Thursday, July 29, 2021
From the Notebook: Problems with the FBI Start At Home by Tom Luongo
From the Notebook posts are expansions on ideas first published for my Patrons. This one is from July 23rd, 2021
I know this will come as no shock to most of the libertarian-minded in the audience, but the police aren’t your friends. And I sincerely with that wasn’t the case. But the curious case of Tucker Carlson and the FBI tells us this is true.
The idea of the community-based Constable On Patrol (COP) keeping tabs on what’s happening locally and assisting in basic crime prevention today is a comfortable lie we tell ourselves still exists as a coping mechanism for denying the police state we actually live in.
There is a fundamental difference between Law Enforcement (LE) and Crime Prevention (CP). The two ideas could not be more diametrically opposed. One builds community strength (CP) and one actively undermines it (LE).
And it’s one of the real problems we face in unpacking the problems of modern policing, which is itself, a bluff, where 1 arrest can keep a thousand people in line.
This interview with Srdja Trifkovic over at Chronicles Maganize is another prime example of someone properly connecting the dots as to where the root causes of the societal dysfunction in the U.S. (and most of the rest of the world) lies.
Right after the 2015 terrorist attack by two Islamists in Garland, Texas, CNN itself accused the FBI of directly encouraging the perpetrators to act upon their jihadist ideas. The same method was applied two years later to a mentally unstable pizza delivery man [Khalil Abu Rayyan] in Dearborn, Michigan. In other words, FBI agents routinely goad individuals to commit crimes solely in order to turn them into dangerous villains who were stopped in their tracks by the vigilant agency and sentenced to many years in prison. Such ploys of course justify the agency’s very existence by making it look like it is really preventing terrorist attacks.
This apparatus and this scenario—actively seeking out potential perpetrators of crimes, in order to cajole them and then arrest them—is no longer used against potential jihadists. The members of extremist groups within the Islamic community in the U.S. are no longer interesting. The target has shifted to white Americans who support Donald Trump, and who are therefore a priori suspicious as would-be “homegrown” extremists and terrorists. In this context, the very fact that you are a white, heterosexual male, in addition a practicing Christian, especially if you belong to an evangelical denomination, makes you suspicious and potentially liable to surveillance. Let me add that just two weeks ago the FBI directly asked Americans, in a tweet and later on its website, to spy and report on their neighbors, co-workers, and even family members, for so-called suspicious behaviors potentially conducive to what it called homegrown violent extremism.
These practices by the FBI are sold to us everyday on television and in the media as the highest evolution of Crime Prevention, but they are hardly that at all. And I know this will rankle the LEOs in the audience because the world is just so damn dangerous.
I’ve heard this excuse from multiple generations of police now. It started with my father struggling with this transition from CPO to LEO while he worked for the NYPD and became the basic text of endless conversations with family and friends both LEO and LEO-adjacent for the past twenty five years.
But, this practice is anything but CP. It is nothing more than LE dressed up as CP to enforce laws which, in any rational reading of the Constitution, are unconstitutional, e.g. drug enforcement, and therefore serve a straw man argument to justify immoral and unethical behavior.
This conversion from Crime Prevention to LawEnforcement came as a response to the breakdown of society thanks to the very overreach of government itself. Be it Prohibition, enforcement of labor and environmental laws to now literally anything some Karen in the ‘burbs can dream up as a hobgoblin he/she feels entitled to be protected from, all of them have advanced the thin blue line.
The centralization of policing and the corruption of LEOs is as natural a consequence of this as night following day.
But yet we still have this quaint notion that we are still free, that the cops work for us and the FBI isn’t terminally corrupt as an organization, even if individual members are not.
Like with all discussions of this nature there is the critique of the institution itself and what we expect of it and the men and women asked to implement that system.
So, of course there are good people lurking within modern law enforcement agencies. I’ve met many of them. I’m happy to separate the sin from the sinner in the hope that when the time is right those good people within the FBI, county sheriff’s office or even Child Protective Services bureaucracy, will do the right thing and back the people over the institution.
