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We’ve done lots of work on the channel with portable power for portable ops. We’ve even discussed power distribution on the channel but it’s always been from a “ham shack” perspective.
All of the examples of power distribution boards found in ham radio shops, are designed to be mounted to a wall. In some cases, we find styles meant for the desktop. What we never see are the design ergonomics for the portable operator. We are given a one-size-fits-all solution which only fits the needs of the ham Shack. This happens because designers of these boards have no real field experience, with power distribution. So we need to DIY a reasonable power distribution cable ourselves.
The main problem with off the shelf is the Anderson powerpole connectors are facing upward. This puts a lot of strain on the solderjoint underneath the powerpole connectors connecting to the circuit board. For the active operator, it will lead to eventual failure. What we want is a backpack friendly power distribution cable with 2, 3, or 4 power pole connectors, and a USB or 5v port. This would be good enough for your radio, your laptop, and charging your mobile phone for example. Or it could be your radio and Raspberry Pi. Whichever combination it is, we have one input, and the various outputs meeting our requirements. There’s one more feature it should have, but I’ll wait a little while before I explain it.
I’ve made several different variations of this cable. This one is capable of running a 100 watt radio, Raspberry Pi, and charge my tablet or laptop simultaneously. Of course it also depends on the battery pack we’re using with it. Naturally I’m using the battery packs with built on the channel with this power distribution cable. This allows the battery to stay in a safe place, with a cable coming out of a pack and only exposing the distribution block on the head of the cable.
The most important aspect of this distribution cable is the distribution block. The Anderson powerpole connectors are in line with the entire cable, laying flat without placing any strain on the solder joints. On one end we have a flexible silicone coated 14 gauge cable. In the middle we have the circuit board with a 25 amp fuse. Coming off of the circuit board we have 4, 45 amp power pole connectors, in parallel and supporting one another. The circuit board is covered with Vulcanizing tape. Heat shrink is applied around the fuse leg towers, preventing any “shocking” mishaps. Finally, vulcanizing tape is applied around the power pole connectors on both ends and onto the cables, to provide strain relief.
I could have made the circuit board for this project myself, but instead I decided to order and adapt the four Port board from k9jeb.com you can see, even Johns boards have the power-pole connectors facing upward. With a few pieces of adequate wire, we could turn that distribution board into something awesome for the portable operator.
If you haven’t seen my portable off-grid battery and solar power for amateur radio series yet, you can browse through it at the playlist below.
Portable Off-Grid Battery & Solar Power for Amateur Radio:
The coronaviruspandemic has created a world wracked with worry and panic. Restaurants and bars have closed, people are stuck at home, and alcohol sales are up. Whether it’s wine o’clock or quarantini time, people have taken day drinking to a whole new level due to social distancing and pandemic fears. But with so many people afraid of being sick, why not skip all that and go straight for The Cure?
The Cure cocktail is inspired by the famous Long Island Iced Tea, which is known for its mix of multiple liquors, starting bar fights, and erasing Spring Break memories. Incidentally, the history of the Long Island Iced Tea is steeped in some small mysteries (maybe the creator had one too many?).
Photo by Jeremiah McCarthy/Coffee or Die.
The first instance of something like a Long Island Iced Tea appeared in the 1920s. A man named Old Man Bishop concocted a drink called, fittingly, the Old Man Bishop, which involved all the staple liquors of a Long Island. It included rum, vodka, gin, and tequila, but instead of triple sec, it featured whiskey and was sweetened with maple syrup. This version of the Long Island is the one that inspired The Cure.
To keep this cocktail timely, we’re going to use alcohol that highlights a few of the primary countries being affected by COVID-19: China, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Italy.
Photo by Jeremiah McCarthy/Coffee or Die.
And we’re starting off right where COVID-19 did: China. Baijiu is the national liquor of choice in China, but it hasn’t quite taken off around the world — which means it’s kind of hard to come by. But its flavor profile is similar to whiskey, so you can substitute if necessary.
