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Lately I think I've mentioned a few times that I have a politician station, one that talks a lot and everybody hears it but it doesn't listen so well. That opinion is being reinforced today.

I am on the 15 meter band, one of the upper bands where long-distance communication is pretty common. The various maps and tools I use indicate that the band is hoppin'. There are people posting reception reports on the reverse beacons for stations in Europe and South America. Some Japanese stations are reporting in.

I'm showing up on the reverse beacons as well. I call CQ and get good signal reports from all over the US, plus occasionally ones from Australia, New Zealand or Japan. These aren't stations that are trying to contact me -- just ones (possibly unattended) who have reported hearing my signal.

The thing is, I'm calling CQ because I can't hear much of anything. There are a few stations listed in my reverse beacon reports that I picked up while I was out buying dishwasher detergent for my wife, and the highest signal strength I reported was a -20 (with -1 being "you sound like you're right next door to me"). The reports go down to -24 and even one at -27, which is right down in the noise that's always present in the radio spectrum. In contrast the reports people are giving me are good and string, with reports from -4 to -6 pretty common and even a -1 once or twice.

I can only conclude that there's something about my situation that is causing me to be as deaf as a sixth-grader on garbage day. One clue might be the signal strength of the background noise. I seem to remember it was at a fairly low level when I had my station in Montana. On the "S" scale we use it was maybe S2 or S3. At the moment my noise level is around S9, which would be a good signal if it were coming from a transmitter instead of . . . everywhere. In Montana I was still in the middle of a moderate-sized city, but those were the days before ubiquitous computers, cell phones, digital this and digital that and every piece of equipment in your house from your cable box to your toaster having a computer chip in it. Did I mention that computer chips are active sources of radio interference? There's a famous article from QST magazine where a guy built a transmitter from a single hex NOR gate integrated circuit and a few spare parts. It was a really weak transmitter, but he hooked it up to an antenna and made a few contacts with it.

I can only hope that the reason I'm getting so much noise is because my antenna is so low to the ground and runs through the house, picking up RF interference from all the computers we have around here. Once I figure out how to get the antenna higher in the air, the noise will die down and I'll be able to hear the weaker stations. I hope. (My favorite antenna in Billings was 30 feet up in the air. I wish I still had it.)

It appears that igor, my file and print server, is well and truly dead. After about seven years of service I finally pulled the plug on it last night. It was not only not booting from any hard drive I tried in it, it may have been actively clobbering the hard drives and/or USB drives I was booting it from. My time is worth enough, and computer hardware is cheap enough, that I can't justify putting any more time into trying to figure out what's going on.

Now it's time to play musical computers:

* My laptop will become my primary development/ham radio machine. As I type this on the laptop I am doing some maintenance on the hard drive, after which I'll be installing my ham radio programs. One bit of lemonade in this saga of lemons is that I have igor's monitor hooked up to the laptop, giving me a dual screen display. This will let me run propagation software, DX spotting sites and the like in the background while I do primary tasks in the front.

* My daughter has a computer she inherited from her brother that she isn't using. The plan is to put a new hard drive into it and install Windows 7 for my wife, whose computer is at least as old as igor, is still running Windows XP and hasn't had a registry cleaning in all that time.

Yeah. So, finally she will have a computer that will run her Gaia games at a reasonable pace. This is her Mother's day present from the two of us.

* My wife's old computer will, hopefully, become the new igor. It's of the same vintage as igor – in fact it uses the same motherboard – so I don't know how much longer it has left to run or whether it too will start acting berserk, but at least with any luck I'll be able to pull the files off the RAID arrays and onto an external drive.

And that's my Saturday. That, and figuring out why the cable was out at our house (answer: it wasn't, someone had just switched channels). And taking a nap. A nap is definitely on the agenda. And watching Classic Arts Showcase, which I highly recommend. I just learned that there's such a thing as a "Liverpool Oratorio" that Paul McCartney had a hand in. Presumably it's that Liverpool and that Paul McCartney. (I just checked. It is, and it is.)

So it was a weekend of the good, the bad, and the ugly this weekend, around and around, on the ham radio and related computer front.

GOOD: I had a spool of somewhere around 50' of the same size wire my loop is made of, so Friday afternoon I soldered it to the end of the loop. Longer is better where antennas are concerned, and with the extra wire the loop is about the right length to check into the networks that were the purpose of putting this station together all allong.