But that is, if I’m being completely honest, a vane hope, rather than a sober look at the reality of the situation. If government is efficient at anything it is in the creation of petty tyrants.
The controversy surrounding Tucker Carlson’s going public with the attempts to marginalize him by Federales speaks to the heart of the divide between modern conservatives and libertarians in this area. Fox News Conservatives are mostly the progeny of William Buckley conservatives who were slowly but surely asked to transfer their allegiance from their local community (and local policing) to that of the country and its police force in the name of the Cold War and the Culture War, a war supposedly of ideology against godless Commies.
Buckley himself, however, was a CIA asset, so this should come as no shock to anyone that he would be the point man to subvert two generations of conservatives into sycophants for interventionist foreign policy and increased draconian law enforcement at home. Conservatives hate chaos after all. Their Conscientiousness (in the Big Five Pillars of Personality sense) can be weaponized easily to fight chaos, and was, especially after 9/11.
And from where this “lolbertarian” sits (more on this later), however, the CIA v. KGB fight was really just two communist factions duking it out for control of the global narrative. We’re still fighting commies today, and some of them in our intelligence agencies just went after one of the only popular voices in corporate media not down with the Commintern.
Because of the influence of Buckley and the massive financial support of D.C. think tanks, as well as the undermining and marginalization of Rothbardian/Misesean libertarians — c.f. the takeover of the Cato Institute by the ‘libertarian’ Koch brothers — there is still this reflexive defense of all policing by conservatives which has intensified thanks to the Democrats’ backing of the looting and rioting of BLM/Antifa which ws used as a psychological weapon to divide people further.
Quickly lost in all of the verbiage surrounding George Floyd was the acknowledgment by everyone that there is something fundamentally wrong with militarized policing methods. Everyone wanted to have that conversation but that was the one conversation we were not allowed to have.
And when you are not allowed to talk about something that’s your clue that that is the goal of the exercise.
This centralization in the hands law enforcement and no longer vested in the citizens themselves policing their communities has corrupted the souls of cops while simultaneously prepping the people psychologically for infinite aggression on their part in any encounter.
Do you go into any encounter with a modern policeman of any variety with anything other than dread?
Shouldn’t you take your Miranda rights very seriously? After all, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.
But at the same time the police are just responding to the increased threat of violence and the increased ‘bluff calling’ by ne’er do wells as to whether the police actually have control of the streets or not. These folks are increasingly asked to be in obscenely dangerous situations with their hands tied behind their backs. So, I do sympathize and again am questioning the political and social apparatuses which placed them in those positions in the first place.
These are, after all, real people with real emotions, limits to their self-control and all the deficiencies and strengths we all have.
The truth is they never did have that control over the streets. We did through our support of them but lazily transferred it to them over time and expected somehow for those who rule them not abuse that power? Is this really all the cops’ fault or are we scapegoating them for our own failures and weaknesses?
At the same time, if they are not focused on solving our problems locally and serve a higher, more centralized authority then why are we surprised when the bond between them and the community is broken and we devolve into the situation we are in today, a society based on fear rather than respect.
That breakdown of relations can easily be turned against the police, even the good ones, into a society-destroying mind virus like we have today where ‘dindus’ and disaffected children in black bloc run around spouting “ACAB” rhetoric and spitting in the faces of people who think they are still protecting and serving.
This is why the support for secession is rising rapidly. Secession is a state of mind, not a political process. Opting out of the State’s violence isn’t just a choice, it’s a necessity if we are to regain our sanity and composure.
People want control back over their communities. The good ‘cops’ want to protect their jurisdictions and the people under their care, not to operate in some globally-focused politicized headspace.
In the end, however, secession of this sort is just another coping mechanism to objectify and shadow project our own failings to protect our local communities rather than take responsibility for what we allowed to happen.
