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Lately I have been messing around with Esperanto, which like several other hobbies I picked up as a young man and had to drop when I got married and started raising a family. If you've heard of it, it's probably in the context of "it's a language that everyone in the world was supposed to learn to speak, but nobody speaks it any more" or some such incorrect piece of information. It is in fact alive and well, and like many constructed languages (from Solresol to Klingon) the Internet has given it a pretty sizeable boost. It's the 16th or 17th largest language on Wikipedia in terms of the number of articles written in the language, and it's one of 64 or so languages available on Google Translate.

Google Translate is an example of how "it's not so much that the bear dances well, as that it dances at all." Some of the translations I've run through it are pretty good. Many are lacking in one or more ways, primarily in the absence of certain words in Google Translate's vocabulary. For instance, it doesn't know the word "banjo." (For the record, the Esperanto word for banjo is . . . "banĝo." The two are pronounced the same; the letter "ĝ" in Esperanto has the same sound as the g in "ledge" or "orange.")

And this morning, it got one translation very, very wrong. There's a site called "Lernu!" (Esperanto for "Learn!") that sends out a word of the day every day, defined and with examples in Esperanto. Today's word was "veneno," which means "poison." The examples are sentences like "Plena glaso da vino, sed kun guto da veneno." (A full glass of wine, but with a drop of poison.) They show how the word can be used as a noun, a verb, as part of a proverb ("Running like a poisoned mouse" - something I've never heard before) and even as a part of a statement potentially inconsistent with continued viability ("Nobody can poison me - I'm immune!")

I decided to run the examples through Google Translate to see what would happen. Most of them translated closely enough that I could make the leap the rest of the way, and a few contained words that Google didn't understand, like "veneniĝo", literally "becoming poisoned".

And then we got to the last example, "Li povas morti, ĉar ni ne havas kontraŭvenenon." Google translated this as "He can not die, because we do not have an antidote." Kudos to Google for having "kontraŭveneno", literally "counter-venom", in its vocabulary. But the first part of the sentence is not just incorrect, it's wrong. "Li povas morti" means "He could die" or "It is possible that he can die." Google's translation "He can not die" is the polar opposite of what it should be.

I doubt anyone would ever use Google Translate to save someone's life, and if they did I doubt they'd need to do so by translating Esperanto into English. Even so, one has to wonder how Google got "povi" into its vocabulary with a value of "can not" instead of "could."

And for the record, it's not just English. "Li povas morti" comes out as "Él no puede morir" in Spanish and "Er kann nicht sterben" in German, both meaning "He can't die" and both just as wrong as in English.

Machine translation these days is moderately good. It's at least in a lot better shape than it was when I first heard about it in the early 1970s. But it still has a long way to go.

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I haven't been doing a lot of radio lately, but Saturday I fired up the software to see who was out and about. Conditions were good, and I saw signals from France, Germany and England. Other stations were calling hams in Eastern Europe and Africa, but I couldn't hear them.

When the French station ended up a QSO with a station near me and started calling CQ, I decided to answer him. To my delight and surprise he came back with a signal report just on the lower edge of the "good" range. I had hoped to catch the German station too but apparently he went off the air while I was making my exchange with the French station.

There's a natural phenomenon called the sunspot cycle. You may have heard of it. Over about an 11 year period the number sunspots waxes and wanes, and when it gets high, it's good news for high frequency radio communications. At the peak of the sunspot cycle in 1979 I was working stations all over the world on 10 meters. The peak of the sunspot cycle is going to arrive within the next year or so and I want to be ready. Maybe the opening to Europe over the weekend is an indication that it's on its way.

Yesterday the temperature here flirted with 90 degrees. We Seattleites are not used to such scorching temperatures. You Texans and Georgians may laugh at such a statement, but this weekend was the first time all year the temperature got above 80 for any length of time.

