Running Gags, Inside Jokes, Continuity Issues And Other Stuff Inside The Random Access Thought!

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Listen to This Week in Amateur Radio long enough and eventually you will begin notice some of the more unusual elements within the program, such as the Random Access Thought. And at some untimely point thereafter, you may also start to actually hear those short promotional announcements for the Random Access Thought and the little movies-in-sound pushing our custom TWIAR QSL cards, our This Week Blogs and Twitters, and our KXKVI podcast download site.
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Believe it or not, it may take as many man-computer hours to generate a 90 second promo as it does to develop a complete seven and half minute Random Access Thought or Random Access File segment. Coming up with fresh ideas for these mini-radio shows can be creatively challenging but on occasion, a simple storyboard idea may manifest itself and carry across multiple promos and even into the RATs themselves. Here's an example: Back last year, after we decided to start posting via Blogspot, I made the observation that George W2XBS had launched several preliminary versions of his blog before finally settling in on a specific custom page design, but several posts that he had published had subsequently disappeared. Why?
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George indicated that he was not happy with some of his written material and so deleted those, saying something to the effect: "I want to get it right the first time". BINGO! I cross-haired, locked and loaded as his passing thought passed on by.
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Thus, in a July 2008 TWIAR Blog proclamation, the 45 year old fail-to-launch, chain-smoking Cigman is plinking away at his keyboard when MNOAOS Zach asks: "Hey Cigman, whatcha doin?" Cigman says: "I'm working on my new blog!" Zach says: "How long have you been at it?" Cigman says: "About three hours!" "Wow, that's a long time!" says Zach. Says Cigman: "I want to get it right the first time!"
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In a follow up September 2008 pitch, the highly cylindrical TANK is busy at work lead-fingering (assuming he has fingers) his keyboard when Zach asks: "Hey TANK, whatcha doin?" TANK says: "BLOG!" Zach says: "How long have you been working on it?" TANK says: "THREE DAYS!" "Wow! That's a long time!" says Zach. Says TANK: "I WANT TO GET IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME!". The gag is running.
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In an upcoming promo for the Random Access Thought, Cigman is rehearsing his big one line as an intro for a RAT entitled "Now For Something Completely Different". Zach says: "Hey Cigman, whatcha doin?" Cigman says: "I've been rehearsing this line for tonight's big performance!" Zach says: "How long have you been practicing?" Cigman says: "About three weeks!" "Wow, that's a long time!" says Zach. Says Cigman: "I want to get it right the first time for opening night!"
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Then there's Cigman's sister Marilyn. There is an occasional pop-up theme which picks up on Marilyn's peculiar fascination with watching paint dry. When I did a RAT feature on non-directional aircraft radio beacons, the promo script called for Zach to stop by at Marilyn's house where she is feverishly painting the living room. Marilyn says: "I like to watch paint dry. I paint a wall and I watch it dry!" So later on, in another segment, when Cigman sees his sister watching a blank analog TV screen after the big switch to digital television, he makes the suggestion that she would do better watching paint dry. To which, in perky Pavlovian response, she says: "I like to watch paint dry. I paint a wall and I watch it dry!" And of course, she does just that!
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George was also able to provide yet another little gem for an inside joke that plays out in a TWIAR QSL Card offer that first aired this January. I was in QSO with George one day on the local 146.82 machine. I'd been bugging him to get a SONY PSP. His terse response was: "I'd would rather invest in a good pair of gym shorts". George said this because he has taken to daily visits to his local YMCA.
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BINGO! In the next QSL promo, when little kid Bix's vintage Hallicrafters S38 shortwave radio goes on the fritz and he runs to his Dad begging for a new receiver, Mister Nix sternly intones: "Well my Son, shortwave radios are very expensive! I would rather invest in a good pair of gym shorts!"
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There was an issue of continuity for another QSL promo which still occasionally airs. The story involves a somewhat incredulous scenario where Marilyn is doing time in the Big House. The scene opens with the sound of a large jail door sliding open and footsteps are heard as she makes her way to a payphone. She calls Pauly, Ricky and Bobby (presumably her associates in crime) to advise them of the new This Week in Amateur Radio QSL card "with the asteroids"(flag that thought) that she has secretly come into possession of.
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But it was the sound of the footsteps that was flawed and got noticed by at least one of our most valued WBCQ shortwave listeners. When I first outlined the piece, I had planned to do the voice of a La Cosa Nostra-style Goodfella making that outside call but I got lazy and decided to have Marilyn do the voice over instead, thinking to myself that it would be funnier. Since I had already sourced all the effects prior to the scripting, the sound of the footsteps were of a man's shoes. In fact, they were my shoes.
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As a sidebar, the first occasion where I needed footsteps was for the Random Access Thought entitled: "The Internet Tubes Are Real". The premise had me as the host, entering a service tunnel at Big City Cable, making my way to a main distribution Internet tube. I needed footsteps, so I put on my shoes, placed my cheap forty-nine dollar Radio Shack audio cassette recorder on the kitchen floor and took four steps. The footsteps were then loaded onto a hard drive, cleaned up and looped.
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Meanwhile, back at prison, it did actually occur to me that Marilyn's sensuous British dialect plus my man shoes were a sonic mismatch, but then I thought: "Who will notice? It's only a little commercial!" A week later, a postcard arrived at Box 30, Sand Lake, NY 12153 from Peter Bently of East Aurora, New York, who wrote: "It's a dilemma. In your promo for the new QSL card, Marilyn walks like a man". Peter further wrote: "I was going to suggest you change the sound FX, but I realized it's probably impossible to find a recording of Una Espia, sneaking around in her bedroom slippers. Oh well, perhaps Marilyn is more the Nancy Sinatra type".
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This oversight resulted in three consequences. First, the voice and effects mismatch was indeed observed. Second, the mismatch may have skewed one man's mind's eye view of just what kind of a gal Marilyn might actually be. And thirdly, in the end, the bit was even funnier because of the shoes!
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Going back to that flagged thought, when we first started issuing QSL cards, the job of creating and printing them was assigned to George's long-suffering wife Cheryl, who was running some kind of a MAC computer that could make a nice three by five picture and then copy it to the same size card stock. After two or three print runs, we decided we wanted something new so George got one of his news anchors to draft up a cool outer space scene showing the sun and the nine planets. He even went so far as to include the asteroid belt which you could barely see in the image. BINGO! The asteroids became the focus of the QSL card sales pitch. For well over a year, various characters in equally various QSL card promos extolling the virtues of having a custom QSL card with the asteroids in your personal collection.
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With these items top of mind, look elsewhere in this blog for "The Voices at -18 dB". That post, linked with this one, just goes to show what kind of nut cases are busy at work producing stuff for This Week in Amateur Radio!

