Friday, December 31, 2010

ARRL rolled back the clock on your member benefits but not staff size

ARRL trumpeted the addition of the online archive of the complimentary bird cage liner known as QST. Every now and then there is something worthwhile, although even the ads are out of date before it reaches you.

An eham.net review heralded the change.

Now, ARRL taketh away after two years:

Diamond Club members at the Brass level and above (contributing $250 a year or more) enjoy access to the complete QST on-line archive, including the most recent four years of the archive, not available to other ARRL members.

That's besides the $39 dollars or less that kept a more frugal, Connecticut Yankee run ARRL going from December, 1915 until about 1995 !

Were these Midwestern staff the Connecticut Old Timers hired during the 1970s from Grosse Pointe or what ?

See, what happened is they were given hundreds of thousands in federal DHS grants through the Corporation for National Service (CNCS) and private ones through United Technologies Corporation (UTC) to formalize the communications backup that hams have done for 75 years.

The staff lived free off those grants from an unlikely indirect patron for that Democrat top-heavy org, George W. Bush.

So now they're choking and need to secure their pensions between the grants evaporating so that Obama can take a $1.74 million vacation in Hawaii where he has We Are Change Members beat up by local police who then pretend to apologize after after damage was done.

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

WWVB and Radio Controlled Clocks: Social engineering ?

I've been watching the reviews and comments on atomic clocks for a number of years and from the user end there is a distinct pattern.

All of a sudden, people across the country will report the stoppage of the self-setting of their clocks, or it will be come very spotty.

Then, the buying starts. You'll see the reviews pop up on the different sites. Even if they don't reference this, as someone with reliable clocks from a few brands, it's obvious.

When this occurs, WWVB becomes rock solid for months until this cycle starts anew. Do the people whose clocks "broke" ever go back and compare them to be sure they did break, reset them or pop the batteries out ?

Is this one of two MIC stunts ?

1. A social engineering experiment to see if this part of the MIC can control people's buying habits. Does the consumer wait patiently or jump the shark.

2. A simple MIC stunt to get you to keep the clock companies in business by buying new clocks thinking yours are broken, or that newer ones will be better. This of course is the measurement of how useful WWV and its employees are, especially after Congress threatened cuts to WWVB a few years ago given NTP and GPS.

For the number of engineers that have told me that the WWVB signal is not impacted by lightning or solar activity, it is clear that there is some issue here because these lapses, seen by virtually everyone at once, are almost never (99 percent) the result of posted outages.

I'm going to listen to an independent engineer before someone beholden to tax money. I like to use WWVB and WWV, but if games are being played, it's just more of the same "gimme grants" bologna.