On Saturday I splurged for a $3 movie for the four of us (me, my wife, my daughter and granddaughter). "I'd like four tickets to air conditioning, er, Hunger Games," I told the box office attendant. She just laughed. We chose Hunger Games in part because it's a good movie that we'd already seen and knew we would enjoy, and in part because it was the longest movie the theater was offering that day.

This is a dodge we used to pull all the time in Texas when they had $1 and $2 movies. We'd grab a few bucks, pack up the kids and spend the day watching movies. Good movies, bad movies, silly movies, movies from Italy or France, movies we'd seen before, we didn't care. They could have advertised an empty theater for $1 an hour and we'd probably have paid it. And bought popcorn to go along with it.

Yesterday we went to (air-conditioned) church, changed our clothes, packed up some food, grabbed the Igors and went for a drive. We had planned to go up toward Lake Goodwin, but a whole bunch of other people had the same idea, so we kept driving and ended up at Deception Pass State Park at the north end of Whidbey Island. The picnic area was cool and shady, there was water for the kids to play in and around, and everyone had a pleasant time. Much better than we would have if we'd have been sitting at home grousing and sniping at each other because of the heat.

The temperature is supposed to spike near 80 today and then be down in the 70s over the next week or so. I sure hope so. Weather like this reminds me of why we were so happy to get out of Texas.

I hate nights when I can't sleep. Since I am often tired and fall asleep readily, situations where I can't go to sleep are puzzling and frustrating, especially when I really want to sleep. Like last night, when for the second night in a row I didn't get to bed before midnight.Then about 4 in the morning Igor the Younger came in whimpering because something had woken him up and my wife went out to take care of him. It was just enough to wake me up, so I got up, went to the bathroom, went back to bed . . . and couldn't get to sleep for nothin'. I think I finally conked out somewhere around 5:15, but before I did I reset the alarm to get an extra half hour of sleep. I'm feeling it now though, and hope I manage to make it through the workday, aided by my personal specialist Dr Pepper.

Igor the Younger and his toolkit I described a few days ago helped with a mad science project yesterday. I pulled out the computer screw connection and he and I fastened down a CD-ROM drive in my radio computer. Then he got to fasten the case panel by screwing in the thumbscrews that hold it on. I know it's very simple but he gets to feel like he's helping Grandpa and being a super tool user guy. Then he ran around the house for a while with a couple of little LED flashlights I bought when I got his tool set. He attached them to his head and told me he was a car.

The network is up and running. There's one more step before everything is finished, perhaps two, but the software configuration is essentially complete other than minor tweaks as I find things that I either forgot to implement or didn't know I needed to. Now I just have to wait for a couple of Ethernet extension cables I ordered to come in so I can move the firewall/router out closer to the middle of the room for easier access through the house. I may have to get an amplified antenna. I don't really want to spend any more money if I don't have to, but my daughter says she's having trouble maintaining a signal in the basement, and if repositioning the antenna doesn't work I may have to.

Actually there is one more thing I have to do. In some ways the point of this exercise was to allow a wireless connection to a computer in the front room that serves two purposes. One is as a web-enabled machine for homework and the like; unfortunately it too is getting a bit old and slow for modern browsers and word processors, so I may have to do some research into lighter-weight alternatives. The second is for that machine to allow the TiVo to make its daily calls that update the program listings. Currently we have to string a big orange cable down the hall to the bedroom and over to the Ethernet switch, more or less diagonally across the house. This way the TiVo will connect to the front room computer, which will connect to the firewall, which will connect to the Internet, which will connect to the TiVo servers out on the net somewhere. Hey, better that than stringing a big orange cable all over the house.

Come to think of it there's probably no reason why I couldn't put a second wireless card into the front room computer and let people connect to it. Or maybe I can do it with just the one. I'll have to go investigate.

About 45 years ago one of my jobs around the house was to get up and adjust the rabbit ears on top of the TV if the reception started getting fuzzy on one of the three or four channels we got. Now I get irritated if I have to hook up a wire once a week so I can get a list of what's on on the 100+ channels that come streaming into my house. Once again, living in the future rules.

