WARNING WILL ROBINSON! IT AIN'T WATCHA THINK!

On occasion, I will perform Google searches on keywords associated with This Week in Amateur Radio, TWIAR, TWIARi, The Random Access Thought, The Ancient Amateur Archives, along with other significant key phrases. Because some of us involved with the production of TWIAR now have these amazingly entertaining blogs to share with you, I also perform random blog searches as well. In the last week, I have made the observation that there are other blogs or web sites arranging things such that when you blog search: TWIAR (as an example), the following listing will be retrieved:

Likewise, a listing such as this:

While I have noticed that there are a few other blogs within the blogspot environment that legitimately reference This week in Amateur Radio, there are others that borrow keywords and phrases and tie them to their website which, should you key on them, will produce subject matter inconsistent with amateur radio. In fact, the content will be p#rn#graphic.

The important considerations in connecting to these sites are: Will visiting a parasitic p#rnblog result in increased and unwanted junk p#rn e-mail in my inbox? By connecting to these pages, do I increase the risk of virus infection, and invite installation of hidden programs on my computer which will redirect my computer's activities?

Chances are, if p#rn is your scene, you have already located such sites elsewhere, but if you're just looking for amateur radio related information, then take the time to carefully check the website address and read the listing descriptive. P.S. - George, I know it's really "Danger Will Robinson!"

Japanese Manga Sound Effects! Not Sound...Pictures!

Here's a web page I came across last night. One could imagine George Takei a.k.a. Star Trek's Mister Sulu dulcetly (such a word?) enunciating these verbally onomatopoeiac (such a word?) effects.

The link is http://www.oop-ack.com/manga/soundfx.html and is part of a larger page apparently devoted to Manga which, as My Number One And Only Son Zachary will advise, are Japanese comic books, jammed pack full of these Original Batman-like print effects. Not your Silver Age Green Lantern or Aquaman stuff of the 1960's...

In fact, this is bigger than I thought! Here are a few other locations that expand further on this topic:

http://www.angelfire.com/geek/tetrisnomiko/sfx.html

http://www.jbox.com/PRODUCT/KDM002

http://www.reimeika.ca/aku/gunnmlastorder/Kana.html

http://www.reimeika.ca/aku/gunnmlastorder/kana4.html

Sitemeter! Get the Door! It might be YOU!

Attention: The following is not a paid endorsement!

A few weeks back, while trolling around the Internet and scoping out other blogs, I made the observation that a quite a few had an icon attached for something identified as Sitemeter. Sitemeter is a specialty website that can provide basic diagnostic information regarding your presence on the Web. Basic service is offered free of charge, along with a lot of adverts, and of course there is an upgrade available for the professional version which begins at $6.95. But for free, you get a boatload of statistical detail!

While you may be not know specifically who is visiting your blog at any given time, you will be advised of Internet Service Provider, city state and country, date and time of day, plus factual background on the visitor's operating system, type of browser, monitor resolution, color depth, country, continent, time zone and more.

To me, the most useful metric is "referral". Here you can see exactly what brought a fellow Internaut to you. Here at the Random Access Thought, since so much noise is made about sound, many trollers stop in by way of Google with significant "sound" keywords while others plug in with nothing more than"n2fnh".

One of the fun things you can do is to key on the observed ISP address. Not all ISPs may offer a home page, but many do and in the case of ISPs in countries outside the USA, it can be visually appealing to see how creatively those pages are decked out, especially if they carry an ethnic subtext to the design. And of course, you can poke around and probe for additional content or pathways too.

So! Got a blog? Get a Sitemeter! Free! Factual! Fun!

From the RAT FILES circa 2003: Arachne!

The following copy was originally composed as radio copy for THIS WEEK IN AMATEUR RADIO which first aired in March of 2003. Please click on http://www.twiar.org/ for additional information on this amateur radio audio news service.

This is no real shocking news. But. I have too much electronic junk lying around the house. Plastic irregular dollar-store storage containers bulging with mostly slightly vintage electronic junk. Not quite truly vintage. Only just slightly vintage. But not even really EBAYable yet either. Yes, I know. You got the same crap.