VACATION! A Visual Definition!

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I came across this image while searching for wallpaper for my Sony PSP. Elsewhere in this Blogulation are two posts entitled "Vacation!" and "Vacation?" Go read those posts and then carefully view this picture. Although rendered as an amusing visual blip for momentary note, you may discover that this simple JPEG dovetails nicely with those articles but also provides the final solution to the puzzles posed.

As it was in 1999: Packet Radio, Packet Politics and the Land Line Lids!

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Hello there! It's me again! N2FNH with more on those amazing Packet Internet Gateways,Amateur Radio's Best Kept Secret! This time around, it's Packet Politics! I have learned there is a raging debate in the Digital Domain these days concerning Packet Radio, world-wide message forwarding and the Internet. Up to until recently, I thought Packet was just about the only safe harbor in the Hobby shielded from the passionate and sometimes ugly political scene that can manifest itself on the Low Bands or local VHF and UHF repeaters. I was wrong!

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It is an on-going war-of-the-words between the so-called Land Line Lids and the Radio Frequency Lids. You can march right down to the front line by simply connecting to your local Packet BBS and begin reading all those verbal Scud Missiles under the DEBATE and Land Line LID headers and decide for yourself just who's winning and who's losing.

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Here's the story: Best I can tell, it goes this way: When Packet Radio first made the scene some 10-15 years ago, a lot of figurative blood, sweat and tears went into fashioning the AX25 protocol and then, extensive efforts were put forth in every Ham community to develop and refine regional Packet Networks to enable users to reach out and touch somebody else someplace else in another town or state. But it was the idea of sending messages that really got a lot of folks into the Packet scene and so message-handling and the subsequent forwarding of those messages moved from the local VHF and UHF circuits to a globe-spanning HF Network making heavy use of the 75, 40 and 20 Meter Bands.

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With this new network, you could use nothing more than an Hand Held Radio, a computer and a TNC to send Packet Mail to other Amateur Radio Operators overseas. A typical message might take a few days to get across the country and maybe up to a week or so to reach distant ports of call in other countries. And this system functioned very well and still does, in most places around the world. However, there have been a few changes. It may have started with LONNY back in the late 1980's when some NBC and BBC broadcast engineers who were also Hams got this great idea to link London and New York City together by taking a couple of Packet Nodes and connecting them to each end of a commercial undersea transmission cable. And it worked! Very well! Now, Amateur Radio Operators could enter through Manhattan and exit into foggy old London Town and explore each other's local Packet environments, enjoy keyboard QSO's and exchange third-party messages, which by the way, opened a big can of worms a few years back...but that one is another story.