This is why the alt-right is wrong to characterize all ‘libertarians’ and ‘lolbertarians.’ They are still fundamentally unwilling to accept that the state grows out of our desire of community but it does not and cannot do anything other than corrupt that community because of its monopoly on the use of force.
In the end, they are just the flip-side, no matter how well considered or constructed their arguments, of the SJW left.
Their unwillingness to engage honestly makes them as irrelevant as the “open-borders at all costs” lolbertarians they make fun of. It’s truly just two Leninist emotional cripples beating each other with crutches, South Park style.
Meanwhile, the FBI intentionally creating political headlines is the highest form of police corruption one can think of. It’s in the realm of the East German Stasi but with the paranoia taking on an active role to advance the agenda of traitors to the country who were placed in the highest civilian offices by foreign powers.
And it was the libertarians of the stripe ignored by both the alt-right and the hard-left that made the hard arguments about how defense is produced and how communities are maintained, who held the answers all along.
Destroy Leviathan. Attack it at its core. And expect nothing from the police other than pain, but be gracious and accepting when you get assistance. End public property. Stop allowing the exporting of crime to peaceful neighborhoods through those public roads you make fun of us about all for the convenience of a fucking Wal-Mart or a strip mall.
That is the conclusion we can no longer avoid in 2021.
Because as this situation gets worse, which it is, the police and the law enforcement officers will come to see themselves as the final arbiters of truth and they will be encouraged to exercise the power to destroy anyone they want, since that’s what their bosses want.
They are already faced with enforcing unjustifiable abrogation of our medical privacy and basic civil rights in the name of dubious public health demands by self-serving politicians. And so far we have yet to see them crack.
What will it look like tomorrow? Next year?
History tells us that many will support this for no other reason than we won’t give them a reason not to.
All Cops aren’t Bastards anymore than any of us are all bastards. But the potential exists within all men to unleash their worst aspects of themselves under extreme conditions. Theirs is not a power anyone should wield, even the most high-minded and moral of men, under these circumstances. I watched my father struggle with it the entire time I was growing up. It won’t matter whether those men will hate themselves for what they’ve done, they will still do it and beat themselves up later.
I welcome all the current law enforcement and law-enforcement adjacent people into this ‘community’ of those wanting to rebuild what was lost. They have unbelievable knowledge and expertise on how to do this right and do it wrong. But it starts by both sides recognizing the others’ humanity and saying no the right way at the right time. The smart libertarian always said, “No one sees corruption like a government employee.” The dumb ones just hoisted their Gasden Flags and damned everyone with their insufferable self-righteousness.
It’s time to really address the corruption of the police and ourselves. It’s time to face down our fears and get to work rebuilding what’s been taken from us, our dignity and security. And it’s time to realize that the last thing we need is more law enforcement and to prioritize the prevention of future crimes against humanity itself.
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There Should Be No Federal Funding for Mass Transit by Dan Mitchell
As a matter of sensible public policy (and well as fealty to the Constitution), the federal government should not be involved in transportation.
But since I don’t expect the current crowd in Washington has any interest in getting rid of the Department of Transportation, perhaps we should have a more modest goal of eliminating subsidies for mass transit.
After all, there’s no reason why taxpayers across the nation should be subsidizing the cost of railway, bus, and subway travel in a handful of cities.
Getting rid of these handouts would save a decent chunk of money. Here’s a chart from Downsizing Government, which shows the history of pre-pandemic spending by the Federal Transit Administration.
But that chart is now out of date since politicians have used the pandemic as an excuse to dramatically increase the burden of federal spending. Including big handouts for mass transit.
And now they want to raid taxpayers for more transit money as part of a spending spree on infrastructure.
The Wall Street Journal editorialized about this topic a couple of days ago.