Yesterday was quite a day and I feel like I actually accomplished something.

The Tooth Of The Matter

Sunday I was sitting in church waiting for services to start and Igor the Younger offered to share a couple of Mike&Ikes his grandma had given him. I took one, thanked him, praised him for sharing, bit down on it and immediately wished I hadn't. Bit down, not praise Igor the Younger. The candy knocked a crown loose off of one of my lower right molars. Luckily my dentist, who is a family friend and attends the same church, was sitting right behind us, took a look and arranged for me to come in yesterday. The bottom line is that he feels like I need a couple of posts in what remains of the molar to get the crown to stay on, but he cemented it on so it would stay in until he could bring me in for the full procedure. I'm grateful that he was able to take care of it quickly. I wasn't in pain - the tooth was root canaled long ago - but my tongue kept scraping against the sharp edge of the remnants of the tooth. It's healing up now but will probably still be a couple of days before the abrasions and lacerations go away.

Shopping For Tools

My daughter very kindly picked me up from the dentist with Igor the Younger in tow, and we stopped off at Walgreen's on the way home to pick up some Spider-Man Band-Aids to take care of some boo-boo or another he had gotten himself into. It was a fun experience as only shopping at Walgreen's with a four-year-old can be. We never got past the toy aisle, where he tried to use his Con Auntie And Grandpa skill. Luckily we both made our Resist Con Job From Four Year Old Who Wants You To Buy A Bag Of Water Balloons roll. We didn't get water balloons (although if the temperature stays up we might just have to), but on the way to the checkout I spotted a little $5 household tool kit with some jewelers' screwdrivers and a couple of other useful gadgets. The water balloons would have been cheaper, but Igor the Younger's is fascinated by tools and this looked like it would be a good addition to his collection. It wasn't until I got to the checkstand that I figured out that this toolkit had both a pair of scissors and a wire snipper, both of which can be very dangerous in a little boy's hands. Especially this little boy By then it was too late, though. He had already seen it and decided it was his. So we went home and he and his scissors helped me open a box that arrived in the mail, cut up some stray pieces of recycling and generally had a good time with the new toy.

Wireless Access Coming Soon!

Several years ago I bought a combination wireless access point and ethernet hub so I could share out our cable modem connection. It turned out to be not exactly what I wanted. Apparently Linksys makes several different kinds of WRT-54g WAP, and the one I bought wasn't the one that runs Linux natively and can be modified and improved. Even so, I put it to work, but it's showing its age and has some frustrating limitations, the lack of modability being one of them. Flakiness is another. Every so often it seems to drop connections or lose power or something, and I have to reset it.

I've wanted to replace it for a long time, but I wanted a specific replacement. I have an HP Vectra computer that's been around long enough to have a "Made For Windows 2000" sticker prominently displayed on the front. It's old and slow and would collapse under the weight of the software if you tried to put any modern GUI-based operating system on it (Linux included), but it's plenty fast enough for my mad scientific purposes.

The Linksys does have one thing going for it, though. It's a purpose-built machine that you can just plug in and go. There's a little configuration involved if you want to do anything fancy on your side of the network (meaning I did some configuration) but not much. Turning the Vectra in to a firewall/router/WAP/DHCP/DNS machine is a do-it-yourself project that involves scouring the Internet, discarding the stuff that was applicable to versions of Linux from six years ago that now would be known as The Hard Way, and making it all work and play nicely together.

I installed the latest version of Ubuntu Server onto the machine over the weekend (an adventure in paleocybernetics I won't bore you with here), gathered the software I needed and started configuring. Some of it was "by the book," er, website, some of it was trial-and-error-and-read-the-logs-and-try-again. Executive summary: Yesterday I turned on the access point package and got my cell phone to connect to the WAP and get an address. This means most of the configuration is done and everything is working the way it should for the packages installed so far. There's still some tweaking to be done, mostly involving security and making the Internet accessible to the machines behind the firewall, but the bulk of it – something I've wanted to do for over a year now – is done. I still have one piece of hardware on order before I can hook everything up, and my plan is to switch out the Linux machine for the Linksys router over the weekend, possibly after everyone has gone to bed Friday night. They'll all want their Internet access on Saturday, and I can't blame them. I would.

