May Showers, Solar Flares, et. al.

My flag flies again on Memorial Day. Grey skies, moderate temperatures, hey -- it must be the end of May!

As I start this article, it is around 65F out, and it's lightly raining outside. It's mid-morning here. The neighborhood's rhododendron farmers (folks who have a few rhodie plants out in their yards) have done well -- there are less of them than in previous years, but their bushes are blooming, finally. And yes, you heard that correctly -- there are less of them than before.

There used to be a street in my neighborhood where maybe half of the homes had awesome rhodies, and I have posted pics of those as recently as 2018 or 2019 here on my blog.

 

Here is a couple of those photographs. All the bushes in the next two pictures no longer exist, sadly.:

 

One pic I took in May, 2015, and which I posted on a blog article here back then. All of these beautiful rhodie bushes are now gone. They were torn out some time last year. :-(

I took this picture in April, 2015, and posted it in my blog that month. In fact, it was April 15th. The rhododendrons started flowering a month earlier than they did this year. All of these beautiful rhododendron bushes were torn out maybe two years ago. 

This is a rhododendron that was full of awesome blooms this year. I took this pic in May, and this bush is in one of the few yards where the owners kept all their rhodies intact. :-)

Here is a mixed rhododendron, on a moderately warm, grey morning in May. There were a lot of bumblebees checking out the flowers, but unfortunately none of the pics I took of them came out well. The little guys would either hide inside a bloom, or fly away just before I could get them in focus. This is the one yard left in my neighborhood that has all of its rhododendrons intact.

But over the past two years or so, a lot of those beautiful, tall rhododendron bushes were torn out by more than one neighbor, for unknown reasons. I don't know why anyone would tear out a rhododendron bush, but they apparently do. There used to be about four or five yards in my neighborhood that had 4-6 rhododendrons, and they were always a beautiful thing to see every mid-April. Now there is just one neighbor who has about four or five bushes -- the other neighbors who had multiple rhodies had them removed.

On a personal level, I'm still dealing with the aftermath of tax season, and I'm still recuperating from an illness I got a week and a half ago. And no sooner than I got my car back from the shop after a serious repair to the leaky gas line / dying gas pumps / clogged gas filter, etc., a tire went completely flat. As they say -- when it rains, it pours. My fiction writing has halted, due to the recent illness and a serious case of writer's block. Maybe I need to drink more coffee? I still play my guitars -- both 12 string and electric, but it's mainly to keep the ability going, and relearn a few acoustic songs I wrote in 2011-2013. 

My cat is doing O.K., although she still demands that I watch her eat. 

What was left of the Great Aurora by the time I photographed it. I missed seeing the colors, but I did see these haunting looking rays projecting upwards and outwards from the North, at the time I took this picture on my Nikon L32, around 3:30 a.m.. I wish the rays of light would have shown up in the photo. Oh well.

SOLAR FLARES & THE GREAT AURORA

On the radio side of things, the night-time, long distance radio conditions have been mediocre, with a few notable exceptions. As always, even when overall SW conditions are mediocre, there are some surprises. 

As most MW and SW DXers know, we had a massive Solar Flare about two weeks ago, on May 10th -- the biggest one in 20 years -- and it wiped out all of the SW bands, turning them to quiet hiss. The night of the biggest Flare (and the Aurora, which I could just see early in the a.m.) produced just one SW station out of Mexico, that I could barely hear on two of my radios (my XHDATA D-328 + wire, and Panasonic RF-B45 + wire), so I know it wasn't some sort of overload image. Besides, the MW band was mediocre, so no MW stations would be strong enough to overload SW -- and they don't play Mexicano folk music, which I did hear on 6185 kHz, fading in an out in the grainy, Auroral static. 

So here's to Mexico's Radio Educacion: you were the only station on SW heard in my part of the world during the 'killer' Solar Flare. PS, your music and programming is cool.