Democrats are accusing Republicans of holding up the Senate infrastructure deal over funding for mass transit. Here’s what’s really going on: Republicans have bowed to most Democratic demands. But now Democrats are also insisting that they acquiesce to spending ever more to rescue broken rail and bus systems in big liberal cities. Mass transit typically receives $13 billion in federal funds each year,
and Congress provided an additional $70 billion for urban transit last year in the myriad pandemic spending bills. That’s more than six times the normal transit budget and more than the annual operating and capital spending of every transit agency in the U.S. combined. …But most mass transit systems face a larger structural budget problem that pre-dated the pandemic: Ballooning operating costs from generous labor contracts and pension payments, which are siphoning off money from system improvements and repairs. Many systems have also been losing riders due to lousy service… So Democrats want Republicans to bail out those cities and their public unions. Republicans have agreed to a $48.5 billion supplemental appropriation for mass transit in the deal. But in addition Democrats are demanding that 20% of transportation spending from the highway trust fund—financed by gas tax revenues—go toward transit.
This is throwing good money after bad.
In a column for the Foundation for Economic Education back in 2019, Hans Bader explained that mass transit in an inefficient money pit.
Mass transit is largely a failure and continues to decline despite growing subsidies to many mass transit systems. Light rail systems are white elephants. …South Korea is abolishing its celebrated high-speed rail line from its capital, Seoul, to a nearby major city because it can’t cover even the marginal costs of keeping the trains running. Most people who ride trains don’t need maximum possible speed,
and most of those who do will still take the plane to reach distant destinations. …most Japanese don’t take the bullet train either; they take buses because the bullet train is too expensive. Bullet trains do interfere with freight lines, so Japanese freight lines carry much less cargo than in the United States, where railroads—rather than trucks—carry most freight, thereby reducing pollution… California’s so-called bullet train is vastly behind schedule and over budget, and will likely never come close to covering its operating costs once it is built. …Just the first leg of this $77 billion project will cost billions more than budgeted. And the project is already at least 11 years behind schedule.
Government is a big reason why transit is so inefficient and expensive.
Industry expert Randal O’Toole wrote about the harmful impact of socialized systems back in 2018.
Public ownership of transit has significantly increased the cost of transit, creating another disadvantage for the transit industry relative to other modes of travel. Before 1964, transit systems in most American cities were private and profitable, albeit declining.
In 1964, Congress gave cities and states incentives to take over transit systems, and within a decade nearly all had been municipalized …followed by a staggering decline in transit productivity. In the decade before 1964, transit systems carried an average of about 59,000 riders per operating employee. This plunged after 1964 and today averages fewer than 27,000 riders per employee… It is doubtful that any American industry has suffered a 54 percent decline in worker productivity over 30 years unless it was another industry taken over by the government and inflicted with all the inefficiencies associated with government control and management.
We’ll close with this chart from O’Toole’s study, which shows total taxpayer subsidies over time.
The bottom line is that government transit systems are a lot like government schools. More and more money gets spent over time with worse and worse results.
Except maybe mass transit is even worse because of absurd cost overruns.
P.S. Click here and here to learn more about the boondoggle of government-funded rail.
P.P.S. Click here to learn more about the boondoggle of government-funded subways.
The Sons of Disobedience
PRESIDENT TRUMAN BELIEVED IN SEGREGATION — UNTIL BLACK WORLD WAR II VETERANS STARTED GETTING MURDERED By Lauren Coontz
President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981 on July 26, 1948, desegregating the armed forces of the United States. The order to desegregate the military — today viewed as a cornerstone of civil rights progress — represented a massive change of heart for Truman, who believed in segregation for much of his early life and was raised in a family deeply connected to the post-Civil War South.
But after World War II, a series of lynchings of war veterans across the South convinced him that the country needed the change.
Truman grew up in Missouri, which reflected the Jim Crow-dominated South. The Civil War was very much in the living memory of most adults. That included his grandparents, former slave owners who remembered the Emancipation Proclamation and cursed the name of Abraham Lincoln to young Truman. His mother, who lived into his presidency, was also a lifelong Confederate supporter.