And Whaddaya Get? Another Day Older

After I finished up with the WAP, we ate supper and the grandkids settled in to watch a movie with Auntie. I was in the bedroom winding down and getting ready to go to bed, and as I often do I had the banjo in my lap as I did my computer stuff. I was just kind of idly picking at the strings, sounding an open chord, not playing anything in particular, when I hit upon the pattern 5-1-2-3-4. Hmmm. That sounds almost familiar. I tuned the second string down a half step to a B♭, did the pattern again, and yep, it was the opening riff to Tennessee Ernie Ford's version of "Sixteen Tons."

So of course I had to work out the song, which involved figuring out the chords on a banjo that's not tuned the way I usually play it. Luckily the way I remember the song it's only three chords. Rise Up Singing says four, but I usually go with what I hear when I can figure out what it is. Makes it sound "folkier," in my humble opinion. Anyway the base G minor chord was now an open strum and the other two just involved moving the finger fretting the second string up a fret.

There was something missing, though. I mean, I followed Ford's version pretty closely, but as it sometimes does, my ear was telling me to do something different. So just before the last verse ("If you see me comin'") I shifted the key up from G minor to A♭ minor by barring the first fret. That's something I don't often do on a banjo because the fifth string becomes discordant (G against an A♭ chord), but as it turns out I was able to solve that fairly easily. I had been ending each verse by doing a quick attack with a D7 chord on "owe" and then doing "my soul to the company store" a capella, following it up with the "5-1-2-3" riff. Since I have "railroad spikes" on my banjo (a capoing system where you put actual model railroad spikes into the fretboard and capo the fifth string by slipping the string under the spike) I figured out I could hit the chord for "owe", then while singing "my soul to the company store" quickly spike the fifth string at the sixth fret so it would sound an A♭ and be in accord with the new key. Then I did the riff, played a couple of Gm chords, and moved up to A♭m. I think it sounds pretty good.

Anyway that was my day yesterday. Hope you had a good one too.

When last I posted my banjo was unstrung and in several pieces. I was awaiting arrival of a new bridge and a nut to fasten the tailpiece to its bracket so I could put everything back together. I'm still waiting for the tailpiece nut, but I found something in my junkbox that's working well enough to do the assembly and get some practice in. I'll probably still use the nut I ordered because it looks like it matches the decorative nuts on the brackets. It might be a pain and it might not be significant to anyone but me, but I feel like it's worth doing.

So I pulled out a set of strings, fastened the tailpiece and hooked up the strings to the peghead and the tailpiece, then positioned the bridge properly so that the twelfth fret would sound an octave like it's supposed to. Something felt off, though, and I wasn't sure what it was. I tried adjusting the screw on the tailpiece that controls the tension on the strings, but that didn't seem to help much.

At this point, enter Igor the Younger. He loves to play with the banjo and sing. Good thing it tunes to a major chord most of the time. "Hi, Grandpa," he said, "Did you fix your banjo?"

"Sure did, Boofy."

"Can I play it?"

"Of course," I told him. "Here you go."

I sat the banjo face up on the bed. He took a look at the tailpiece, go this look on his face, ran his finger widthwise across the tailpiece and said, "Where's the strings here?"

And that's when I noticed that I had strung the banjo wrong. The tailpiece has a set of hooks at one end and a set of holes at the other that the strings are supposed to pass through so the tailpiece can control the tension. I had hooked the strings to the upper holes rather than to the hooks, which was why the tension - and the feel of the banjo - were off.