Your distinctive selection of the crap and the physical distribution and the ultimate disposition of the crap may vary somewhat from mine, but in the end, it's really going to be the same mess of wires, the same mass of cables, the same concoction of connectors, plus old radios, maybe many old radios, maybe some not-so-old radios, a couple of new radios and certainly a few computers.

Maybe a late 90's Christmastime 486.
A dusty musty mid-90's 386.
A rusty crusty early 90's 286.
Or perhaps a truly eroded if not totally corroded Dawn Of Man 8086.

I recently moved..again, this time back to little old upstate Albany, New York many miles from my beautiful lakeside shanty at rustic Sand Lake, home of course to This Week In Amateur Radio, North America's premier audio news service devoted exclusively to the fine art of ham radio and related subject matter. I remain as always, your humble servant, Bill Baran - N2FNH - with more chozzerai, more audio chachkes from the Random Access Files, at one time referred to as Packet radio's Best Kept Secrets. I still do packet but it's really Internet packet. The local radio networks in this area have fallen into disrepair, largely forgotten and now virtually unusable beyond the local horizon. My original interest in packet has however resulted in the amassing of an amazing stellar array of beige colored Dumpster Babies. Dumpster Babies are those abandoned and orphaned computers that nobody else wants.

But me.

A case in point: a friend of a friend had a gorgeous like-new Hewlett Packard 486 that about five years ago he wanted to sell to me for 250 dollars. Now five years later, this friend of a friend says: "Please! Just take it already!" An hour later, the HP, complete with CD-ROM, 1X, maybe 2X if I'm lucky, a 3 and 1/2 inch floppy - AND - a 5 1/4 inch floppy, is rigged and plugged in. As the box boots up, my heart sinks as I observe the BIOS screen summarily summarize in steely cold black and white frosty font that there is only 7.136 Megs of extended memory in the box. The machine came equipped with an internal modem, a sound card and a scanner card, which was nice. This friend of a friend has some visual impairment so the scanner for him was a necessity.

The HP came with Windows 95, still usable but no candle to a Windows XP. Imagine my further surprised when I discover that this Win95 is version 4.00. 950, most likely one of the very first if not the very first retail version of 95 to hit the market. So archaic is this copy that there is no Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser, no Microscoft Outlook Express e-mailer and no Microsoft DUN, that's your Dial Up Networking software. Just the alphabet soup modem Hyperterminal program on board. Even worse, the harddrive is only 162 Megs in size! What a heart failure! There would not be any space left at all if I wiped the drive clean and installed a more recent and more viable copy of Win95 so forget about Win98. Still, it was a FREEbie.

Now, I could go through the bother of installing a better harddrive and maybe scrounge some extra memory but this would be work and maybe I will do it someday, but not today. I decided to keep the computer in Retro mode and preserve the primordial Win95 in its virginal state but Iwould make this lead weight Internetable using not the monopolistic, pan-global Microsoft Windows but a fascinating operating environment called... Arachne.

Have you heard about this? Arachne, and the current version is at 1.70 at press time, is a full-featured FREEWARE Internet HTML browser which you can get from the good folks at http://www.arachne.cz that comes with a built- in PPP or Point-to-Point protocol dialer and the option of several TCPIP and multimedia plug-ins to make the program completely Internetable and completely entertainable. Arachne is designed to run over most versions of Disk Operating System - or - DOS as well as Linux and is very much reminiscent of Windows 3.1 or Win95 but it is not a Windows thing at all. Arachne is built to run on any PC from pristine Pentiums down to eroded 8088s. What's more, the executable is under a Meg in virtual size before installation which means it can be physically transported on just one 3 and a 1/2 floppy disk.