That upbringing rubbed off on Truman. In 1911, when he was 27, he wrote a letter to his future wife, Bess, saying he thought “the Lord made a white man from dust, a nigger from mud, then He threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman. […] Negroes ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia and white men in Europe and America.”
But as president, Truman was stunned by a wave of violent attacks on WWII veterans returning from war that took hold in the South. Two significant cases struck Truman as particularly unsettling: Isaac Woodard and the Moore’s Ford lynchings in Georgia.
Isaac Woodard captured the nation’s attention in 1946 when he was assaulted and left permanently blind by white police officers on the day he received his honorable discharge. Carrying his discharge papers and in uniform, he boarded a bus in Georgia and rode to South Carolina to rejoin his wife. He had a disagreement with the driver, who reported Woodard for “disorderly conduct” to local police in Batesburg, South Carolina.
Woodard was pulled off the bus, and the police chief, Lynwood Shull, beat him across the face until Woodard was unconscious, blinding him for the rest of his life. The police left him at a hospital and would deny all allegations.
The Moore’s Ford lynchings in Georgia generated widespread national outrage and captured the president’s attention.
George W. Dorsey, a WWII veteran; his wife, Mae Murray Dorsey; and Roger and Dorothy Malcom were all sharecroppers for local farmer J. Loy Harrison after the war and were lynched together in 1946. Roger Malcom had been arrested for stabbing his landlord, a white man, on July 11, and the other three had gone with Harrison to bail Malcom out. As they drove home, a mob forced the car to stop near Moore’s Ford Bridge outside Monroe, Georgia. The four Black passengers were forced out of the car and shot.
Dorothy Malcom was seven months pregnant.
Truman asked the FBI to investigate, but despite 100 witnesses testifying to a grand jury, no charges were brought.
Soon Truman launched a series of initiatives aimed at passing civil rights legislation, such as anti-lynching laws. But the laws never passed, killed off by Southern legislators.
The legislative defeats made Truman consider moves he could make unilaterally as president. To officially desegregate the military was one such move.
Truman addressed Congress on Feb. 2, 1948, saying, “We cannot be satisfied until all our people have equal opportunities for jobs, for homes, for education, for health, and for political expression, and until all our people have equal protection under the law.”
He signed the order to desegregate the US military five months later.
These Foldable Houses Cost $50k and Go Up In a Day
Study Used by CDC to Support New Mask Mandates Based on a Non-American Vaccine, Rejected by Peer Review By Eric Lendrum
It has been determined that one of the studies used by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to justify the strict new mask mandates was not only rejected by peer review, but was also based on a vaccine that is currently not authorized for use in the United States, the Daily Caller reports.
The controversial study came from India, where scientists there studied “breakthrough infections” in over 100 healthcare workers who had received a vaccine but still caught the coronavirus, determining that the COVID-19 India variant, also known as the “Delta” variant, produces a higher viral load than other strains of the coronavirus. This was one of the pieces of evidence used by the CDC to claim that even vaccinated individuals should wear masks, since the India variant is allegedly capable of being transmitted by vaccinated individuals to unvaccinated individuals.
Despite admitting that the study in question involved a vaccine that has not been approved in the United States, the CDC’s report said that such studies “have noted relatively high viral loads and larger cluster sizes associated with infections with Delta, regardless of vaccination status. These early data suggest that breakthrough Delta infections are transmissible.”
But, in addition to relying on a vaccine that is different from the ones being used en masse in the United States, the study was also rejected upon peer review, and as a result is undergoing a revision.
Although it has been documented that vaccinated individuals can still catch the coronavirus, the notion of “asymptomatic spread” – the idea that an individual who is immune or displays no symptoms, despite actually possessing the virus, can still infect others – was debunked months ago. Yet this theory serves as the basis for the CDC’s abrupt new restrictions, issued on Tuesday; among other sudden reversals, the CDC now demands that all students in K-12 schools wear masks at all times, regardless of vaccination status, and that even unvaccinated people should continue wearing masks.
