Blackcap Blog

Published at 23:12 on 16 November 2011

It never ceases to amaze me how something so simple can be so brutally effective at muzzling the worst radio frequency interference (RFI) sources. The above picture shows the one I installed on the thermostat wires of the new furnace (whose fan motor controller was using those wires as an antenna to spew RFI). It took multiple turns through the core, but I did end up mostly driving the RFI from the new furnace into the local noise floor.

Some Internet searching reveals that some individuals go inside the furnace to install beads on wires. I didn’t want to open it up, because it’s not mine, and I don’t want to void the warranty. I reasoned (correctly) that since it has a grounded metal case, it’s essentially a Faraday cage already and I could address the issue it by dealing with the wires that exit it.

Haven’t gotten around to those two lower yellow wires yet. Was going to put that bead around both sets of wires, but experimentation revealed that the thermostat wires were by far the worst offenders (to the point where I needed to wrap as many turns of them as possible through the bead), and the lower wires (which control the condensate pump) don’t have a very long run outside the furnace anyhow.

Published at 11:03 on 8 November 2011

OK, you’ve just seen (in my last post) how much better than shortwave Internet audio quality can be. One might be tempted to conclude that demonstrates shortwave broadcasting is now obsolete. Not so fast.

First, this is an example where shortwave fares unusually poorly, even by its own standards. The signal paths between India and the USA are so difficult that India has never even tried to target the USA for their shortwave broadcasts. Even though I’ve been lucking out with a strong signal and low local interference the past two mornings, the signal still ends up seriously degraded by being forced to take a multi-hop path over the polar regions. That’s why it has such a fluttery character to it.

If India were to rent time on a transmitter in Eastern Canada or the Caribbean, for example, my audio recording would have had significantly better quality. It still wouldn’t have been as good as the Internet download, of course, but the newscast would have been completely intelligible instead of only partly so.

Second, the US Government does not particularly care if I listen to news broadcasts from India or not. So the government is not blocking my ability to download podcasts of their news bulletins, or requiring ISPs to report the names of their customers that attempt to do so. The Chinese are not so fortunate. If they want to hear news that has not been subject to their government’s censors, the Internet is of little or no use to them. On shortwave, they often end up in cat-and-mouse games with jamming transmitters, but in such games sometimes the mouse wins.

Basically, any communications medium that requires either payment for access and/or third-party (beyond the producer and consumer, that is) infrastructure is extremely vulnerable to censorship. Governments can track or block payments, or pressure the third parties into not carrying the offensive material. Pretty much any satellite or Internet-based means of delivering information ends up falling onto this category.

Direct-broadcast satellites could theoretically provide a real alternative, once there are free (to the consumer) options and they get to the point where there are a large number of such options under a wide diversity of ownership. Those latter points are critical, and current satellite broadcast options do not satisfy either one.

Therefore, shortwave is still really the only option for getting information into an area against the will of the government which controls it. Crappy audio quality beats no audio any day.

Published at 10:25 on 8 November 2011

I just discovered today that All India Radio news broadcasts actually are available on line. It’s just that AIR has done a very good job of hiding them, by hosting the audio files on a completely separate site from their main site.

It’s actually a good thing for me, as while the diction of their announcers is pretty good, it is still accented English, and when one adds the degradation of a long propagation path to the signal, it turns what was a perfectly intelligible news bulletin into something only partly intelligible.

To see what I mean, compare what I recorded over the air (note that this contains a minute or two of the music that aired prior to the news bulletin) to what I downloaded from their web site.

Published at 11:56 on 7 November 2011

I ran across All India Radio’s Bengaluru transmitter on 9425 kHz quite by chance late this morning, coming in with a very strong signal considering the distance. A recording of a brief musical interlude, followed by some announcements in Hindi then the news in English may be found here.

This is another of those stations where the Internet is still not an option.

Published at 13:16 on 6 November 2011

My latest Voice of Korea recording may be found here.

The audio quality is sort of iffy in this recording, but it’s actually the best signal of any of the times I’ve thought to tune in recently. Trans-Pacific propagation has been sort of crappy recently; this has adversely affected my ability to receive Australia and New Zealand as well.

Voice of Korea has less to say for themselves in this recording than they do in some of my earlier ones. Starting several months ago, the amount of spoken word programming declined greatly, to be replaced by programming consisting mostly of music. There’s actually more spoken material in this recording than there has been in some other recent broadcasts, so maybe this trend is reversing itself.

Perhaps of particular note is the piece on wind power at the end of the transmission, which in a marked departure from virtually all Voice of Korea programming, appears to have nothing to do with praising the “Great Leader”.

As usual, the “news” is dominated by whatever the “Great Leader” has done recently (this always leads); mention of any favorable things said by foreigners about the DPRK also figures prominently. The latter is frequently from those belonging to insignificant Stalinist splinter groups, or items in a foreign paper which are actually a paid ads taken out by the DPRK foreign ministry.

Hopefully someday soon I’ll take another camping trip and be able to furnish something recorded in a more RF-quiet, rural location.

Published at 15:13 on 4 November 2011

I did not get the job east of the lake after all. I’m almost certain it was because I expressed my antipathy about doing systems administration work; my interviewers kept revisiting the issue of sysadmin work and my (lack of) willingness to consider doing any more of it.

So be it. There was only one systems administrator at that company. He’s only human, so he’s going to get sick. And if I was to be the one called upon to fill in when that happens, forget it. Worse, suppose he departed for greener pastures — Guess Who would be appointed the new sysadmin (quite possibly permanently!) in such a case?