Installation is straightforward and the prospective user is prompted along the way to set up the dialer and e-mail configurations and also too, various miscellaneous user customization parameters. Perhaps the most annoying aspect of the Arachne program is its auto-modem detect feature. The help files stress that Arachne does not like Winmodems. A Winmodem? Since I really do not know, I am guessing that Winmodems are designed to work within the Windows environment and to function using Windows drivers that are inconsistent with the DOS world. (See a future Random Rant where the Winmodem is better defined and clearly hated by many Retro people!)

It would appear almost all current generation modems are Winmodems so don't be surprised if the auto-detect does does not find it and the manual setup format produces no result. The modems that did work here were a US Robotics 28.8 external modem and an Intel 14.4 FAX modem designed for use with early 21st century laptops. Curiously, the internal Reveal 28.8 modem that came with the Hewlett Packard load was well-liked by Arachne.

How does Arachne compare to Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape or Opera? In terms of shear performance, these advanced browsers easily outpace the Arachne product but then again you can't install an Explorer or Netscape on a 286 or an 8086. Arachne does strange things too, like convert incoming JPEGs to Bitmap images. We are advised JPEGs are slow to decompress so this scheme expedites conversion time. The result is images on a 16 color screen look a lot like 18th century pastel oil paintings sketched by shower-needy and badly unshaven psychotic (scribble in this space the name of your most disliked European country and not just France - JUST KIDDING!) painters.

Since this process may take a little time, Arachne is user friendly enough to ask if you would like to have some coffee while it processes. If it sounds like I am software bashing, please forgive me. I beg your pardon. I am not. Only because these appear to be the most objectionable aspects of the program so far. The learning curve associated with Arachne is fairly shallow so you can learn most if not all its functions within maybe an hours' time and still have a fun time the same night you install it. Some of the FREE plug-ins are truly eclectic, like a speaker WAV thing that lets you play WAV files through your teeny tiny insignificant little computer speaker, that one that goes beep or possibly boop or maybe bammp on boot up. The audio quality is synonymous with the kind of sound that squeeks out of stuffed animal toys embedded with cheap cruddy chips. But you can also download DOSAMP. DOSAMP is the non-graphical version of the NullSoft WINAMP product which can be used to play MP3 audio.

Any compressed download material from the Arachne website is expanded by the system's Automatic Package Manager, a device similar to WinZIP. Without prompting, the APM explodes Arachne plug-ins and also publishes a report summarizing success or failure plus a user synopsis. I just installed Arachne on all my Dumpster Babies but where this package really shines is on my somewhat Silver Age Toshiba Satellite crappy little laptop and of course, my equally almost-ancient Hewlett Packard 486 and this is where we came in. My completely shameless almost-infomercial-like testimonial is now... Over.

Thus, if you have old PCs concealed in closets, clustered in cellars, archived in attics, banished in basements or languishing in lavatories, get your children to drag them out because they are too heavy for you to drag out and prepare to revitalize. Hey, if we hams can refurbish old Hallicrafters, Hammarlunds and Heathkits, we can do the same with our Dells, HPs and IBMs. Remember, the site to check out is http://www.arachne.cz/

And now, as I sit here now topping off the install of an original Microsoft Internet Explorer version 3.03 (designed exclusively) for Windows For Workgroups 3.11 in that same crappy little Toshiba laptop, already loaded with Arachne, I bid you a fondue with a promise, a mandate even, to return with more curiously idiosyncratic and highly decentralized thought to your radio speaker in just one month's time. Let's face, a little goes a long way! Hey! Didn't I just say that about Arachne? More later!
-30-

Amateur Radio Repeater IDs! Even More than Ever Before!

For the week ending August 9th, PacketMan and Mother Radio return to the Random Access Thought with more Amateur Radio Repeater IDs! Even more than ever before! In this Star-Spangled episode, our almost forgotten digital dude PacketMan not only has more to offer from his personal MP3 player but he is now in conversation, making use of standard English language contractions, thanks largely to a Linguistic Vernacular Firmware Upgrade!