BAD: I misjudged either the amount of wire left on the spool or the size of my back yard, because the loop ended up a few feet short. I had to go fetch another length of wire from a different, shorter spool and solder it on.

UGLY: I'm not a big fan of having a bunch of solder joints on the wire. The antenna still works, it just looks a bit unsightly.

GOOD: When I hooked up the loop everything tuned up nicely!

BAD: I made a few CQ calls and then went out to the website I described on Friday to see how I was getting out. Almost nothing. I could hear lots of activity on the band so I knew it wasn't a matter of poor conditions. I was getting frustrated and beginning to wonder if I had somehow broken the loop.

UGLY: Suddenly I remembered I had been experimenting with settings on my radio and apparently one thing I changed that I shouldn't have dropped my power to somewhere near nothing.

GOOD: Changed everything back the way it was and made a couple of contacts!

THEORETICALLY GOOD, BUT ACTUALLY BAD, AS WE SHALL SEE: Incapable of leaving well enough alone, I decided I wanted to set up a lighter-weight operating system that might make the programs I use run faster, so I downloaded an ISO of the latest XUbuntu CD and booted up. Everything worked fine until I tried to install to a spare partition.

UGLY: XUbuntu wouldn't install. It bailed with a "broken pipe" error before the installation meter ever started. So I tried to boot the computer back to regular Ubuntu and got a "file missing" error. Uh oh! What had I done?? So I booted up with XUbuntu again and did a little poking around, but no definitive answers.

GOOD: While all this was going on I dusted off my Morse code skills and decided to jump into a couple of QSO parties. Remember the Montana QSO party I talked about a while back? These were regional contests where the objective is to contact as many stations as possible in the area covered by the contest. This weekend two QSO parties were going on, one for New England and one for the seventh call area - basically from Montana, Wyoming, Utah and Arizona to the Pacific, with the exception of California, which has so may hams it gets its own call area. I had no intention of submitting a score, I was just jumping in to give a few hams who were participating extra contact points. I was surprised how well my Morse code did in short, repetitive bursts.

BAD: While the computer was broken I couldn't use any of the digital modes I've been enjoying.

UGLY: It turned out that the hard disk was flaky, so I replaced it. XUbuntu still wouldn't install and still threw the "broken pipe" error. Interestingly, regular Ubuntu did the same.

GOOD: I managed to get XUbuntu installed by using an earlier version. I figured I could upgrade to the newest version when I had everything up and running. I installed fldigi and got wsjt to build (two programs I use for digital mode communication).

BAD, VERY BAD: The sound card wouldn't work. At least nothing was showing up on the programs' display and I couldn't get anything to come out of the speakers when I hooked them up to see if they were properly generating the digital tones. I enabled all the controls in search of the problem. Nada.

UGLY, UGLY, UGLY: I turned off the computer to make sure the sound card was seated properly, even though the proper drivers were loaded, which Linux generally won't do unless it detects the hardware that needs the driver. I turned on the computer. Disk error. Apparently the disk I used was also questionable.

NOT AS BAD, BUT STILL NOT GOOD: In a final attempt to get things going last night I tried installing to an outboard SATA disk I've had in the computer for some time. It wouldn't take the installation.

GOOD, ALL THINGS CONSIDERED: My /home (where all my stuff is) and /opt (where stuff like my music and pictures get backed up) are on a RAID array. I was able to verify that the data on the RAID array are still intact.

BAD ENOUGH TO MAKE YOU CRY: I had been waiting patiently for the station from Yemen to start using RTTY so I could try to contact them. And finally, over the weekend, they were on . . . when I couldn't do anything about it but listen and sob.

So, to sum up, my server-slash-radio-machine is offline until the replacement hard drive I ordered shows up on Thursday. This is probably the last fix for this machine, as old-style ATA hard drives are getting scarcer and I was able to determine last night it won't boot off of a SATA drive connected through an add-on card. (This is not definitive, but it looks like that's the case). The computer is eight years old and mostly still works like a champ, even if it's a bit slow by today's standards, but that won't be the case for very many more years. I would love to just replace it and be done with it, but my wife is even more frustrated with her computer than I am and it actually needs replacement. I would love to just go plop down a couple hundred bucks and get his-and-hers matching computers for Mothers' Day and Fathers' Day, but it's not in the cards right now.

Once the new hard drive comes in we reinstall the OS, get the sound card working, set up the digital mode software, tune everything up . . . and then go take a nap because I'll be exhausted. And hope Yemen comes back.