Representation from the U.K., the U.S., and Italy are fairly standard — gin (Tanqueray), vodka (Tito’s), and limoncello, respectively. Rum is an international booze, so choose your favorite, but make sure to keep it light as to not overpower the drink — something like Flor de Cana is perfect.
Recipe by Tim Becker/Coffee or Die. Photo by Jeremiah McCarthy/Coffee or Die. Graphic by Erik Campbell/Coffee or Die.
After you’ve put all the liquor into a shaker filled with ice, add the grenadine and lemon juice, then shake well. Strain the mixture over ice in a highball glass (or, you know, whatever you have on hand). Top with Sprite and garnish with a lanced cherry and lemon wedge.
The drink should come out red to pink in color, slightly sweet, and very strong — if you have enough, you might just forget all about the coronavirus!
Contact Tracing? Really? That’s the next big government program to push for total surveillance over our lives. Now the real fallout from the Coronapocalypse comes to light.
The very people who created a fake pandemic out of faulty statistics, media fear-pimping and the rankest of propaganda are now pushing the total surveillance state to protect us (them?) from the next crisis.
James Corbett from the Corbett Report just published an excellent video discussing ‘contact tracing’ as promulgated by (who else?) the Clinton Global Initiative to create an army of new Brown Shirts to assist our wise and benevolent leaders in managing us like livestock.
James is urging us not to use their Orwellian term, and I agree with him. But the best way to do that is to make fun of it and them.
I propose just looking at them and saying, “Don’t Trace Me, Bro.”
As always when they want to herd us towards a terrible idea they first have to come up with a harmless sounding euphemism for it. Either that or just call it a war that we’re going to fight and win together, you know, for kids!
But this was always the plan with this virus. We can speculate as to why this has been done, why it was directed from the commanding heights of our society but, in the end, that speculation is irrelevant.
This is happening, it’s here and they are now working to square the circle. The goal is to finish off the last vestiges of anonymity and individuality started with the destruction of financial privacy during the Clinton Adminstration, which was wrapped in the classic government phrases “Know Your Customer” and “Anti-Money Laundering”
Now those sets of rules which got ramped up after 9/11 dominate the global financial landscape.
But, let’s look at what’s happened with COVID-19 step-by-step.
The gold standard remains the ABC News report according to which intel collected in November 2019 by the National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), a subsidiary of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), was already warning about a new virulent contagion getting out of hand in Wuhan, based on “detailed analysis of intercepted communications and satellite imagery”.
An unnamed source told ABC, “analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event”, adding the intel was “briefed multiple times” to the DIA, the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, and even the White House.
Next China, the gold standard for the Orwellian Panopticon, proceeds to use that Panopticon to prove to the world how effective government can be in containing a deadly plague.
That model, which runs fundamentally counter to billions of years of evolution and basid immunology, is then propagated around the Western world to combat COVID-19, a disease which has a mortality rate similar to the annual flu, to shut down those economies exacerbating a financial crisis already fully underway.
This destroys the lives of hundreds of millions of people. It creates economic dislocations that make the Great Depression look like a mild recession.
In places like Italy, France and Spain where youth unemployment has been in double digits for more than a decade, the lock down was used as a way to tamp down social unrest, as they were hot beds for opposition to inept and increasingly fascistic governments.
In the U.S., a country ruled by old, ideologically-possessed and corrupt Boomers who have been in a heightened state of fear since Donald Trump was elected saw the opportunity to create the worst possible outcome in places like New York and California.
Governors in blue states seized power they didn’t legally have and cried for help they didn’t need.
And the confusion and disinformation about the virus created so much fear people willingly huddled in their homes hoping the angel of death passed them by with nothing more to do than be glued to the death counter in a desperate bid to stay informed about the science.
But there weren’t two million dead in the U.S. There’s around 50,000 and those death statistics are very speicous since the people reporting them have motive, means and opportunity to inflate them to get Federal aid, advance their political agendas now on full display and cover their asses.
So, now ‘contact tracing’ which is just a euphemism for total surveillance. But they are admitting that they can’t do it themselves. They need help. In totalitarian governments like the U.K., they’ll have an app in a couple of weeks.
Matthew Gould also disclosed plans to log the location of whenever two or more people are in close proximity for minutes at a time.