The focus is on classic digital male voice IDs, analog female voice IDs and "Repeaterisms", hosted by professional voice-over artist Bill Hamilton of the Musicol Studios, in Columbus, Ohio. In addition, there are also custom WA4TEM IDs included in this RAT which were kindly provided by Greg Williams K4HSM, our official TWIAR Webmaster. I thank Greg again for those cool clips which made for some fun editing when this feature was produced back in February of 2006!

Catch the Random Access Thought, along with all the latest news over the official This Week in Amateur Radio Podcast. Look for TWIARi Edition #185 and TWIAR Edition #800. To get the Random Access Thought separately and to hear other RAT, RAF, QSL and BLOG clips go to:

http://twiar.org/n2fnh/RATParts

Look under file: RAT060205_BCQ.cab and RAT060205_HAM.cab. Right click on each file and "Save Target As". Use your WinZIP or IZArc to extract the files.

Producing the Random Access Thought: The 5 Stages!

The creation and completion of a typical Random Access Thought, sometimes also known as a Random Access File, for This Week in Amateur Radio is essentially a process laid out in five stages which if carefully crafted, will produce a viable result. Here are those stages:

1) THIMK:
Before production can embark in earnest, a subject is required. Although the focus will be lodged somewhere deep within the expansive electromagnetic domain, the very nature of this feature will be a random selection. Therefore, topics can range from amateur radio repeater IDs and long wave non-directional aircraft radio beacons to business band radio bootleggers and onward to the history of the Internet Tubes.

At this point, thought will also given into what sort of environment the episode is to be presented. Thus, if the subject is Stratovision - an experiment in the 1950s for wide range distribution of television programs by high flying airplanes, then the setting will be on board a post WW2 commercial Douglas DC-6, which brings us to stage 2:

2) SOURCING SOUND:
Prior to writing the script, voice clips, primary sound effects and environmental backtracks or music will be sourced from the N2FNH Sound Effects Library. For a recent feature on Business Band Radio Pirates, I recorded individual voice and radio sound clips direct to harddrive from a Uniden BCD-396T scanning receiver. These recordings have been preserved and may show again in extremely modified form in future releases.

For the same episode, I decided to go with an indoor radio room environment, which in this instance resulted from a merge of two previously designed tracks. The first was a background consisting of radio scanners in a room mixed with the sound of birds coming through an open window. The other was made up of additional scanners with distant muted city traffic. The two separate tracks were carefully balanced to provide the right environmental flavor. On many
occasions, a custom mini-library of specialty effects will also be designed. When the subject was the infamous Network of Internet Tubes, audio was composed to simulate what it might actually sound like being inside one of these alleged tubular worlds.

Likewise, a voice must be assigned. For a number of years, I hosted each week's performance but as weekly production became increasing more complex, other actors were recruited. My Number One And Only Son Zachary was drafted into service at the age of ten to handle announcing chores in the RAT and RAF promos that proceed the feature. Bill Continelli W2XOY has on occasion hosted a Random Access Thought with material he has written that falls beyond the realm of his popular Ancient Amateur Archives, also heard on This Week in Amateur Radio. Recent entries from Bill included "CQ MARS!" and "The Story of Reggie".

Some of the characters who appear in the RAT, BLOG and QSL promos have also been employed as hosts. Mother Radio, Cigman, Marilyn and Boleslav Krasnov have appeared as RAT emcees. During this phase, certain sounds and music components may be processed (compressed, equalized or filtered) to work better against the primary voices.

3) WRITING:

This is the hardest part. My procedure is to first research the topic either through text literature currently on hand or by trolling via the Internet. Using my trusty text editor, the Norton Commander, significant facts, keywords, and phrases are collected and digitally jotted down. Then, copy is composed and arranged around these core elements. From keyword insertion to final draft, the copy may be rewritten five times or more over a three day period, while at the same time assembling the voice clips, the effects tracks and anything else I need.

I can sometimes escape extensive writing if the content is taped in the field using my cheap, inexpensive, forty nine dollar RadioShack cassette analog tape recorder. In covering the local Schenectady Museum Amateur Radio Association Field Day this past June, most of the RAT consisted of field recordings of club members with commentary scripted around each clip.