Tuesday, July 27, 2021
Government Spending Is a Problem, Regardless of How It Is Financed by Dan Mitchell
Back in 2019, I listed “Six Principles to Guide Policy on Government Spending.”
If I was required to put it all in one sentence (sort of), here’s the most important thing to understand about fiscal policy.
This does not mean, by the way, that we should be anarcho-capitalists and oppose all government spending.
But it does mean that all government spending imposes a burden on the economy and that politicians should only spend money to finance “public goods” that generate offsetting benefits.
Assuming, of course, that the goal is greater prosperity.
I’m motivated to address this topic because Philip Klein wrote a column for National Review about Biden’s new spending. He points out that this new spending is bad, regardless of whether it is debt-financed or tax-financed.
As Democrats race toward squandering another $4.1 trillion — perhaps with some Republican help — we are being told over and over how the biggest stumbling block is figuring out how the new spending will be “paid for.” …Senator Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.), who is trying to maintain his image as a moderate, insisted that he doesn’t believe the spending should be passed if it isn’t fully financed.
“Everything should be paid for,” Manchin has told reporters. …Republican members of the bipartisan group have also made similar comments. …But it is folly to consider massive amounts of new spending to be “responsible” as long as members of Congress come up with enough taxes to raise… At some point in the next few weeks, Democrats (and possibly Republicans) will announce that they have reached a deal on some sort of major spending compromise. They will claim that it is fully paid for, and assert that it is fiscally responsible. But there is nothing responsible about adding trillions in new obligations at a time when the nation is already heading for fiscal catastrophe.
Klein is correct.
Biden’s spending binge will be just as damaging to prosperity if it is financed with taxes rather than financed by debt.
The key thing to realize is that we’ll have less growth if more of the economy’s output is consumed by government spending.
Giving politicians and bureaucrats more control over the allocation of resources is a very bad idea (as even the World Bank, OECD, and IMF have admitted).
W2LJ QRP - When you care to send the very least!: FOBB 2021
Havoc by Ping: The Unbearable Madness of the COVID Circus
FIELD REPORT: SOME QRP POTA AND SOTA AT HANGING ROCK STATE PARK! by THOMAS WITHERSPOON
I’m not a summer-heat-loving guy. Quite the opposite, in fact. Give me cold weather and I can hike and camp forever.
On Tuesday, July 13, 2021, it wasn’t cold outside, of course, but I still wanted to fit in a park activation and hike. Despite the forecast highs of 90F/32C. I had almost the entire day to play radio, too–a rarity.
When I have an entire day to devote to radio, I can either hit the road and try to hit multiple parks–perhaps as many as 5 or 6–or I can choose to venture further afield and hit a new-to-me park.
I tend to choose the latter and that Tuesday was no exception.
North and north by NW of Winston Salem, NC, are two parks I’ve always wanted to visit: Hanging Rock State Park and Pilot Mountain State Park.
I devised a plan to first visit Hanging Rock, then Pilot Mountain. Both parks are close together geographically, but a good 30 minutes drive apart.
A quick check of the SOTA database and I discovered that there are actually two summits on Hanging Rock State Park’s grounds. One is off the beaten path a bit and would require some light map work, and the other–Moore’s Knob–is on one of the park’s main trails. Since I was putting this whole plan together morning of, I opted for the “easy” summit as I didn’t have time to double-check topo maps, parking areas, etc.
Hanging Rock State Park (K-2735)
Travel time to Hanging Rock was about 1 hour 45 minutes. Once I arrived on site, I discovered that, like many state parks, the main visitor’s center is being renovated.
I easily found the parking area for the Moore’s Knob loop. It being a Tuesday, the parking lot only had a few cars.
Pro tip: with the visitor’s center out of commission, stop by the swimming area pavilion for some proper restrooms/washrooms!
I planned to take the full trail loop in a counter-clockwise direction.
I’m glad I did, too, as the bulk of the ascent was a long series of steps. I’m not a fan of steps, but I much prefer using them heading up a mountain rather than down.
