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FYI! Last read at 08:03 on 2025/04/10.

Back to the burning rings of fire...

The fire as it happenedIf you recall, we had a nearby field fire on the 22nd - which you can see in the little picture on the right. Notice, however, the harvester chundering up and down the field in the foreground. Life goes on, huh?

Well, we went for a walk up to the town's picnic spot and we saw part of the burnt area. The picture below is about a fifth of it. The fire, sadly, touched some of the bushes and trees around the picnic spot so it will remain to be seen how this will affect them. Kudos again to the farmers whizzing around with their ploughs - it looked as if at one point they cut right through the fire...

Burnt area

A little bit further up the way we found the culprit. The back was completely burnt out, but the front looked okay. I wonder what happened? I know when I have been mowing at twilight how many sparks fly out from the blade, which would be invisible in the daytime.
Burnt baller

 

Adventures in ShortWave

I tied a length of baling twine to twenty metres of speaker cable. The cable was, at the tent end, tied around one of the loops for the 'skylight' and tensioned with one of the flystrings. The other end, the twine was looped over a tree branch and tied to a fencepost. You can see this in the picture below.
Tent with my antenna
20 metres speaker wire to tree. at about tree, tied to plastic braid cord which is tied to a poke which is wrapped around a fencepost!

So there I am, a couple of nights ago, listening to the radio. It was a chillier night than others, which was good. Last night the humidity was horrible. The only problem I had was lying on the ground was a bit uncomfortable for a podgy lump like me!
The odd thing on the antenna is because the speaker cable ended with the little pin-and-spade style speaker plug, so I dug up a socket and affixed that to my antenna. This made it simple to connect and disconnect the twenty metre cable.

Listening to the radio
The problem with SW is there is so much of it. My little analogue tuner allows me to 'scan' the entire frequency range an about eight seconds (missing loads) while my digital tuner would miss nothing but take about ten minutes to go from one end of the range to the other.
Having had the receiver for a while, the one thing I would change is to make some sort of way of skipping up and down ½MHz at a go (instead of 0.005MHz at a time!). This would allow a much quicker traversal of the frequency range.

I was also surprised at how many stations were on top of other stations - I picked up channels in French, German, and some sort of Spanish-like language (Portuguese? didn't sound like TVEi but had the cadence of Spanish); but in the background was something very odd, like somebody choking on an obfuscated language which, in lieu of better information, I will blame on Eastern Europe. ☺ That's it! Romanian and Polish radio!

Two notable omissions were Radio China (which I had once picked up practically every other channel, I guess tonight wasn't their good signal night) and, sadly, anything in English. Receiving the SW BBC World Service was a challenge at the best of times, but now it has vanished to be diffused on-line, like everybody in far-flung places with a little SW radio is suddenly going to go and get electricity and broadband and a powerful computer. Or maybe they'll just listen to somebody else's propaganda instead, like, ahem, Radio China?

I did finally find a transmission in English. At 11.840MHz I found... Radio Australia! They were having their Connect Asia programme, at quarter past one my time.

I took the tent down today, as bad weather is forecast for numerous days in the future - so best get it down when the weather is good and the tent material is dry.

 

Today's word...

It's 2am and I'm hungry, so there is no word for today. Instead, try to think of as many euphemisms for "I'm hungry" as you can. I'm famished/starving/wasting away...

 

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