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In any event, this was the first instance where a non-Amateur Radio medium was used big time to extend the communications range within this aspect of the Hobby. There was a lot of debate at the time, but nowhere near the amount of verbiage generated over the arrival of the Packet Internet Gateway Bulletin Boards and their effect on message-handling. Like an Invasion of the Body Snatchers, these amazing devices began to insinuate themselves into many localities allowing Ham Operators to connect by Radio and leave by Telephone and end up thousands of miles away all through auspices of the Super Information Highway.

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It appears that some BBS SysOps may have decided that using HF was at best an inefficient means of message-forwarding and decided to attach an extra cable and modem to their Packet BBS's and suddenly the mail moved a lot quicker! I found this out myself. A year ago, I sent a special test message through my local packet BBS and then chased that message over the next week using a regional Internet Gateway to see if and when that test message showed up at strategic BBS's in other states and in other countries.

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It took a day for the message to move across the state and into Eastern Canada. It took a week for the original test to reach places like Turkiye, Lithuania and the Canary Islands. Then, a few months ago, I tried it again. Same deal: a day to move across the state and into Eastern Canada but now, about a day to reach places like Ecuador, Italy and Russia. At some point in its journey, my message slid into an Internet Storm Drain, did the wormhole bit and washed up on a distant shore, just like that.

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And this is the focus of the Packet Politics! The Land Line Lids say marrying Amateur Radio with the Internet enhances the hobby by streamlining the process and speeding up the message forwarding. Besides, they say, the Internet is here to stay and is not about to go away. It is better to make the best use of this powerful communications tool rather than reject it wholesale. Meanwhile, the RF Lids offer the strong opinion that where Packet Internet BBS's spring up, the local Packet Network suffers since the need for that Network is sharply reduced or simply not needed at all, resulting in neglect and eventual disintegration of the system. The analogy is similar to a virus infecting a healthy, thriving organism and inflicting irreparable damage to that organism.

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I have discovered many SysOps of traditional Packet Networks within a specific Packet environment will not support any message forwarding that they feel in some way involves the Internet. However, it is possible to find within the same environment, an active Packet Internet Gateway allowing users Telnet access to remote Gateways overseas. That same Gateway may also be used by HF DX'ers to link with distant stations to arrange schedules and compare notes. And that same Gateway may also be a launch ramp for global APRS traffic, bypassing more traditional HF and VHF pathways in favor of the Internet as a grease-lightning transmission medium.

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I would be tempted to say I am neutral but I would be lying since just about every aspect of my Amateur Packet activity involves the Internet in some way. For me, if the plugs were pulled, I would not be happy because I have made many very fine acquaintances over the wires and radios in many states and in many different countries. I am not sure how healthy Amateur Radio is your community, but here in Upstate New York, VHF and UHF repeater and simplex activity is at an all time low. Finding a conversation in progress is like trying to win the lottery. Good luck!

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You know you got problems when a local Ham Club runs an article in its newsletter with the headline: "Problems With Our Repeater" and you read on to discover the club president is begging his members to please, please use the repeater more...it's not being used enough. You know you got problems when the January, June and September VHF Contests arrive but you have no clue because your scanning radio intercepts no signals on contest channels. Some say the HF Bands are flourishing and it appears they are but isn't the vast bulk of Operators mostly aging Baby Boomers who might just the last wave of Hams to key down and talk up before those highly valued and much exalted frequencies eventually fade into nothing more than scratchy and clicky static?

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The debate goes and on but it's academic. The Internet has successfully infiltrated and infused itself with our Hobby and there it will stay until we Amateur Radio Guys and Gals decide to put it to the best possible use or until Amateur Radio is finally and completely decommissioned, leaving us with just our cordless phones, pagers, garage door openers and CB Radios.

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In closing, I say if there's a Gateway or BBS in your neighborhood that's cooking with gas because it's connected to the Internet, use it and use it well. Support your SysOp if he or she needs the help. If somebody suddenly gets the bright idea to hook up his Voice Radio to Internet Phone or VoxChat, see what you can do to help out and then use it when it's built. Otherwise, one by one, Radios will be turned off for the last time, big Pentiums will boot up night after night all over town and it will be www.insert your favorite web page here.com or even worse, Amateur Chat Room on some unseen fully wireline VoxChat Server. So give it some thought! In the meantime, this is Bill Baran, N2FNH, saying 73 for This Week In Amateur Radio.

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