That will disturb privacy campaigners.
Ya think?
Mr Gould told the Science and Technology Committee the app would be “technically ready” for deployment in “two to three weeks” – but made it clear it was only one part of the strategy to emerge from lockdown and would involve a none-too-subtle marketing campaign.
“If you want to protect the NHS and stop it being overwhelmed and, at the same time, want to get the economy moving, then the app is going to be part of an essential part of a strategy for doing that,” he said.
China already has this. All across the enlightened West countries will now recruit tens of thousands of ‘contact tracers’ to go out and build their network for them, just like Gavin Newsome and Andrew Cuomo discussed with Bill Clinton in the video linked above.
And since there are now tens of millions of people out of work desperate for a job of any sort finding recruits will be easy.
See how this works?
First you destroy people’s lives, then you print trillions in funny money to bail out the inept and continue paying the enforcers, ensuring they are fed. And then when desperation reaches its peak you create a new government program and turn people into snitches to ensure compliance.
We’re going to empower the worst busybodies who are already insane with fear to run around collecting data for the government.
All in the name of getting the economy back up and running!
I’m pretty sure when I read The Scarlet Letter in high school we didn’t consider Hester Prynne to be the bad guy. Because the person who is COVID-19 positive will now have a big red “CV” on them which will limit their ability to partake in society.
The next stage will be to force them to lock themselves down in isolation or face the depredations of the State. And even if we begin to ignore such insanity the next step will be to look the other way when the contact tracers become belligerent.
This is all about keeping everyone in a heightened state of fear at all times. The Karens will bee worried about a stupid germ and everyone else will be worried about what the Karens will do.
Because what good is this app if it doesn’t report you to the authorities who know where you are.
So the solution to a virus and the incompetence of our governments is to turn busy bodies into brown shirts and COVID positives into social pariahs.
Do you realize what happens when you don’t pay a parking ticket now? Eventually your licence gets suspended, then your car insurance gets canceled. If you don’t turn your tag in for not having insurance then you are risking jail time when you get stopped by the police. They arrest you for driving on a suspended licence, impound your car, and the entire ordeal becomes a bureaucratic nightmare.
The moral of the story? Pay your parking ticket, obviously.
But not because you were a bad person or committed a heinous crime. But because you broke the rules. If you don’t follow the State’s rules, no matter how petty, no matter how asinine you will be punished to the full extent of the law.
Do you really think this ‘contact tracing’ system won’t end up in the same kind of hell?
Now you’re a documented threat to other people’s lives! You’re an evil spreader, man! Think of the children!
The State is only good at two things. Killing people and creating perverse incentives. And if this isn’t a classic case of creating the perverse incentive of destroying civilization in order to save it I don’t know what is?
This is the real danger of 5G technology. It isn’t China having a backdoor embedded by Huawei, it is the State having the ability to blanket the world in high bandwidth snooping devices everywhere that people congregate.
Their system is failing before our eyes. It’s a system born of corrupt money begetting ever greater institutional corruption. They wouldn’t be pushing for this total surveillance if they weren’t uniquely paranoid about our readiness to throw them overboard.
They want us snitching on each other and suspect of each other. This is the most pernicious form of social control ever devised, to distrust basic human contact and interaction because there are germs in the world.
It’s time to end the mass hallucination that we’ve never dealt with something like this before. The mass branding of this COVID-19 as the plague is laughable and the push for global surveillance is pathetic.
Unfortunately, we live in a world today where the fearful are empowered by the powerful to mob the non-compliant. COVID-19 isn’t the plague folks. If you think it’s the crisis you should be fearful of I urge you to seek therapy not the false security of a government tracking app.
Hiking time estimation is one of the most important trip planning skills for figuring out how long it will take you to hike a trail, climb a mountain, or backpack a route. One way to figure it out is to look at a guidebook or app, which will often list the length of the trail, the amount of elevation you’ll climb while hiking it, and a time estimate. This is often referred to as “book-time,” from the days when people used guidebooks instead of apps.