Since the Solar Flare of May 10th subsided it's still mostly poor to fair DX conditions on the MW and SW bands, so even though I tune them to see what's out there, it's not like I'm hearing a ton of new and interesting stuff.

The MW band in general has been sounding like poor summer evening conditions since the flare, although I did hear a Las Vegas station really well a couple nights ago, KMZQ, on 670. It was the loudest and most consistent signal I'd ever heard from that station. Other nights? It's nothing but staticky hiss in KBOI Boise's extremely tight 'null' spot on 670. And for those not acquainted with 'nulling' a station, it's what one does on the AM band to reduce one station's signal to nothing, so you can hear a second or third station in its place. It's a trick I discovered on my Sanyo M9926 Boombox in 1983 or so. I had read about it previously, but hadn't actually tried it.

Even a simple AM-FM-SW radio like this XHDATA is probably capable of FM DXing, as this radio pulls in FM almost better than most of my other FM portables, thanks to an excellent DSP chip inside.

This XHDATA D-328 pulls in a few fringe region FM stations really well at my location, just off the whip antenna. No real FM DX on any radio, yet, though. A lot of FM DX depends on location, location, location.

On the FM side of things, I haven't really done any attempts at FM DXing, although in other parts of the US there are guys who have started doing it. Spring and Summer are apparently the best times to hear Ionospheric E-Layer skip on the FM band, which is a bit more sporadic than the D- and F-layer skip that we MW and SW DXer's experience. Some of the catches FM DXer's get in other parts of the country are fairly spectacular, considering.... One WA state FM DXer has heard most of the Western US states on FM. Any time I've tuned around it's locals, fringe stations, or nothing. Sometimes Tropospheric 'ducting' will bring in Canadian stations from Victoria fairly well -- well, two of them. One time I heard a station out of The Dalles, Oregon -- I can't remember which one. It had to be either really good Tropospheric ducting, or perhaps some E-skip, as The Dalles is over 200 miles away and there are a lot of mountains in the way. That station is my best catch on FM, on my GE Superadio 1, a long long time ago.

I suppose I should try a lot more at the FM DX hobby. Some day, maybe....

 

I've also entertained the notion of eventually becoming a ham radio operator, although I don't presently have the finances to get a decent rig. If I do eventually take that step, it will be some years away, when finances permit. I already know that it would be a simple, bare-bones operation. One simple rig, a code key, and one simple antenna. Make the best out of whatever you've got.

But I have other, more pressing tasks to deal with before I even consider something like that.

My mystery bush -- some sort of Wild Rose, I think -- that blooms around this time every year. A friend of my father's planted it next to our birch tree one year a long time ago, and it's bloomed every year, ever since.

Despite the mediocre SW and MW conditions, things did improve over the past week or so, and there always are a few gems that appear even when SW and MW conditions are mediocre. The DSP in the DSP radios can help, but I've also done a lot of listening to two of my analog portables, my Panasonic RF-B45 and Radio Shack 200629, and the readability of the weak SW stations is still pretty good -- usually more than enough to ID the station. 

The ham bands have been a wash, before, and after the Solar Flares. 160M, 80M and the bands above 20M have been mostly dead with few exceptions. 20 meters has had a few DX stations present on different afternoons and evenings, but it hasn't exactly been slammed with signals.

30M sometimes has a CW QSO, but the past few nights the 'beacon' to the EU, the RTTY station at Pinneberg, Germany (10100 kHz), has been MIA. The other beacon, NAU, RTTY in Puerto Rico (10155 kHz), has been in at varying strengths.

In the past weekend (May 25-26), SW conditions did pick up. I heard several Japanese hams on the 41 and 20 Meter band during a ham CW contest, and I also heard a German ham and a few American guys talking about stuff. I also heard Reach Beyond Australia, broadcasting to a small population of people in the hills between India and Burma, in a language I'd never heard before (Nga La -- maybe 40,000 speakers total). That was cool. Reach Beyond Australia transmits from the old Radio Australia transmitters in Kunnunura, in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. Like Radio Australia, they use the cackle of the Kookaburra bird in their ID's. Pretty cool.