So I let Igor the Younger play on the banjo for as long as his attention span allowed him to, and then I started the laborious task of unstringing each string, one at a time, and carefully restringing it with the loop in the hook and the string going through the hole on its way to the bridge. The two thinnest strings snapped in the process so I had to replace those; it won't surprise me much if the others do too just because of the way I had them strung. Time to order some more, since I will want to restring the banjo about a week or two before I go to Conchord.

Don't ever let anyone tell you small children don't notice things. They see more than they let on.

This morning I had a few minutes to kill before I had to take off for work so I fired up the radio and did an exercise I call "one ping only." This is a reference to the Sean Connery/Alec Baldwin movie "Hunt for Red October." Baldwin's character sends a message to Connery, a sub commander, and wants him to acknowledge the message by pinging Baldwin's submarine once. "Vasily," Connery says to his XO, his voice unmistakable even with a hint of an Eastern European accent, "Verify our range to target. One ping only."

When I do a "one ping only" I send out a single CQ, not necessarily expecting a reply but wanting to see if my signal is getting out. If I see a lot of reception reports on the reverse beacon page, I know that frequency is open for business. If I see few or none, it's time to go somewhere else. Sometimes that's a different band, sometimes it's off to read a book or play with the grandkids.

I did a one ping only on 15 meters at about 6:50 this morning and got nothing. No reception reports at all. So I decided to see if anyone was listening on 17 meters. I got one reception report from a guy in Ohio. I was getting ready to switch things off when I got distracted, and when I looked up I saw that I was sending a second CQ. Oh well, no problem, I'll just turn everything off after that finishes. The CQ finished, I got ready to exit the program . . . and saw a transmission on my frequency. The display had been blank, so this was certainly someone answering my call.

WA7KPK KJ2U DN40

Hmmmm . . . DN40. Grid square DN is somewhere in the north midsection of the country. I set the software to send my answer and, as I usually do, searched Google for his call. His webpage on QRZ.com came up, showing that he was from Alpine, Utah and his name is Ken Jennings.

Wait a minute. Ken Jennings? Utah? Could it be . . .?

The answer is a bit farther down the page. "This question comes up from time to time. NO, I am not the Ken Jennings of Jeopardy fame . . . but I am his father. Unfortunately, DNA does not flow uphill." It's accompanied by a picture of his son with Alex Trebek, and a Jennings family portrait.

So that is my brush with those near greatness for today. I can add that to one of my best friends from Texas who was Willie Nelson's veternarian's assistant, and the time I did Windows 95 tech support for a woman who had been on a Mormon mission with Donny and Marie Osmond's parents. (One of these days I'll write about the time I got a tech support call from Donny Osmond.)

UPDATE: I got a very nice note attached to Ken's electronic confirmation telling me that his wife is from Edmonds and his daughter lives here in Shoreline. (His son's Wikipedia page says he was born in Edmonds.) I've mentioned before that JT65 is very formulaistic and you don't learn much about the other operator other than where they are, so it's always nice to get personal touches like this.

There are days when I think I'm just shouting into the ether, calling CQ over and over and getting no replies even though I know people are hearing me. And then there are days when I make a few contacts but they're all in California. Nothing wrong with California, mind you, but working stations from a single area is like eating steak every night for dinner. As much as you might like steak, it's nice to have a pork chop or some chicken or macaroni and cheese once in a while.

And then there's tonight.

Tonight I worked not one, but two stations in Brazil, the first in the state of Rio Grande do Sul in the far southern part of the country, and the other near São Paulo. These are my first contacts in South America in a very long time. So I'm feeling pretty good and hoping that if I can pull in a signal from Porto Alegre, Uruguay and Argentina can't be far behind.

And now it's bedtime.

The Igors are spending time with Mom and Dad this weekend so no playing fish or facilitating Officer Igor. Which is fun and all, but there's a bunch of stuff coming up the littles wouldn't be interested in.

* Folklife!

