Phil Landmeier @shuttersparks@qoto.org

@atomicpoet Indeed. It was there from the beginning. Listen to the old stuff of her performing with Ike Turner. Ike was the star, right? The big name. But her performances shine much brighter than his. What's actually on the record is Tina Turner and some guy playing worn-out guitar licks.

@freemo @TruthSandwich I should add that in a country as corrupt as the U.S., where virtually every politician, from my local town council to the highest levels is on the take, it's perfectly valid to ask "who is making the laws". Asking this question is the fastest way to the truth.

It's no accident that the first states to enact such laws are those home to the companies getting busted.

My younger daughter lives in a city in Georgia that's home to, arguably, the biggest chicken processing facility in the world. She says that company runs all the politics in the city and county. They surely own numerous state legislators as well. They'd be fools not to since that's how business is done in the U.S.

I learned this in the early 80s when I found myself working closely on a project with a state legislator from Hawaii. I took advantage of the situation and we had some long talks about "civics". Hah. He explained how things really work, from town councils on up. People run for office on town councils mainly so they can influence real estate values by manipulating zoning laws and so forth. He explained how contractors are awarded projects at city, county, and state levels. (Hint: It's not based on merit. Lol.)

In this country one can figure out the truth by looking at what business interest(s) benefit from legislation.

@freemo @TruthSandwich The past year or so has seen frequent cases where big corporations got busted for employing children in industrial chicken and meat processing plants, working long hours in dangerous circumstances. These laws are being enacted, mainly at the behest of those big corporations because they no longer have access to an abundance of willing immigrants to fill those jobs.

Children should be in school, doing homework, eating, sleeping, not working in a dangerous chicken processing plant.

Nor am I opposed to young people getting work experience. I did it myself. I worked briefly when I was 16. Then when I was 17 I got a regular job while still in high school, but it was a job that didn't interfere with school: 5 to 9 PM weekdays and all day Saturday. It worked out great and was a great experience doing a wide variety of tasks. That's not the same as working on a production line in a chicken factory.

So this is the solution to the problem created by stifling immigration, the lifeblood of the U.S.A. since the beginning.

https://apnews.com/article/child-labor-laws-alabama-ohio-c1123a80970518676be44088619c6205

@laren The tobacco puck contains a 9-volt battery and some electronics to clean up contact bounce and scratchiness of some Morse keys.

@laren Easily. A complete setup would fit in many purses I've seen. 😂

@laren Here's the radio. The TR-35 is a four-band CW transceiver that can fit in your pocket.

@laren Like we were saying... Testing a new TR-35 QRP transceiver just now.

Here's the RBN report. 5 watts and a wire in a tree for an antenna. On the 40 meter band, about right for this time of day, zero to 500 miles. On 20 meters you see a 24 dB SNR report (that's loud) at 1,800 miles.

@ai6yr "Stout" is the word I was looking for. 💪

Oh, no. We've lost Tina Turner. She was a tremendous performer with a huge stage presence. She was the last performer alive who was present at the birth of rock-and-roll.

https://apnews.com/article/tina-turner-dead-a04311130e67459cbade34565eb80662

#TinaTurner #RockAndRoll #music

@ai6yr Indeed. Those look like they're not going anywhere. From the looks of the insulators quite new. These are not the power lines you want to crash your small plane into.

@laren The sense of magic of radio that I felt when I was 8 years old has never left me. Back then it was listening to shortwave from halfway around the world.

To sit at a picnic table in a park with a 5 watt QRP radio, battery, 30 foot fiberglass pole clamped to the table, and some wire, and communicate with someone 2,000 miles away using a similar setup just seems impossible. Even though I know all the physics of how the antenna works, how the waves behave, reflection from the ionosphere, etc., it still seems utterly impossible that five watts of energy, radiating in all directions, reflecting off the ionosphere and spread over millions of square miles can wiggle the electrons in the receiver's antenna enough to produce a signal that can pass information. It's seems insane to even think such a thing is possible. Yet, sitting at that picnic table I can see the entire mechanism that's doing it in one glance, and pack it all back into a little carry bag.

The sense of magic is very strong. Learning as I did over the past 60 years and being a retired EE doesn't detract from the magic, somehow.

30 years ago I was a big-gun contester. There's an art to that too. These days I run barefoot. On Sunday I had a nice chat over an 8,600 km path using 35 watts (10m band). My all-time record I did in the 70s was a 12,000 km QSO using 3 watts on the 15m band. And the signals at both ends were strong, S9 (!) What? That's ridiculous, right? No way that can be done. Haha.

@vk2gpu @laren Yes. Ham radio is the ultimate hobby and almost impossible to explain because it's 500 different hobbies with one common thread: radio. You could spend a lifetime working with just two or three of the subhobbies of ham radio.

@rudyschwartz@dobbs.town Yes he was.

@lauren Wasn't me. I swear.