The DX-350A radio -- like a lot of smaller portables -- sometimes can overload on really strong SW signals. At the same time, just using the whip antenna sometimes just isn't enough to bring in a lot of stations on the SW bands. Clipping a wire to the whip antenna can help, but it can also overload the radio's front end amplifier transistors.

Placing resistors in between the wire antenna and whip antenna can help with this. The resistors lower the signal levels just enough to keep the radio from overloading.

I'm using two resistors here because I didn't have a small enough value one. 200-500 or 1000 ohms or so would probably be just right -- both of these resistors were over 33K ohms. Clipping them in parallel like this dropped the resistance to around 19K ohms. It got the job done -- it worked!

USING A WIRE ANTENNA WITH MY REALISTIC DX-350A

& NO OVERLOAD!

After a while of not using them, I fired up my Realistic DX-350 and DX-350A earlier this past week, trying my indoor, 25 ft. wire antenna by clipping it to the whip. Normally, the 350A would overload with a wire antenna, but this time I had my drop-down resistors that I rigged up to experiment with, and the results were pretty satisfactory. It's pretty easy to rig up an antenna drop down resistor -- all you need is an alligator clip. Being that most alligator clips have set screws, there is no soldering necessary. Run one resistor lead through the 'handle' of the alligator clip, loop the lead around the set screw, and screw it down, and make a small loop or hook with the other resistor lead to give your wire antenna's alligator clip something to clip onto.

It worked really well. My 350A, as I mentioned, will often overload on SW if you use an external wire antenna. Sometimes you'll get lots of extra hiss and FM transmitter hash (one of the two major FM transmitter locations is about 5 miles N of me, and it can slam the 31 and 25 Meter bands with hash in a couple places). 

With the drop-down resistor, the overload was eliminated. I had to use both of my resistors in parallel because the only ones I had in my parts box were pretty high value -- 47K ohm and 33K ohm. Ideal resistance would be 250 ohms to 1-2K ohms or so. But with both of my resistors in parallel, I got roughly 19K Ohms, which wasn't bad. It got the job done.

PANDORA: WHERE 2010's E.D.M. POP LIVES STILL

As I've stated here on this blog in the past, for some reason the pop music of the early 2010's really appealed to me, and -- to be honest -- it still does. I wrote a blog about this over a year ago, where I was commenting on the general state of music at the time -- and to be blunt, the general state of popular CHR and rock music hasn't really improved. There are a few bright spots here and there, but overall, it seems about as dull as the grey weather outside.

And the pop music of 2012 was so upbeat, so emotion-tinged, so technically concise, so well produced and put together, and often technically edgy -- but it was also so easy to listen to and enjoy. And, face it -- much of it was PARTY MUSIC. Nowadays, the pop music isn't really party music. Neither is the rock music. Country music has its party moments, but it's not really my cup of tea.

The autotune which was popular in the 2010's was overused, but it gave the singers a nearly super-human quality to their voice. They sounded more AI than AI, but in a good way. Every note perfect. It seemed to fit the high tech tenor and delivery of the computer-driven EDM music that backed the singers.

2010's pop is miles from Rose Tattoo, of course (and Rose Tattoo is my favorite artist anymore), but it's still good. The pop music today is nowhere near as fun.

Where is Pitbull when we need him around?

On local FM radio today the 2010's hits that were so cool to hear -- Katy Perry's Part Of Me, Cobra Starship's You Make Me Feel, Calvin Harris's Feel So Close, Taio Cruz's Dynamite, Ollie Murs' Heart Skips A Beat, and the like -- get rare airplay, and some of them get NO airplay because they didn't pass the radio company's beloved "research". 2010's pop hits also are too new for Classic Hits and too old for Recurrents. It may take ten more years for a 2010's heavy pop format to show up on FM. And some songs that were so cool back then -- anyone remember the Gym Class Heroes? Or Andy Grammer? -- would never make it to a 2010's Radio format because everything on radio is researched to a crisp.