OK, the littles would love some parts of the Northwest Folklife Festival, and I hope their parents take them, but I for one don't envy anyone trying to chase Igor the Younger around a cheek-to-jowl Seattle Center. He's just too big and too fast and could be in the wading pool next to Key Arena before you can say "Bob's-yer-uncle."

Some of the things I like about Folklife:

. The price is right. It's free (funded by donations actually).

. Picking a spot and just watching "the free show" as my dad used to say. Just seeing the amazing variety of people going by.

. Listening to the buskers performing along the walkways and under the trees.

. Wandering around through the vendor displays. All kinds of food and lots of cool items I can't afford. I really miss the Musical Instrument Showcase; they used to have an entire room dedicated to selling instruments topped off by an auction, but the auction closed down several years ago and the Showcase wasn't far behind. I bought a didgeridoo and a Pyrex flute at the Showcase in years when I was a bit more flush; I still have both of them.

. Plopping down in a performance venue without knowing what's going to come up. You could get old novelty tunes from the 20s and 30s on fiddle and uke, followed by a bandura concert and then by a traditional Thai dancer. We've seen gamelans and zydeco, storytellers and Irish bands.

This year we have a destination in mind rather than completely surrendering ourselves to serendipity. Miss Thing, our 15-year-old choir student, has an assignment to go to a choral concert and write a report by the end of the school year. Folklife is showcasing the Seattle Women's Choir, the Seattle Men's Choir, and the Seattle Girls' Choir on Sunday. I think that should qualify.

* Radio!

The bands have been a bit more active lately. I'm still not hearing anyone outside North America, Japan, Australia and New Zealand on HF, but that doesn't mean I should quite looking. I still need to get the antenna up in the air.

* Contest!

Ham radio contests are interesting critters. The idea is to make contacts with as many participants as possible during the span of the contest. Some contests are limited in scope (hams in Michigan, for instance, or veterans), and the idea is to contact members of that scope for contest credit, or if you're a member of the scope, make as many contacts with anyone participating as you can. Some are open to everyone who wants to participate, and everyone contacts everyone else. There are byzantine rules about how to calculate your score, but the basic idea is, work as many stations as you can. Contacts tend to go pretty quickly.

This weekend will be the CQ Worldwide WPX Contest, CW (Morse code) version, sponsored by CQ Magazine. It's a free-for-all where your score is in part based on the number of different prefixes you work during the contest. In this context the "prefix" is the part of a radio ham's call that precedes the block of identifying letters. It generally has both alpha and numeric characters and ends in a number. So for my call, WA7KPK, the prefix is "WA7". It's not as common a prefix as it used to be, but it's by no means rare. Then there are calls like 4U1ITU, the ham radio station at the headquarters of the International Telecommunications Union, the UN body charged with international radio regulations. Their prefix, 4U1, is literally unique. There's only one station with that prefix.

CQ Magazine sponsors an award called the WPX, which you can earn by getting verified contacts with ham stations with 300 different prefixes. It is probably possible to work enough stations for the WPX during a contest weekend. Certainly if you're attacking the contest seriously, you can do it if you can get the contacts verified. It's been many years since I did any heavy-duty contesting, and I don't know how involved I'll get with this contest. I may just hang around, give some participants a new multiplier, and not take it too seriously. The contest starts at 5 tonight and runs for 48 hours; there's no way I'll spend that much time at it (especially since you're required to take some time off during the contest). Or I may see how close I can get to that magic 300. I have over 50 now in about two months of operation, so who knows?

* General hamming!

Just getting on, doing some casual and digital operation. One of the interesting things about contests is that a big free-for-all like WPX can crowd the bands, leaving hams who don't want to participate grumbling about "those *%!@(& contesters". Some years ago three new bands were added to the ham radio spectrum; part of the deal for allocating those bands to us hams was that contest activity would not be allowed on them. I may meet up with some refugees from some of the more crowded bands on these so-called WARC bands if I decide the contest has crowded everyone else out. That, and my normal nets on Saturday, Sunday and Monday.

* Work!