Near the summit, there’s a very short spur trail to Balanced Rock which is worth a visit not only for the rock, but also the views.
It being a North Carolina state park, there are some obligatory warning signs about how falling off of cliffs can lead to injury or death. These warning signs aren’t as prominent as those at Crowders Mountain State Park, though!
Moores Knob (W4C/EP-001)
There’s no mistaking the summit as there’s a large observation tower on top that affords some spectacular views of the Blue Ridge Escarpment, the foothills, and Pilot Mountain (my next stop).
There were a number of hikers on the summit of Moore’s Knob and it was actually pretty gusty up there, too. I searched and found a nice little spot to set up that was sheltered from the wind, shaded, and even had trees tall enough to hang my Packtenna 9:1 UNUN random wire antenna!
Gear:
- Xiegu X5105
- Packtenna 9:1 UNUN Random Wire Antenna
- N0SA portable paddles
- GoRuck GR1 USA
- Weaver arborist throw line/weight and storage bag (affiliate links)
- Rite In The Rain Weatherproof Cover/Pouch (affiliate link)
- Jovitec 2.0 mm Mechanical Pencil (affiliate link)
- Muji A6 Notepad (affiliate link)
- Note: I brought the CHA MPAS Lite in case there were no good tree options on the summit.
Set up was quick and easy on the radio side of things, but as with most SOTA activations, positioning my tripod to make a video was the tricky part. Since I’m sitting on the ground, it can be difficult to find the right angle so that the radio, key, and notepad are all in the frame. (See my video below).
I started calling CQ at 16:00 UTC on 20 meters. I had a reasonable cell phone signal on the summit, so I was able to spot myself. Problem was, though, my hiking app seemed to be draining my iPhone’s battery very rapidly (that and my aging iPhone 7 probably needs a new battery at this point). After spotting myself, I shut down the phone to save power. I forgot to contact my buddy Mike (K8RAT) with a frequency, but he eventually saw me on the SOTA spots.
In a period of 29 minutes, I worked 20 stations on 20 meters.
Next, I moved up to 17 meters where I worked eight more stations in seven minutes.
I love effortless activations like this and part of me wanted to continue operating–even switching to SSB–but looking at the time, I knew I needed to hit the trail, make my way back to the car, and drive to Pilot Mountain.
I called QRT around 16:42 UTC and packed up my gear.
QSO Map
Not bad for 5 watts and a 31′ wire!
One highlight of this activation was meeting Jim (NA4J) who heard my CW from the summit and popped by to introduce himself. Although I trimmed out our conversation in the video (I’m not entirely sure he knew I was recording the activation), you’ll hear him in the first half of the activation.
Video
Here’s my real-time, real-life video of the entire activation:
Click here to view on YouTube.
The hike back to the car was very pleasant. It was a bit longer than the path I took to the summit, but the descent had no steps which made it a breeze.
I had a radio topic on my mind during that hike and actually pulled out the OSMO Action camera and made a bit of a “hike and talk” video. It’s on the topic of ATUs and resonant vs non-resonant antennas. I haven’t yet decided if I’ll post it–the shaky camera might make some viewers sea sick! 
We’ll see–maybe I’ll brave up and post it anyway…
Next, I drove to Pilot Mountain State Park for a quick afternoon activation. Although Pilot Mountain is a SOTA summit, too, it’s yet to be activated because the actual summit would require proper rock climbing, I believe.
Thank you
As always, thank you for reading this field report! And thank you to everyone who has supported me through Patreon and the Coffee Fund. I truly appreciate it.
I hope you find time this week to take your radios outdoors to play, or to hunt some parks and summits from your shack, backyard or vacation spot!
And for those of you working on your CW skills, don’t give up and don’t stress about it. Take your time and allow your brain to absorb code by simply listening. When you feel you’re able to copy even some of the contacts in the videos of my activations, you’re ready to start hunting CW activators!
You’ve got this!
73,
Thomas (K4SWL)