Really, I never want to do such work again. Ever. I’m completely burned out on it. A job where I am literally a heartbeat away from becoming a sysadmin again is one gigantic turkey of a job.

It pales in comparison to the above issue, but it’s also nice not to be compelled to move again, particularly if the move does not involve leaving the megalopolis. Simply too much hassle for too little improvement in my lifestyle, particularly after I’ve spent so much effort getting settled where I currently live.

Published at 15:34 on 30 October 2011

I believe I will soon be working full time again. It’s far from a sure thing, of course, seeing as how I have yet to interview in person with them, but the vibes I got over the phone were that I was basically their top candidate and unless I seriously blow things, I’ll get the job. Moreover, it would negate all the effort I recently spent erecting a shortwave listening antenna, and there has always been a strong element of Murphy’s Law in all of my job searches.

That is because the job is in a place where it is most definitely not pleasant to commute to from where I currently am living. I told my landlord/housemate when I moved in that it might be necessary to move in such a situation (and he’s understanding, there are a lot of nightmare commutes in the Seattle area), so that’s no problem. The issue is where to move.

It’s in Bellevue, east of Lake Washington, an area that I once heard very accurately described as “Orange County with Fir Trees”. It has much of the same plasticky yet vaguely upscale feel that its California namesake does. So one option is to live someplace in Seattle from where I can catch an express bus to work. Another option is to live further east in Issaquah, which alas still has much of the same aesthetic as Bellevue but at which also has the advantage of a small older core that feels much nicer (it predates the suburbia era, having been built as a logging and mining town). Moreover, Issaquah abuts many square miles of state park and state forest land.

It’s really difficult to discern which option is better. Given that I usually don’t do much Big City stuff these days, it probably means that it will be a net win to be closer (much closer, in fact) to the foothills. But it’s still an area that I have absolutely no friends in, so I have worries about social isolation. Which can be solved by trips to the city, of course — but such induced trips effectively negate much of the advantage of being closer to nature.

Issaquah is still probably very slightly better, because there’s far more of Seattle easily accessible via bus from Issaquah than there is nature easily accessible via bus from Seattle. And when I do have to drive to get to nature from Issaquah, I can head east and be out of the megalopolis almost immediately (country driving is both more fuel efficient and a heck of a lot more pleasant than urban driving).

But it’s a slight enough advantage that the particulars are probably going to dominate. If I can find a home in Issaquah or the Central District that strongly appeals to me, that will instantly tip the scales.

Published at 11:47 on 28 October 2011

They misrepresent.

They misrepresent you to the prospective employer. They misrepresent the prospective employer and the position to you. Typically they do so by selective omission; they only list the best things about you or the job to the other party, to give the impression that you must match in all other areas, too.

If one is following the low road (and many pimps headhunters do), there is every incentive to do so, because having once engaged in representing you to an employer (no matter how poor the match, and misrepresenting encourages both you and the employer to show initial interest even for a job that matches poorly), they have a much stronger case for claiming an existing business relationship with you. And once they do that, they can leech off your salary for a job they did not even help you find.

Published at 10:50 on 28 October 2011

Simply put, it will end up being litigated in court. It blatantly violates the Washington State Constitution’s single subject clause, so a legal basis for challenging it exists. Nowhere in the title or text of the measure on the ballot is scrapping light rail to Bellevue mentioned, yet (if allowed to stand unchallenged) it would most likely achieve that end. Based on the ballot measure that implemented the project, extending light rail to Bellevue has the support of both the majority in the Sound Transit district and the majority in Bellevue itself.

Therefore there exists both a means to challenge the measure in court and a motive (an electorate annoyed at falling for a bait-and-switch) to do same. And the absence of any mention of light rail in the measure will furnish ample evidence that the voters did not intend this outcome when they voted for it, which will probably cause any court-interpreted revision of the measure to gut the provisions of it which interfere with the proposed light rail line.

It may even get overturned by a subsequent bill in the legislature before it gets through court. Normally, the legislature is reluctant to touch the text of voter-approved laws, but again, the bait-and-switch nature of this one might bias the legislature in the opposite direction to the normal trend.

Moreover, the system listens to what Big Money has to say, and with the exception of Kemper Freeman, Jr., Big Money does not want I-1125 to pass. Transportation in the Puget Sound region is a horrible mess, this mess is making it hard for the Big Money crowd to do business, and the initiative will complicate the process of doing things to help relieve the transportation mess.

Naturally, when the inevitable happens, Eyman is going to go into conserva-victim mode and whine about how the evil courts and legislature are subverting popular will. Which will be something of a rich comment when one considers that the measure was obviously deliberately crafted to be a bait-and-switch. It’s not as of the single-subject clause is any big secret or anything: it’s right there in the state constitution, and Eyman’s initiatives have ended up being reinterpreted by the courts in the past because they’ve run afoul of it.

Of course, Eyman’s main motive in the thing is money. He earns it by hawking his services to the highest bidders in the right-wing crowd; he will laugh all the way to the bank no matter how much the legislature and the courts end up gutting the measure. Whether or not the thing eventually flies is completely beside the point.

Published at 18:14 on 25 October 2011

I have learned very recently that at long last Voice of Korea has an official web site. Unfortunately for those who wish to stream audio, the links that let one do that are currently not working. However, that will probably get fixed in the not-too-distant future, meaning that there will at long last be an alternative to shortwave for those who want to listen to official North Korean propaganda.

Until then, I plan on recording their broadcasts off shortwave, as time and propagation conditions allow.