[R-390] Future of the website, R-390A collecting/restoring, Silent-Keys

[Tisha Hayes]

The last two years of this plague in combination with the entropy of the
universe continues to take their toll upon the members of this list. None
of us are immortal (or at least the immortals are keeping a low profile);
Names I had seen active over the years are falling away in to silence. Some
are or were my friends who I would meet at a hamfest or even go over to
dinner with them and their spouses. Now I just don't know any more.

I am still around but my free time is even less than it was before; I still
travel the continent doing radio engineering as a paid gig. The sales side
of our business may have dropped off and the trade-show circuit (that
affects me more) has been less active, but customers still have the same
litany of installation issues, grounding issues, antenna issues,
interference and technology-literacy challenges. Even with COVID I still
need to travel to keep the infrastructure of electric utilities and
petrochemical operations sending little bursts of data packets across the
airwaves.

As surely as I think that I have spare moments to contribute to helping out
in writing technical stuff for our hobby, then the bill-paying part of my
profession ends up demanding more time. Not spilling the beans about my
age, but I still have around ten more years of professional life before I
can think about retiring. To many who are pushing their seventh and eighth
decade with your bodies above room temperature that seems young, but I am
feeling the years too. I no longer look at a 200 foot antenna tower and
think about how it would be so neat to climb it. Mostly I look up and think
about how much my legs would hurt from the climb or the crunch of my bones
if I fell off of that thing.

I have more radios than I have time to work on them; If I did retire today
I still would want to work on them all; Even that evil looking R-220/URR
that has been peeking at me from under the old towel in the corner of my
lab. I also want to get the T-195 fired up and paired with the R-392.. Just
too many projects and boat-anchors are heavy!
-----------------

As far as dealing with panel meters and their radioactive bits; People make
entirely too much out of that boogeyman. With some basic materials handling
precautions (and a N95 face mask, hmm, where do we get those from?) almost
anyone can deal with the momentary issues of cracking open a meter case to
replace a broken piece of glass or to free a stuck needle (just don't go
scraping off the radium paint with a screwdriver and snorting it up like a
white powdery substance that was popularized in the movie Scarface). I have
dealt with radioactive substances for several years of my life in
university and during my internships at labs. Only one time did I ever
contaminate up something, and it took me ten minutes to clean up my mess.

*Ms. Tisha Hayes*
*AA4HA*

*Still up in the mountains of northeast Alabama*