[Hallicrafters] Some New Years Thoughts

[Duane Fischer, W8DBF]

Here are two items I rescued from the literary repository. I hope they get 
your year off to a great start. If not, print them out and use them to 
ignite those fake logs in the synthetic fireplace. Enjoy!

                    Ode To A Humming Halli


                                  By Duane B. Fischer, W8DBF


I turned the knob and current flowed,
The filaments within now glowed.
I listened for those waves of short,
>From foreign land, the air and port.
But what was this, a rising hum?
It louder grew and drowned all fun.

I pulled the cord and sniffed for smoke,
Those roasted bugs were not a joke!
I pulled the tubes and checked each one,
And looked around for grounds undone.
Electrolytics oozing goo,
Resistors toasted black and blue.
Insulation all dried and loose,
No holiday for this old Goose!

A cathode short or cap that fried,
The coil hummed Taps and then it died.
The knobs were loose, shafts warped with age,
Missing was the schematic page!
Dial cord was frayed, the pointer bent,
The dial lamp filament was spent.
The chassis dark with flecks of rust,
But fix this rig I knew I must.

To Internet i went with haste,
To find some help, then cut and paste.
With solder warm and tester hot,
I searched my junk for parts forgot.
With luck and coffee by the dawn,
That blasted hum would all be gone!
And then with eyes all red like beets,
I'll turn that knob and mock defeat.

Now some may think this really dumb,
But solid state is just no fun!
There's nothing like that magic glow,
That comes from vacuum radio.
So when your Halli hums so strong,
Be sure to smile and hum along!


Original: June 22, 2003



               Zeus Blows The H Out Of D Layer!


                                 By, Duane B. Fischer, W8DBF



     I have made a special one time deal with Apollo, the
former Sun god, now retired and living in an antenna
restricted condo on Ganymede, to have his friend Zeus hurl
some bolts of energy at the D region of our ionosphere and
blow the H out of it!

     Now the "H" in this case, is representative of Hyades,
an asteroid that hangs out between Mars and Jupiter and
periodically affects Earth's upper atmosphere weather, , not
that hotter then the equatorial Tropics place known as Hades.
AKA Hell.  Where dishonest used car salesman, Bay of E
electronic pirates and crooked as a snake doing the S Curve
Shimmy Shimmy Shake dance politicians end up for all
eternity.  Don't book your next vacation there! CROAK!

     Hopefully Apollo can blast some holes in the accumulated
solar debris and let those waves from the Hallicrafters that
still go glow in the dark encircle the planet and we can hear
each other tonight.

     While Zeus hurls, (hopefully bolts of lightning, not his
supper!), I shall do my propagation dance moves. I was
featured on the Fred Astaire Funniest Dance Video because I
could not get the triangle moves out of the square dance
numbers. So my propagation dance involves playing the
Cascades "Rhythm Of The Rain" while blasting low hanging
clouds with my sawed off twelve gauge shotgun loaded with
Silver Iodide.

     Sometimes one can hear the sound of neighbors swearing
when I miss the cloud and top a prize tree into their
carefully manicured hybrid imported Japanese rose garden!
Worse yet, drop a leafy limb on top of their imported
bioengineered Siamese Cat that is cross eyed and bowlegged
and render it senseless, sometimes dead! He who confuses
mailbox with litter box, ends up as dead mail in unsanitary
sewer! CROAK!

     It makes good sense to me why Space Weather, especially
in the case of our Sun, is such a mystery. If we stare at it
to study it, we go blind! If we try to land a space probe
there, it melts!  If we try to orbit it and report solar
flares, atmosphere flame temperatures or all the different
kinds of radiation, the spacecraft turns into an overly fried
egg with third degree yoke burns!

     As Zeus told me. "You humans complain because it is too
hot.  Then you whine because it is too cold. Either there are
too many sunspots so your stupid satellites do not function
properly or too few sunspots so there are minor climatic
changes and the HF propagation stinks. By the way.  That
fleet of satellites whizzing around Terra Firma are
destroying the view from the Earth to the Cosmos! Now when I
stand on the peak of a volcanic Moon mountain and look at
what used to be a simply beautiful blue planet, I see what
now looks like a damn auto parts junkyard! I have to duck and
dodge constantly to keep from getting a Russian water bottle
up my ass or a floating American digital torque wrench jammed
into one of my ear canals! If you Humans do not stop using
inner and outer space as your personal junkyard, one of the
deities is going to get a Gamma Ray crossways up his or her
toga and fling one of those asteroids circling between Mars
and Jupiter at whomever coined the term "landfill"!

     It is ok to explore space. But leave all of those damn
Aluminum pulltabs on Earth!  Yesterday I found one frozen
inside a solid cube of urine that some ESA country launched
using their cosmos friendly robotic vehicle then tried to be
literary clever and named the contraption the "Jules Verne"
Apparently the space station crew was using the vehicle to
return all of their biodegradable or not trash back to Earth
hoping the entire disgusting mess burned up in the Earth's
atmosphere!  Like who cares about the chemical inbalance this
conversion of crap to atoms creates, heh?  Maybe the holes in
the Ozone Layers are exit points for you litter minded
lifeforms to go visit some other solar system!

     Did you ever stop to think what would happen if that ESA
thing did not get vaporized, survived the baptism of fire
coming through the atmosphere and rang Big Ben's chimes?  Big
Ben survived the horrible WW2 London blitz when most of the
city was a pile of bricks, broken china tea cups, reprints of
Churchill's speeches, German V2 rocket parts, badly burned
 crumpets, etc.  Now a piece of frozen urine smacks it at
 160,000 kilometers per hour and permanently unwinds old
 Ben's mainspring!  Spring has sprung takes on a new meaning!
 CROAK!  Think about it mortals!  Even if the Dinosaurs had
 been killed by an asteroid smacking into the Earth sixty-
 five million years ago, which is wrong by the way, how would
 you like to be exterminated, as in gone extinct, by being
 killed when a blob of frozen shit hits you between your
 frontal lobes! So much for a sense of feeling safe in an
 outhouse!  When your number is up, it is up, but this is a
 testimonial to really bad timing! CROAK!

     It could happen!  Remember the block of frozen toilet
sewage from that jet airliner several years ago that nearly
hit the restaurant?  Surprise! A change in the menu! Yes I am
serious! There was a heck of a mess with the FAA over that
"pilot error"! Guess the GPS was asleep and someone mistook
the city of Atlanta for the middle of the Atlantic ocean!
Bombs away! OOPS! Absolutely true, check the microfilm
newspaper files.

     So clean up your attitudes humans, lest you go the way
of the Mastedon, Sabre Tooth Tiger and metal ssilverware!
Tune in the Sunday HHI 20 meter radio Net and don't make
any waves on Frogzilla's pond, ripples in the D layer of the
Ionosphere or noxious gas bubbles in the bathtub water! Never
ever forget, that the outhouse of life has NO safety lock on
the flush handle! Which is why the most famous last words of
both the famous and the 'never heard of' are the same; "Oh
Shit!" CROAK!


Frogzilla

Duane Fischer, W8DBF


Duane Fischer, W8DBF - WPE8CXO
E-Mail: dfischer at usol.com
Hallicrafters web site: www.w9wze.net
HHRP web site: hhrp.w9wze.net