4) RECORDING:

Recording the final document is easy if one of the virtual characters reads. Very little clean up is needed plus the virtual voices read exactly as I tell them. "Clean up" is defined here as unwanted, extraneous noise that detracts from the quality of the presentation. When analog voices are used, there may be more "tone" and incidental noise. Likewise, breaths and other peculiar artifacts are also deleted.

5) FINAL MIX:

At this time, the TWIARi RAT, BLOG and QSL promos are mixed down to two tracks while the Random Access Thought is configured as a single track. I say "two track" because they are not stereo or binaural recordings but the result is a stereo effect. Voices and primary sounds will be assigned a "position in space". For example, Zach may be positioned 38 per cent left of center while Mother Radio is located 63 per cent right of center. This is sometimes referred to as ping-ponging but the payoff is that Zach is to your left and closer to center while MR is stage right but somewhat farther away. In some cases, environmental backtracks and ambiances may have actually been recorded in full stereo which further enhances the "two track as stereo" effect.

In the end, it's a labor of love. It's just a part of my amateur radio hobby that keeps me out of trouble.

From the RAT FILES circa 2003: Abandonware!

Back in the days when I would make the monthly trek to the George Bowen palatial estate in fashionable Poestenkill, New York, I would sit within the NASA control room that is the W2XBS production center with nothing more than a print copy of my feature and a microphone. At the same time, the RAT played over This Week, I published a text copy for my newsletter THE TELNET NEWS...

The following copy was originally composed as radio copy for THIS WEEK IN AMATEUR RADIO, which first aired in February of 2003. Please click on http://www.twiar.org/ for additional information on this amateur radio audio news service.

................

I think maybe this whole thing got started with those sometimes cute and sometimes annoying little computer screen mates or screen buddies that I found a bunch of one day on the Web. These are those little animated chunks of digital detritus that do not do much more than dance or scamper or skate or skitter or jump or whatever it is they do across your monitor screen, doing not much else accept maybe tapping off a few extra kilobytes of your memory resources as you perform your most significant and important daily computer tasks and duties. Little flecks of 1's 0's like NEKO, the mouse chasing virtual cat http://odourz.freeservers.com/screenmates.html and ESHEEP http://www.is.lt/viking/index.html , the fat little pixelated virtual puff of fluff first born and delivered onto the primordial desktops of Windows 3.1 machines many years ago, maybe ten. These same early evolutionary if not quite revolutionary bits and bytes eventually wandered onto my own little hard drives and thus stirred the smoldering embers of a slowly but steadily developing curiosity in things of a vintage flavour.

That is to say old, outdated junk software. But it turns out the official label for stuff like this is ABANDONWARE and there is much ABANDONWARE to be found and equally as much that is very hard to find because certain software authors, developers and vendors like Microsoft make it their business to curb the download traffic so that their all-but-forgotten ware, sometimes called WAREZ and you would spell that W-A-R-E-Z should not be had for free even though almost nobody is attempting to use the stuff anymore except for a few freaks, myself included!

And by the way, myself is Bill Baran - N2FNH - with the Random Access File, the usual monthly or sometimes not feature heard exclusively over This Week In Amateur Radio.

So, what's out there ABANDONWARE-wise these days? The answer is: "Quite a bit". But before you go totally ABANDONWARE, first you should page yourself over to http://www.oldversion.com/ to find recently outdated software. Earlier versions of RealAudio, Netscape and Adobe are harbored at this location. Here's a good case-in-point: I still use the original and remarkably still-free-for-the-accessing JUNO e-mail service. Wanting to install JUNO on additional dumpster-baby boxes and having momentarily misplaced the original floppy I got from George W2XBS, how easy was it to scroll over to OLDVERSION and grab a fresh old copy of JUNO that I couldn't even pay money for from JUNO if I even asked nicely!

