I really didn't think I'd be doing so little today, but going through my most regular news feeds, I really see hardly anything I find interesting, let alone anything that will be widely considered interesting. There are YouTube Clickbait artists posting things saying all sorts of things to get clicks, things ranging from saying they have the date when Butch and Suni come home, to Starbase is going to be shutdown by the FAA or some agency or other, to Starbase is fine and the next Starship test flight is any day now. I always check those video titles against other news sources I trust and can't confirm any of it.
So I played on the radio.
We had a short geomagnetic storm that peaked yesterday in the afternoon through early evening Eastern time but the Planetary K index didn't really settle down to quiet levels until after noon today. I operated on HF both yesterday and today: 20m to 10m during the day and dropping down to 30m after dark. The only rare place I contacted was an uninhabited island that's a US possession, called Jarvis Island. In the funny world of ham radio "wallpaper collecting," it's considered a separate country due to its distance from the US mainland or any other country.
Jarvis is a rather small island, less than 2 square miles and the high point is about 22 feet above sea level - like my house. Since it's in a group of islands in the south pacific called the Line Islands I'm thinking the most likely folks to have ever seen it are some of you ex-Navy or ex-Marines.
I mentioned dropping Casey Handmer's blog because of him writing very little about space topics in the last year or so. I still get an email whenever he posts something new and got one today. This time it is space-related, in the "maybe we'll get there this century" sense. "Antimatter is the best post-chemical rocket propulsion system" and opens with what I'll call a subtitle of "Or, how to explore the solar system and be back in time for Thanksgiving."
From an image search. Credit was to https://www.janeresture.com/jarvis but the site returns some sort of error and nothing else.
And that's all, y'all.
How do you contact an uninhabited island?
ReplyDeleteThey get together a team and travel to the island. They bring all the gear, put up antennas, run generators, everything they need. This operation is doing some stuff with remote operations, so some guys are sitting at home and running the radios on the island remotely.
DeleteJarvis is not extremely rare for an uninhabited island. It has had this sort of one or two week activations a few times. It's far more common to have a contact with them than North Korea.
We already know how the story of Butch and Sundance ends.
ReplyDelete