If you’re not using a guidebook, but have a topographic map handy, a navigation app like Gaia, or an online mapping tool like Caltopo, it’s easy to calculate a good time estimate using a formula known as Naismith’s Rule, which factors distance and elevation gain. This is the same time estimation formula used by most guidebooks.
Naismith’s (Time Estimation) Rule
Add 30 minutes for each mile of distance or 1,000 feet of elevation gain (climbing).
Here are some examples of how you’d apply it:
For a trail that’s one mile long and doesn’t climb any hills, it will take you 30 minutes.
For a trail that’s one mile long and climbs 1,000 feet of elevation, it will take you 60 minutes
For a route that’s five miles long and gains 1,500 feet of elevation, it will take you 195 minutes.
The time estimate generated by Naismith’s rule generates time estimates for the “average” hiker and factor in variables like rest breaks, layer brakes, bathroom breaks, and so on. Its value is in helping you figure out if you can hike a route and return before nightfall or how far you should plan on hiking for each day of a multi-day backpacking trip.
If you know that you hike faster than the 30 minutes per mile or 1,000 feet of elevation gain, you can plug those numbers into the formula instead. With experience, you’ll figure out your own hiking pace in different terrain and climates for planning purposes.
A couple of weeks ago, I debunked a remarkably anti-empirical column by Dana Milbank of the Washington Post.
He claimed that America’s response to the coronavirus was hampered because government is too small, yet the nations he cited as successful role models actually have much smaller public sectors than the United States.
Unfortunately, other journalists share Mr. Milbank’s ignorance with regards to easily accessible data on fiscal policy.
Writing for the Atlantic, George Packer asserts that the U.S. response to the coronavirus has been a miserable failure because government is too small.
Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state. …a federal government crippled by years of right-wing ideological assault, politicization by both parties, and steady defunding. …tests for the virus were almost impossible to find… years of attacking government, squeezing it dry and draining its morale, inflict a heavy cost that the public has to pay in lives. All the programs defunded, stockpiles depleted, and plans scrapped meant that we had become a second-rate nation.
Michael Brendan Dougherty of National Reviewtakes apart Packer’s column.
He points out that CDC funding has increased, while also noting that the bureaucracy has squandered the additional money it has received.
…the CDC’s funding has increased — not that it has made good use of the extra money. This is not a lean and mean virus-fighting machine, getting by on starvation-level resources. It maintains a Hollywood liaison to consult on films. In recent years, it has expanded beyond its core mission to promote motorcycle safety and sponsor programs dedicated to fostering “safe, stable, nurturing relationships” in schools. If you’re wondering why there was lots of political and social messaging larding up CDC documents on COVID-19, just realize that when Congress increases an agency’s funding, the result is likely to be more ideological make-work jobs rather than a more effective workforce. …as for public-sector health-care spending, ours is not notably low — it’s roughly equivalent to those of the developed nations of Western Europe.
And he also observes that nations with smaller governments have done a better job than countries with bigger governments.
…The East Asian states that have done best in fighting COVID-19 are not social-democratic but hyper-capitalist. Compared with them — and to America —Western Europe has done much worse at containing the spread of the coronavirus and the holding down the death toll.
Excellent points.
For my contribution to this debate, I’m going to investigate whether Mr. Packer is right about “steady defunding” of the federal government.
To see whether he is correct about “programs defunded,” I went to Table 1.3 of the Historical Tables of the Budget and created the following chart to see what happened to inflation-adjusted spending over the past 40 years.
Lo and behold, it turns out that Mr. Packer is completely wrong. There hasn’t been any defunding. Not even close.
Instead, the inflation-adjusted burden of government is almost three times greater today than it was the year Reagan was elected (and it will be more than three times greater once all the emergency spending is included).
The bottom line is that I can’t figure out whether to be more dismayed that journalists are innumerate or that major publications apparently don’t have fact checkers.
P.S. There were periods when spending grew faster than at other times. There were also times when the private sector grew faster than the government (fulfilling the Golden Rule). And we also can see the how government exploded because of TARP and Obama’s faux stimulus and then was briefly constrained during the Tea Party era (and is now climbing rapidly under Trump).