Now, prepare yourself for a journey back in time and zip over to http://www.winsite.com/ and click on the link for Windows 3.1 stuff and MY OH MY! what stuff there is! A lot of clever little Cleavers cut their byte teeth on 3.1 programs back in early 90's and a lot of unique if not
completely interesting or possibly useless material is archived here. Things like a virtual slide rule and who remembers what one of those things is anymore. Few do. And OY VEY! a Hebrew Calendar, good through the early 2000's is available if you still need it, complete with Jewish calendars and official sunset times for your Shabbat observance. Also, an endless array of games, puzzles, screen savers plus a really cool program called SKYMAP which you should right now as I speak go over and get immediately if astronomy is your scene.

But this is nothing compared to the "gold" that I tapped into at the 1994 level. The first ingot of "gold" was something called CELLO. CELLO was one of the original fledgling browser programs developed for use on the Internet as a means of decoding documentation composed in the then brand-new HTML format. In 1993, the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University in
central New York published and released a one-time only freeware version 1.01a for all interested parties to make use of. So, does CELLO still work after all these years? Yes, well yes, sort of. HTML has gone through a lot a changes over the decade so a lot of source code can not be read but then again some web pages, mostly very simply composed pages still play. When the frames and the JAVA scripting and other newer components of the protocol arrive at the browser, it may commit one of those ILLEGAL operations or lock the machine up completely. Still, it's like finding that old 1939 Buick in a barn somewhere and trying give it a go one more time.

During the course of this ongoing ABANDONWARE archeological excavation, I also unearthed a copy of NCSA MOSAIC version 2. NCSA MOSAIC was an ambitious project underwritten by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The project ran from 1993 through 1996. Downloadable flavors of NCSA MOSAIC from version 0.6 through version 3, the final version are still available at http://browsers.evolt.org/ . Officially identified as an Internet navigation and data retrieval tool, NCSA MOSAIC remains as the template for both the Microsoft Internet Explorer and the Netscape Navigator. Although no longer supported by its creators, the program lives on in these various evolutionary manifestations.

So, does NCSA MOSAIC version 3, the final frontier still play after all these years. Yes, well yes, sort of. Better than CELLO plays. Earlier versions like 0.6, just barely. Any version of NCSA MOSAIC can still crack up the PC. But this should not surprise you. After all, this is Windows we
are talking about here.

Finally, what's the point of all this? Well, if nothing else, I found the searching for and digging up of old stuff a lot of fun, a real gas, like digging through some one's attic or basement in search of...what? Who knows? It's remarkable what's out there. Like finding a copy of Microsoft Windows 1.01 or the Norton Commander version 1.00. The Norton Commander is, still-in-the-year 2003, a fantastically popular DOS shell with legions of Commander devotees, like Moonies and who remembers who Moonies were. And I learned that such shells, both DOS and Windows- related, are officially referred to by their composers and users as "Orthodox File Managers".

Here's another thing I learned and I alluded to this at the start of this monologue. When you do your Google searches, you may find that stateside web pages will offer downloads of copyrighted software but you can't download them. So many pages were like this that I began to suspect corporate thumb-nailing. Sites are there. Downloads are not. SO! Go to your Google and start paging deep. If Google says there are 15 pages of listings, start in the middle at page 7 and scan the European and Asian content very closely. You don't need to read German to figure out where Windows 1.01 is archived. Take the time to mine and the results will be worth it.

Apparently, the love-my-software-and-pay-for-it fascists have not been able to clip the Germans, the Italians and the Japanese. By the way, if you have issues concerning the downloading of copyrighted materials, please turn off your radio and go buy some software at CompUSA. You will feel better for yourself. Maybe I'll study the copyright issue for a future Random Access File so stay tuned! Anyway, this is Bill Baran - N2FNH for This Week In Amateur Radio.

Bootleggers on the VHF Business Band!

