Blackcap Blog

Published at 12:21 on 14 April 2013

Pretty much all communications-grade digital voice protocols sound awful, for the same reason that DMR sounds awful. Probably the least awful-sounding one, from the samples I’ve heard, is NXDN. Even that can’t hold a candle to plain old analog FM, however.

It all leaves me wondering if digital is just plain the wrong answer to cramming a voice signal into a smaller bandwidth. I’m inclined to thing using something like SSB plus an intelligent, software-defined receiver (with sophisticated noise filtering and precise, automatic carrier insertion) might be better.

Noise tends to be not a super-big issue at VHF and above, anyhow, so losing a degree of immunity to it might not be such a big deal, particularly if one uses digital signal processing techniques to remove as much of it as possible. SSB can sound as good as AM (which, unless noise gets in the way, blows digital out of the water when it comes to audio fidelity and overall intelligibility), provided you insert the carrier at just the right spot when receiving.

As a further plus, a voice-quality SSB signal uses half or less the bandwidth per channel of any of the digital protocols currently out there.

Sometimes the right answer to a question about employing a new technology is not to employ it at all (or, in this case, to employ it, but in a significantly different way than originally proposed).

Published at 21:16 on 10 April 2013

Somewhat obscure geeky things that other ham radio operators generally overlook tend to interest me.

It’s one reason I bought a 900 MHz transceiver at the Puyallup swap meet last month; it’s a band with almost no equipment built and marketed to ham radio operators. It took some searching to find something suitable (in this case, an HT marketed to business and government users which could be unlocked and programmed on that amateur radio band).

Probably for the same reason, DMR (Digital Mobile Radio, commonly known by its Motorola trademark MOTOTRBO) piqued my interest. Unlike 900 MHz (which is very quiet), there’s actually a smattering of operators using that mode on the 70cm band.

The downside is that the audio sounds positively awful (I’ve been listening to it on the net here). Think cheezy sci-fi voice effects from the 70s, sometimes so heavy that one must strain to hear what is being said.

Maybe it shouldn’t have come as a complete surprise. Unlike digital home entertainment audio, greater fidelity was never a goal for DMR. Instead, the goal was to cram as many channels into as little radio spectrum as possible.

If that’s your main goal, quality is going to suffer. There’s nothing particularly magic (or evil) about digital technology in this regard; one can use analog techniques to compress signal bandwidth, and those have a negative effect on audio quality as well.

I haven’t done much listening to it, but I’ve heard the “official” digital protocol for amateur radio in the VHF and UHF bands, D-Star, suffers similarly.

I think the chief upshot of this awful sound is that we cannot expect any such digital mode to last nearly as long as analog voice modes have lasted. As technology improves, ways will be found to make audio suffer less as it is compressed into a digital signal. It still won’t be high fidelity, mind you, but it won’t leave the listener straining to discern speech, either.

Because of present poor audio quality, the high likelihood of rapid obsolescence, and the significantly higher cost of digital over analog, digital voice is unlikely to be more than a bit player on the ham bands in the near future.

To that can be added adoption issues. A business licensee is a single organization; it can decide to go digital, make the investment in equipment, and issue all employees new radios. We amateur radio operators are individuals making individual choices; this creates a high path dependency in favor of the status quo.

Moreover, the commercial and public service bands are much more congested, so being able to cram in more signals is more important there. Even so, I wouldn’t expect present-day digital technologies to have comparable longevity to, say, analog FM.

Published at 11:54 on 8 April 2013

I received the following in the mail a few weeks ago:

(Click to enlarge; the red box was added by yours truly for emphasis, of course.)

Published at 09:33 on 21 March 2013

Unfortunately, the move was complicated (and somewhat compromised) by a curve ball from my present landlord, who is unwilling to let my tenancy go month-to-month after my lease expires.

Faced with the choice of committing to stay in a place I had already decided to leave this year, or conducting a hurried move, I chose the latter. I did manage to negotiate a 1-month extension to my lease, which made the whole move far more possible (and significantly less costly, because I’m not going to be paying for moving things into and out of storage, not paying for significantly more costly short-term housing).

So starting in about a month, I will see how well the island actually suits me. As I’ve written before, it’s hardly a perfect place. It merely appears to be the most practical alternative, given all the constraints which can be expected to be in place for the foreseeable future.

I’m hoping it will work out well enough that stability becomes justifiable and I can start looking to buy a home for myself in six months or so. The whole mess with this most recent lease, and the recurring hassle of moving, has really created a desire for both stability and not having to deal with landlords any more.

Published at 08:30 on 9 March 2013

I guess I’ve become jaded by political hypocrisy, because I find it more amusing than depressing or infuriating that there’s so many double standards in the Establishment media’s summing up of his legacy.

The Guardian had a great editorial the day after he passed away, which unfortunately seems to have been pulled from their web site. The gist of it was that most of the bad stuff being repeated about Chávez is indeed both true and bad stuff, but that his overall legacy must be balanced against the significant gains the least fortunate have made during his regime, and that the economic difficulties Venezuela has been experiencing over the past few years are being greatly exaggerated by one-sided reporting.