Yes, the curse of the working class. I'm a contractor and need the money and don't get paid time off on this contract, so hi ho, hi ho, it's off to work I go. I have a couple of jobs I can do while everyone else is off enjoying the weekend.

Here's hoping you enjoy your weekend and get to do something fun.

When you are four years old you come up with imaginative games based on your observation of the world around you. On a recent long car trip Igor the Younger designated my wife as an owl who was supposed to say "Hoo hoo" and my daughter as a rooster who would say "Cock-a-doodle-doo." When the owl hooted he would "go to sleep" (lay his head back and loudly snore) and when the rooster crowed he would jump up and say "Huh? What?"

Igor the Younger has noticed that police officers carry radios much like Grandpa's (a little VHF handheld I use to access the local repeaters) and they wear their microphones on their uniform shirt up near their ears. I call those their epaulets but I don't know if that's the proper word for them.

At any rate he will come in and ask, "Grandpa, can I play Officer Igor?" I, being an accommodating mad scientist, want to facilitate his play time and stir his imagination, so I take my handheld, clip it to his belt, clip the microphone to his collar (because his shirt doesn't have anything that looks like a epaulet) and send him off to serve and protect.

At first I was a bit worried that he would key the microphone and cause me some problems, because unlicensed operators are frowned upon in the ham ranks, even if they're four-year-old policemen. Then I came up with an ingenious plan to keep everyone involved out of trouble. The handheld has a number of non-ham channels programmed into it, including three local National Weather Service channels. I just set the handheld to one of the weather channels and we pretend it's the dispatcher. He's happy, I'm happy, and about the worst that can happen is he runs the battery down. I know how to recharge it.

Ah, but couldn't he change the channel and end up on an unauthorized frequency? There's a two-button combination that locks the keypad so he stays on the weather broadcast, and even if he were to somehow unlock the keypad, the weather broadcast is surrounded by a couple of other weather broadcasts.

So now I feel safe knowing that Officer Igor is on the watch.

Oh wait, that title is kind of a spoiler, isn't it?

For several days since I got the computer back up and running I had been having trouble making contacts on JT65, my current favorite digital mode. I wasn't showing up on the reverse beacon page when I called CQ and I wasn't seeing anyone on the waterfall (the scrolling signal display).

I couldn't figure out what was going on. I was sure I had transmit power. The audio was working OK, at least to make contacts on the local repeaters. I could hear Morse code signals. Everything was connected properly. I was starting to wonder if someone had taken down my antenna and replaced it with a dummy load - basically a big resistor used for testing that acts like an antenna except it doesn't radiate.

Then last night I looked down at the waterfall and saw a signal. I don't know who he was because the software hadn't decoded the message. I took a closer look and saw that the transmission had apparently started several seconds after the beginning of that minute.

It was then that a bit of enlightenment burst through the fog banks of my mind. Everything I had read about JT65 said you need to have absolutely accurate time because JT65 uses the current time as part of the decoding mechanism. If your time is off by up to about a second you're probably OK, but any higher delta can be a problem. The emphasis was on setting up a time synchronization program like Dimension4 in Windows, because Linux has the ntp protocol to keep machines on time.

Could it be that simple? This was a freshly installed Linux machine, and I thought Linux always installed ntp (the Linux time sync program) by default. Maybe I was wrong about that. Sure enough, "sudo install ntp" installed a new program instead of telling me I already had one running, and "ntpdate time.nist.gov" told me it was updating the clock, setting it back seven seconds. That's probably about how much the signal had lagged behind the start of the minute.

So that explains why signals weren't decoding, and conversely, why no one else was able to decode me. As for not seeing any signals, I chalk that up to a combination of the time differential and fairly poor band conditions the last few days. That's my story and I'm stickin' with it.

Last night I made two contacts, one with Michael in Plymouth, MI (a new state for me on JT65) and one with Richard in Vancouver, WA, who I've worked before. And I was very happy to have both contacts.

Now if that South African station would just reappear . . .