Bootleggers on the business band! That's the subject of the next Random Access Thought coming up for the week ending August 2nd. In a relatively rare appearance, it is I who will host this edition. Download TWIARi #184, TWIAR #799 or get the individual Random Access Thought by going to: http://www.twiar.org/n2fnh/RATParts

Look under file number RAT080731_1584_BCQ.cab or RAT080731_1584_HAM.cab. Right click on the file name and "save target as...". Use your WinZip or IZAarc to extract the segment. In the meantime, what follows is the text copy written for this week's episode:

Oh hello there!
When you think of Pirate Radio, you may consider the activities often heard over international shortwave radio. Publications such as Monitoring Times and Popular Communications offer extensive monthly detail on how and where such pirates may be received across the high frequency spectrum. In-the-field stations such as WBNY or Kracker Radio International continue to pump out their unique program formats for any listener to hear.

Pirate Radio may also bring to mind the crazy taxi cab drivers in New York City whizzing around the five boroughs, belting out their foreign language transmissions that can be copied worldwide in the basement of the ten meter amateur band. Frequencies legally reserved for us hams light up with Russian, Arabic and Farsi where Dits and Dahs would normally show.

And to be sure, there have been pirates on both AM and FM radio dials since the birth of broadcasting and these too are heavily documented in the hobby media. But recently, I came across what appears to be another sort of radio pirate, a specimen not so commonly heard. For the sake of a little melodrama, let's title this episode: "The Mystery at 158 point 4".

It turns out that 158 point 4 Megahertz is just one of a fleet of VHF channels assigned by the Federal Communications Commission for local business use. Plug this frequency into your scanner and you may indeed intercept business radio activity in your hometown. I have a Motorola XTN VHF business band handheld which I got at Sam's Club. Like all of Sam's Club stuff, the radio came cheap. I discovered that both Sam's Club and WalMart use these radios in all their stores. The radio is fairly rugged, a one channel, 27 frequency device, which at various times I would program, then park on the dining room table and listen.

When I punched in 158 point 4 Megahertz, I soon heard this: (FX1)
And I heard this: (FX2)
Also...this: (FX3)
In addition to all these ring-a-ding signals, there was also a voice repeater
to boot. (FX4)
Here was a channel banging and clanging with all sorts of radiophonic sound effects, so of course I immediately recorded them and stored them away. I soon realized that I heard no identification of any sort: no CW IDs. The population on the repeater used unit numbers and first names only. No legal IDs verbally given either. The transmissions copied were mostly small talk. Street names were heard from time to time but places like 2nd Avenue or 3rd Street could match several localities. No city names were ever mentioned. They knew where they were, but I did not. And...there were often technical issues with the repeater, but the "Alert Zone 1" guy, the "Blip Blip Blips" and the Radio Shack "Ding-Dong" doorbell played on through out the day into the late evening. I could only guess that these signals might be some sort of proximity alarm
system.

At some point, the entire operation ceased communication. The frequency went dead. No Alerts. No Ding-Dongs. No repeaters. I checked online at http://www.nf2g.com/ Dave Stark runs an excellent web page dedicated to scanner activities for New York State. Sure enough, the latest reports showed the bang-clang circus had shifted down range to 158.385 MHz. Dave had documented the station as an unknown illegal and unlicensed repeater which was now causing interference to another legal user in nearby Greene county.

And then, at some point, the entire operation ceased communication. The frequency went dead. I wondered...Did the FCC respond to complaints? Had the FCC shut down the repeater and pulled the plug on its alarming alarm system as well? I asked Dave if he knew, but unfortunately there was no additional information.

It appeared the business band pirates had finally made the fade. In the meantime, their sonic footprints had been carefully preserved and filed away deep within the vaults of the N2FNH Sound Effects Library. These simple sound bites have already been morphed from this: (FX5) into this: (FX6).

But, in the end...it may just be...that the bootleggers on 158.4 have returned. As I was preparing this edition of the Random Access Thought, a "Ding Dong Doorbell", a "Blip Blip Blip" and an "Alert Zone One" suddenly materialized on channel. Not as often as before...once or twice in the morning hours, maybe once or twice at night. No one's talking, (FX7) at least not yet.