Like most resource-rich Third World nations, Venezuela has (still has, despite the progress of the past 15 years or so) an absolutely staggering amount of inequality. This is sadly not unique to Venezuela. Natural resource wealth in the developing world tends to end up concentrated in a few hands, with the vast majority sharing in little or none of it.

None of this justifies Chávez’ authoritarianism, of course, but neither does the authoritarianism invalidate the progress which has been made. And Chávez’ authoritarianism was a far more mild variety than that which existed in Chile under Pinochet or in Argentina during their military dictatorship, to pick just two examples of many one can find in Latin America.

If the coup against him in 2002 — backed by the US — had succeeded, all available past historical evidence indicates that human rights would have been vastly worse under the resulting right-wing dictatorship.

Published at 19:36 on 26 February 2013

Remember back when the Establishment media were waxing triumphant over the defeat of the Tamil Tigers? I was skeptical that it would result in any improvement of human rights in Sri Lanka, given the past record of the racist government there.

Well, it looks like I was right on the money. In case that Reuters article disappears, here’s the report from Human Rights Watch that it cites.

Published at 20:31 on 25 February 2013

Jeez, after the last one later proved itself to be fake, you think the chattering classes might learn. Apparently not.

Paging Dr. Aesop on Line Three.

 

Published at 19:33 on 22 February 2013

I received my Hornit bicycle horn today, and damn, is the thing ever loud. Painfully loud, in fact. As it needs to be; there’s a layer of glass and steel and a fog of oblivion it needs to penetrate.

It’s already been installed, with the trigger button in the somewhat odd location of the underside of the left side of the handlebar grips of each bike (I bought extra trigger buttons and mounts, so I can shift the horn to the bike I am using). Reason for putting it there is it’s easy to hit the button with my thumb while using the rest of my fingers for braking.

I will definitely be braking at least 90% of the time I use the thing. A horn is not a substitute for slowing down to avoid a crash; it’s an adjunct. It’s a way of announcing “Wake up! I am here! Pay attention!”. If push comes to shove, a car will win any disagreement with a bicycle, and decisively. The differences in mass and shielding are just too great.

But, if more bicyclists had loud horns and used them to blast oblivious drivers of motor vehicles, it would have the positive effect of getting more drivers to watch for vehicles other than large, motorized one; that is the real virtue of equipping bicycles with loud horns.

Published at 08:19 on 20 February 2013

NPR had yet another example this morning: they reported how British PM David Cameron became the first PM to visit the site of the Amritsar Massacre, then added parenthetically that his visit fell short of issuing an apology.

I doubt the same spin would be put on a Japanese PM visiting a Pearl Harbor memorial. Instead, it would doubtless be “Japanese leadership still refuses to issue formal apology.” As it should be, in fact: the fact that nationalism leads its adherents to overlook or minimize their own side’s atrocities is something that should be exposed whenever it happens.

Given that’s how nationalism operates, then, it’s particularly important to focus on what one might be overlooking about one’s own country’s past. Keep that in mind you hear the next preachy story condescendingly talking about the Japanese refusal to fully face what their side did during World War II. While the story is valid, the condescension is not: just consider the Wounded Knee massacre.

Published at 20:04 on 18 February 2013

Today I had a chance to drive on Highway 9 north of Arlington. The first time I drove that stretch of road, about 25 years ago, I was shocked at how quickly it changes character. Between Arlington and the Seattle suburbs, it was a wide, straight 2-lane highway with paved shoulders.

Past Arlington, it was like a different road altogether. The road abruptly became not much more than 20 feet wide as it started climbing into the foothills. The speed limit dropped from 55 to 35. Many curves were far slower than that. Bridges were typically wooden and single-laned. The traffic volume also dropped to practically nothing at about the point the road changed character.

Well, it’s still not as straight and fast there as it is south of Arlington, but it’s been widened to some degree; it’s probably more like 22 or 24 feet now. There’s been a depressing amount of suburban development in those hills (well, two subdivisions, but that alone is depressing considering how rural it used to be).

But there’s still a 10 mile stretch that’s as narrow and windy as it ever was, and I was floored when I discovered that the last of the one-lane bridges was still there. This time, I had to wait for traffic coming the other way (I don’t think I ever had to way back when; there was almost no traffic on that stretch then).

It’s not going to last, however. Not that I’m surprised.

What really frosts me is that the need for widening and straightening on that stretch of highway is driven by the suburbanization. The logging-road-with-a-layer-of-blacktop that was the old highway had plenty of extra capacity to handle the odd logging truck or weekend vacationer from the city. If the land had stayed rural, that old road would still have no trouble handling the little traffic using it.

Being a state highway, it is my taxes which are helping to pay for those upgrades. If the full cost was charged back to those moving to the remote subdivisions above Clear Lake, I doubt those subdivisions would have happened: the fees would have rendered them economically uncompetitive.

It puts the lie to the capitalist individualist rhetoric against growth management laws: even if you just focus on economics and ignore the environmental costs of sprawl, it’s not just a matter of a freely-chosen set of economic transactions between landowners, builders, and home-buyers. If those homes had been built up against existing developed land in Burlington or Arlington, it would have taken much less (dozens of miles less, in fact) road building to serve them, and the road-building would have been done mostly at the municipal level, paid for by local property taxes.