along the way. We drove and met up out there. Spent great days at his Aunt’s and visiting the Grand Canyon. He was like a new person.

But, eventually, he caught some infection and started to reject his new lungs. Every transplant is a tightrope walk of balancing medicines between their side-effects and interactions with the body, and protecting the organs from rejection. Every change upsets the balance, and while the doctors are very good at tweaking things, it doesn’t always work.

Anyway, his new lungs were damaged and could no longer sustain his active life. He deteriorated to the point where he was bedridden. But he faced it with a great positive attitude and made the most of it. After all, it was all time he would not have had otherwise.

There is a whole other story about the group of friends that supported him throughout the whole time, and maybe I’ll tell that story later, but for now, this is about all I can write.

Well, I haven’t been posting much here lately and most of my thoughts and rants have been going on Facebook.

They make it so easy, so seductive, to just put a short couple paragraphs or just a comment on someone else’s thoughts. It becomes too easy to spend time there.

But, once again, I’m in Facebook jail.

I don’t know why. They say I posted something that violated “community standards.” They gave me no details and I don’t remember what it may have been. Just suddenly, I can’t post anything. I can’t leave a comment. I can’t even like a photo of a furry cat.

I dug around and found – with some difficulty – a reference to their deleting a post.

I can’t tell from the little thumbnails what it was, or what about it they didn’t like. I have a “Page” where I post things. Things about Trump, our government, and politics. I started the page so I could keep those things off my personal timeline and let only those who want to read them see them. I was being considerate to those who might be offended by anything critical of our illegitimate president.

And, ordinarily, I avoid anything offensive. I lean towards the ironic, humorous, or satirical commentary.

95% of what I post is graphics – cartoons, memes, photos, and articles from major news sources. I mostly “share” not “create.”

And, yes, it’s mostly anti-Trump, anti-conservative, anti-GOP, etc. because, well, how can any moral, thinking person not be?

So, I am in the corner, getting a three-day time out from Facebook. Like that is supposed to teach me a lesson, whereas not telling me what the offense is does…

My experience with these things (I have known others who have also suffered the same fate) is that you usually get these things as a response to someone’s complaint. They are either processed by some algorithm or some person who reviews hundreds per hour. No deep thought is put into it. And there is no way to get a meaningful review. You can click a box that asks them to look into it, but I have not received a response.

From the thumbnails, I can tell it was a cartoon. That’s about all. I routinely download and keep the images I post, rather than just hit share. I do that because I want to break the chain of “So and so shared so and so’s post where they shared so and so’s…” I also sometimes copy and paste commentary along with it that I think the person may not want to have attributed to them. Public figures, I quote with full attribution, I spare the average friend.

So I checked through my collected images and did not find that one. It doesn’t mean it didn’t come from me, but it’s odd that I did not keep a copy. It might be left on a different computer that I don’t normally use. I only checked my laptop and phone. You can bet, if I do find it, I will post it here!

And, I did. I could not find it on any of my computers, but a couple of them have been reworked recently and may have been erased. But with a little Google-Fu and some help from Tineye, I found it.

That’s it. That’s the “offensive” post. I vaguely remember it. It was quite a while ago, so either they dug deep, or someone is going around looking for that particular picture.

This photo was found many times on Twitter. It was on Reddit. It was on Instagram and Pinterest, so it clearly doesn’t cross any lines for most places. It was totally used to target my account. There was also a version of it with a ghostly figure, possibly Jesus, leaning over 45.

So, I supposedly “violated community standards” by posting a graphic that came from the community. Hmmm…

Looking at the timing of it, where we are in the middle of the peak of the Trump impeachment Senate hearings, one has to wonder if it isn’t part of an organized strategy to use Facebook’s’ policies against anyone openly critical of him? Right now, silencing a bunch of his critics for three days without any hearing or recourse, would be huge. You almost wonder if it’s not a new wave of Russian hackers turning to suppressing criticism instead of posting pro-Trump propaganda?

I don’t flatter myself to think that I am that important, or widely influential to garner special attention. So, the explanation of a widespread organized process makes more sense. I just got caught up in it.

So, Facebook put me and possibly many others in Facebook Jail. I’ll live. Actually a three day break will do me good. After all, it got me back to my long neglected blog…