A Crummy Commercial

It didn't really turn out that well: I still had 4 quarts of canned maple sap that I never drank (was going to use it for iced tea or lemonade or ?) so the decision was made to do a final boil to maple syrup.  Except that I forgot to measure the sugar concentration before starting.  So I stopped too early and got maybe twice the volume (7 oz) that I should have. It's sweet and will work OK to sweeten coffee or tea but a little too watery for pancakes. Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm 

I do try to do computer backups on Saturday, mainly of this blog.  Today after the backup I checked and found this: Quite a gap from October 11 to December 13.  What am I doing wrong ?  I'm not sure.  But today I was signed into Archive, hopefully that will help.  I clicked the link at the bottom of the weekly listing of blog posts and then backed that weeks worth of blogs up.  In that way I was able to save all the posts in the gap (I think).  Luckily I have a pretty high threshold for boredom - it was 9 weeks worth of blogs. So a backup is worthless unless verified, especially with a somewhat slap-happy entity like archive :( update 2025-12-14: signing in didn't help, the Wayback dumped my backup attempt yesterday:    I will try a nastygram or maybe turn off the VPN ? Weird ! Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm  

I used to live/work in Northlake IL.  Recently I took a "drive" around Northlake using Google.  It's been over 30 years since I've physically been in Northlake so allow me a little curiosity :)  As far as I know the town was named Northlake because two main arterial roads, Lake Street and North Avenue cross at the western boundary of Cook County / Northlake - in other words a very practical place not fancy.  Suburb names in Chicagoland could be weird though, there is one called Oakbrook which had a big mall / shopping center, and then next to it is Oakbrook Terrace, maybe not quite as upscale but again, practical :) I actually had been looking for a building to the east on North Avenue that had an old Zenith plant: next suburb east of Northlake is Melrose Park, IL They made picture tubes there but of course picture tubes and Zenith have not prospered over the last 30 years.  One of the engineers at GTE used to work at this Zenith Rauland plant.  He said the...

I found this Ameco HP-300T during my eternal search: Here is the packaging: And the instructions: I have no recollection of buying this - must have been a tail-end addition to get to a minimum order amount ? I was thinking of maybe looking at it with the NanoVNA but then would need baluns and also possibly attenuators and became mentally exhausted !  :) I wonder if anyone ever needs these anymore ?  I remember the evening cries at my house when I was in high school:  "TVI - TVI !"   In other words, time to pull the switch, Chuck.  I don't know why I didn't have one of these Ameco or equivalent filters.  TVI always depended on the channel being viewed and the band being transmitted on.  But reading the instructions above, maybe the problem was harmonics from the HW-16 ?  A filter like this wouldn't have helped.  In a way I miss those days. Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm  

The Faded Page  https://www.fadedpage.com/ was mentioned previously: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2025/01/faded-page.html Recently they've been posting more Hardy Boys books, faster than I can read them.  Here is a page of some of their Stratemeyer (see: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2025/02/the-mystery-of-edward-stratemeyer.html ) books for kids: While an actual death is rare in the Hardy Boys books they do actuate my old pet peeve: the conk on the head causing unconsciouness.  If a real life Hardy boy had actually been conked on the head to unconsciousness all those times I shudder to think what their true ability would have been to do any detective work after all that head trauma.  CTE wasn't a coined term then but people knew that fighters often became "punchy".   Maybe I'm just spoiling innocent fun ?  It's not meant to be taken that seriously.   Recently I read The Hooded Hawk which is Hardy Boys book 34.  One item of interest was that i...

The Mediterranean Diet used to get a lot of publicity, people in the south of Europe apparently live longer: source:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_diet This is the kind of thing that is hard to prove but easy to embrace.  Fish, olive oil, fresh fruits and whole grains are emphasized.  Red Meat, sugar, white bread are frowned on.  But is the true virtue  hidden ? It's the expense !  Pricing the fresh fruits/vegetables, fish, olive oil can put a person off their feed.  So maybe these folks eat right BUT they eat less because the food is expensive ?   For example a JJ's "fruit" pie in the checkout at Mann's is sold for something like $1.29.  AND the purchaser NEVER has to worry about breaking a tooth on a cherry pit because I doubt there is a cherry put in any of the pies (although the red colored, cherry flavored, sugar sweetened corn starch inside the crust is tasty.  Eating real bing cherries is going to be a lot more...

I was looking for the manual of a Radio Shack AM radio kit and found this page: source:   https://radioshackcatalogs.com/science_fair_kits.htm It's the same site as the Radio Shack catalogs (this is the one with the flip viewer).  Instead of the flip viewer I'd rather have pdf files but beggars shouldn't be choosers :) Unfortunately the kit I wanted wasn't there but I'll keep coming back as the site owner is looking to offer more manuals. Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm