VP9KF Blog

GaN is making big progress in power electronics [power supplies/chargers] and RF [high power amplifiers for cellular base stations]. Now, the obvious thing: Audio power amps using Class D.

Of course, these amps come from China, move into a ‘niche’, which then becomes mainstream and then takes over. $700 power amps with very good credentials [SMSL PA-X] . Coming to your HiFi system.
Curious. Is the PA in the Flex Aurora made with GaN? Place your bets! Well, WiMo in EU says it has ‘500W GaN PA’.

I had recently been playing with Linux installs and Firefox was a handy second-choice browser to use. Then I became quite impressed. To the point of thinking about going back to it from Vivaldi.

Well, that hasn’t lasted long. They’ve now appointed a new CEO who seems utterly clueless about what Firefox has always been about. Anyway, I’m not going back and it looks like many devoted followers will jump ship. Oh dear, that’s the end of FF.

Note: the fool wants to make it an ‘AI’ browser and turn off ad-blocking. Are you insane?

Added by Firefox Devs:
Something that hasn’t been made clear: Firefox will have an option to completely disable all AI features.

We’ve been calling it the AI kill switch internally. I’m sure it’ll ship with a less murderous name, but that’s how seriously and absolutely we’re taking this.

What about the ad-blocking, eh?

For a while [4-5 years] we had watched football and followed Nottingham Forest, Manchester City and Liverpool. However, that stretch is now over with and I cancelled our streaming subscription to watch.

Why? The primary reason was the inability of managers to do their job right and to manage the players in playing the game.

I detest Manchester United, their management and their current (and past) managers. I dislike Arsenal and I don’t think they are capable of getting clear ahead in the league and then actually winning it – something that’s happening right now – throwing away any advantage.
Forest finally got back in the Premier League, hung on and then made it into Europe. Unfortunately, the idiot owner then decided he wanted to run the show and essentially threw out/forced out the manager who was really getting things done. Disgraceful scenes on the pitch from the owner and enough to put me off Forest for life. I still harbour some support for them but I really don’t mind if they stay up or not now.

The two seasons warning by Pep Guardiola that he was going to leave as manager of City was really, really stupid. Their best players started leaving because they knew he couldn’t be replaced. The club should pay him off and get their new manager in before further damage. They are a shadow of their former self.
As for Liverpool. It shows they had got so good in the last season of Klopp that there was enough momentum to carry them into winning for Slot, no matter what. Then the wheels started falling off and the best players, especially Trent-Arnold, left without their ability to feed up the right wing to Salah. So now Salah is side-lined because of this.
I swear Slot is an idiot and hasn’t focussed on a critical factor. They let in too many goals. They need a much better, no mistakes, goalkeeper. Alisson has not been that for ages.
I think it’s gone too far. Mo will leave for Saudi. Van Dyke will probably leave for a Dutch club soon after. Shortly afterwards, Liverpool will be heading a long way down the table (Everton territory for the last few seasons). All because Slot never wanted Liverpool to stabilise too much after the change of managers [why did Klopp really leave?].

The writing has been on the wall for a long time but the demise of paper has accelerated in the last year. Quite by chance the BBC carried this piece days after I first posted this comment, coming to no great conclusion.

Examples:
Danish PostNord stops delivering letters. I recently received a direct card from a Dane but it was posted in Germany and he wasn’t even close to the border!
UK’s Royal Mail is hyper expensive! I recently received a direct card that cost GBP3.40. Is this a worldwide record for the most expensive? That’s $4.53 today. They have the nerve to call it “An affordable service for everyday international mail”!!!! On top of that the stamps are ghastly with 30% of the area of the stamp being a barcode/QRcode type thing. Surely Royal Mail will be the next to ‘fall’?

The cheapest international mail I recall seeing are for cards from Japan. They were 110Yen but they are now 140Y in a recent increase. A big jump in one go (nearly 30%), but still pretty good for about $1.

Referring to my ‘answered QSL list‘, you’ll see that the number of direct QSLs have decreased rapidly. Yes, I’ve worked a lot of stations and I do get more dupes over time (law of diminishing returns) but there should still be plenty of demand out there.
I look up QRZ database entries pretty frequently and just recently virtually everybody says something like: “QSL: No QSL cards thank you.”

Well, I’m going to have to get used to the idea and adapt. Mind you, LoTW is so bleedin’ hard to register with I gave up ages ago. The hard truth is that I have about 200 330 QSL cards left that I could send out. They’ll last a while but I have to weigh that against ordering 1000 more that I’ll never use up. The demand for QSLs has sunk to about 2% of all QSOs made. A decade ago this was consistently around 10%.

Just think. Just as the telephone box/call box has disappeared, so too will the mailbox for collections. Soon.

A-ha. Instead of picking a snapshot of the present best (and worst), it’s time for ‘all time’. This is something that’s pretty tricky!

Top end transceiver: Trio/Kenwood TS-940S. Worst: Yaesu FT-1000 and Elecraft K4D.
Middle range transceiver: Trio/Kenwood TS-130S. Worst: Yaesu FTdx-401.
Low end transceiver: Icom IC-706mkIIG & RGO-ONE. Worst: Yaesu FT-757.
QRP transceiver: Heathkit HW-8. Worst: Elecraft K1.
Top end amplifier: TL922A and Drake L7B. Worst: KPA-1500 and Yaesu FL-1200.
Middle range amplifier: Acom 1000. Worst: Swan (any).
Low end amplifier: Icom IC-PW1. Worst: KPA-500.
Best CW keyer: Mortty 4. Worst: AEA MM-2, no speed knob!
Best CW paddle: N2DAN Mercury or Bencher BY-2. Worst: Begali Simplex (finish)/ Vibroplex / Hi-Mould.
Best VHF handheld: IC-2E or A. Worst: IC-u2.
Best VHF FM: Yaesu FT-227R and IC-240, Icom IC-240. Worst: Drake TR-22.
Best VHF all-mode: FT-290R. Worst: IC-202.
Best headphones: AKG electrostatic, Audio Technica ATH-M50x. Worst: Anything Bose.

Best car, ICE: 2015 Porsche Cayman or 2010 Audi A3. Worst: 1991 Vauxhall/Chevrolet Cavalier, Citroen 2CV, any Alfa Romeo.
Best car, BEV: Volvo EX40. Worst: Volvo EX90, any Tesla.
Best car, hybrid: Toyota Corolla Cross Hybrid. Brilliant. Worst: Toyota Prius 1/2/3rd gen.

Best AWD systems:
Audi Quattro [best], BMW xDrive, Land Rover, Mercedes 4Matic, Subaru AWD in that order.

Best sailing yacht overall: Allures 45.9, aluminium rig, Al hull. Worst: Hunter 40.
Best sailing yacht, infused resin: Contest 50CS. Resin hull. Worst: Bavaria 40.
Best sailing yacht, expedition: Garcia Expedition 45. Al hull. Worst: Island Packet 480.
Best sailing yacht, small blue water: Sirius 40 DS & Hallberg Rassy 40C. Worst: Irwin.
Best sailing yacht, carbon fibre: Shogun 43. Worst: —
Best catamaran: HH44 Cruising, Al rig. Carbon fibre hull. Worst: Leopard 45.

Best aircraft: Airbus A330-9nn, A350-9nn. Worst: Boeing B787 and B737 MAX equally.

Best computer: Toughbook CF-53. Worst: Apple Macbook (Intel).

Best destination: Republic of Ireland, Bermuda, Barbados, UK.
Worst: USA (expensive/dangerous). Jamaica, St. Vincent, Trinidad.

Worst sailing yachts: Anything by Leopard, Balance or Lagoon (Beneteau) Yachts and/or made in South Africa. Terrible construction and botched assembly methods.

Best radio club: FISTS [award programme and software], IRTS.
Worst: ARRL, CWops [for that CWT crap].

You can drop the stupid tag line “ARRL The National Association for Amateur Radio®”, ARRL.

Further to the good news about the new Morserino:
Unfortunately, still a delay with shipping at QRPLabs (I believe short one component and other slight issue(s)). Think there were close to 1000 orders at last count!

Note: The Morserino group https://morserino.groups.io/g/main/rss has an odd way of tackling bugs – must be an ‘OE’ thing. They put out code, but when it doesn’t work [bricks devices] they don’t stop people from continuing to download it, so it can break their device(s). Then, another release comes out and those that broke it in-between finally get their device working again. When I said “don’t download if you have mk1 or mk2 hardware” it was totally ignored, so this seems to be their standard practice!
More “oddness”: They use a very un-orthodox way of loading data to the unit; web page [browser dependent!!!!!].

Latest news: 1155 units were on order. Some have shipped and at least 2 are in the hands of tariff-riddled USA owners! Now the fun begins with zillions of Li-Ion battery recommendations that’ll start flowing. Ugh!

That’s what my brother and I say repeatedly when we talk on the ‘phone. The problem is that the ‘So How Do We Fix It?’ bit is something that we’ve completely given up on. For good reason.

Earlier this year, I noticed that at two different visits to two different doctor’s offices they were making mistakes when issuing appointments for future visits. They were struggling to make an appointment in the first place, thinking they had made it, printing it off (at my insistence) and then finding that the paperwork said some completely different date (but the correct target time!). This was happening to many people, who were arriving for their appointment and then being greeted with “but your appointment [tap, tap, tap] was last week / is next week [choose]”.

Then it dawned on me. These idiots are using software with ‘AI’ supposedly in it. The ‘AI’ was tweaking, nay fighting, with them and adjusting appointments to suit it! Not to suit the doctor, not to suit the customer but to suit the bleedin’ ‘AI’!!!!

Next! This week more craziness. Imagine the same practice but 6 months later. In the interim period they changed their software without telling anybody until it was too late [‘we will be closed for 2 days while training occurs’]. Now, not only the appointment nonsense continues (yep, the calendaring side of all commercial software seems to be infected with the damn ‘AI’) BUT a huge proportion of records are busted! It all became clear when Ann’s data couldn’t be retrieved because there was a broken word in the e-mail address she uses for this sort of purpose [with a word that would be used all the time in a medical situation]. Then I heard the next customer being told “the birth date is wrong by one day, so it’s the 24th not the 25th. We can’t change that, you’ll just have to remember”!!

Well, the reason for 90% of their database being broken [proven by listening to them for a few minutes]? It’s clear that they were incapable of transferring the fields from one package to the other and had HAND TYPED IT with huge ‘typo’ error rates!!!!

This [‘AI’ taking over, stupid data handling, etc., etc.] has to be repeated all over the place because EVERY business is now like this. Computing in the hands of the masses results in everything being broken. Cannot be stopped. Case closed.

Footnote: Once ‘everybody’ has accepted ‘AI’, what happens on the day the bubble bursts? The day when the big providers get into trouble? Everything comes to a halt. That’s what. So you think things are broken now? Wait for it to get really bad. Oh, who’s going to pay for this going on ‘forever’ [server farms, power consumption, etc., etc.]. You are! Second order effects are the price of electricity, water and memory ‘chips’ [as DRAM manufacturers shift production from consumer memory to server grade memory].

I can see it now. The fanbois will be taking slab-sided boxy SP4 cabinets and putting their Chinese miniPCs inside them to match the K4D 🙂 …..and look like a ‘cool’ Steam Machine.

First, it’s not cool. Second, it would cost a lot more to buy an empty box from Elecraft than it does to buy a computer. Third, if you read this far you should realise this is tongue-in-cheek.

Even bees can do it.

Morse! https://www.sciencedaily.com/images/1920/bumblebee-crawling-over-flowerhead.webp

Well, they finally started shipping the flawed concept of the K4/0, after many years. I suppose we should wish them good luck because there can’t be many sales in such a thing when there are <2000 units (K4s) out there that they can be mated with. They may make some money for a while at $2300, as long as they work and aren’t plagued with problems. News: There are reports of power, charging, battery problems and units dying days into use. Not good. Further: Now 14 owners known. Production hold. Existing units recalled. Ahem!
Notes: when there are lunatics out there who bought two K4Ds to achieve this before, anything goes! Call this a review? Many eHam ‘reviews’ are previews and a simple copy and paste of the manufacturer’s blurb. This particular one is laughable!