Well, rest assured, yours truly has discovered the appeal of streaming. My Android phone came with Pandora installed. I never used it until this weekend, when I decided to give the service a spin. I mean -- it's on my phone, so why not try it? So I did. Instantly, I was taken back to 2011-2012, when I discovered Pop Music again.

Within minutes I heard the Chainsmokers w/ Daya in Don't Let Me Down, Nick Jonas's Jealous, Taio Cruz's Break Your Heart, Nico & Vinz's Am I Wrong, and Ke$ha's Tik Tok, Nicky Minaj's Starships, One Republic's Counting Stars -- you get the idea. A lot of them I hadn't really heard before, like Flo Rida's Wild Ones. I'd heard a couple of his other hits but not that one. And I heard Pitbull within the first half hour -- on an Usher song. And Adele's classic, well-written hit Set Fire To The Rain played -- all within the first 45 minutes.

Here's a link to the 2010's Pop Channel on Pandora, for those interested.:

2010s Pop - Pandora

I can see clearly now, how Radio is being replaced, and redefined. 

Do I like it? Not necessarily. After all, I'm still a radio guy. I've always listened to radio, DX'ed radio, and I worked in the business for 20 years. You don't work in a business for 20 years and not have some feelings for its future.

But when I can tap an icon on my phone and hear my favorite, 2010's hits, one after another, do I like it? Well, yeah, I do like it. I see the appeal.

On the airwaves, an all-2010's pop channel probably wouldn't get good enough ratings to get a radio station agency buys. That's why there are no 2010's pop-heavy FM radio stations. But on a streaming platform, ratings isn't so much a concern that all music is researched to death. Online streaming platforms are a totally different animal.

Even the 'curated' music channels, like Pandora's 2010's Pop channel has a feature where you can give a song a thumbs up or thumbs down, so the algorithm will alter the music it sends to you. So it's like listening to a 2010's Pop radio station, where you can send in requests and they actually alter their playlist for you. 

I realise that for a lot of you this is already second nature -- as millions use Pandora, Spotify, and other streaming platforms. But I see now why people are into this.

Streaming platforms like Pandora have sizeable -- and growing -- chunks of the listening public for a reason.

I have heard the future, and the future is now.

Here's the Gym Class Heroes, by the way. The Fighter. Excellent song, released in late 2011. I heard it on local pop station KBKS 106.1 FM in early 2012. Wish I could find my CD copy of it. Better yet: I wish there were more songs being released like this today.:

In 2011 Andy Grammer said "Keep Your Head Up". I first heard this track on Radio Disney in 2012. Keeping your head up -- it's still a good idea.:

Yep, with inflation the way it is nowadays, we definitely have to keep our heads up, don't we.

I used to sing that Keep Your Head Up in karaoke at Uncle Mo's Pub in Renton back in the mid to late 2010's, sometimes closing the karaoke show with it. It's a good feeling song to sing.

As I pointed out in my second-to-last posting here, I was sick for a week. I'm mostly recuperated. This last Monday was Memorial Day. At first I wasn't sure whether I wanted to put my flag(s) out, which generally was my custom. Partly because it was going to rain, and partly because I didn't know if I wanted to risk my flags getting messed with or stolen. I was certain that one of my flags was stolen last year. I even wrote a post about it. I had literally thought it was stolen. But it turned out that someone had shoved it into the hedge, and I found it a while after I had written up the blog post.

I finally decided to go halfway, this year: I put out one flag, my newest one. And I kept an eye on it.

Happy end of May. 

Peace,

C.C., May 26th & 29th, 2024.