early_riser

I'm mostly thinking out loud here.

I have an Icom 9700 connected to a set of egg beater antennas. The other day I noticed high SWR on 70 cm, so I broke out the dummy load and tested the patch cable running from the radio to the wall panel (along with the barrel connector on the wall panel). SWR was fine there. Then I took the outdoor feedline off the antenna and tested it there. Everything seems fine there too. Plugged it back into the antenna and the high SWR returned.

Seems the antenna is the problem, but I'm not sure how to fix it. The other egg beater is doing fine.

I think I have a serious problem...

How does it fair? It's got a few must-have features for me (LAN connectivity most of all), so I want to buy but don't want to buy too early if there are production issues or other glaring flaws.

Bought a pair of these on Amazon (Store page) with the intention to install Meshtastic on them. One of the reviews suggested that the correct firmware to install was the Lilygo T-Lora V2.1_1.6, so I used the web flasher to install it.

I've gotten as far as the screen above, but there's no select button. There are two controls, a momentary switch labelled RST on the store page, and an on/off switch. The on/off switch doesn't seem to do anything at the moment, and the RST switch just reboots the device.

It does not seem to be advertising a wifi network or bluetooth connection.

Is it looking for something connected to a particular GPIO pin?

UPDATE:

It showed up on the phone app despite not showing up on my PC or phone's normal bluetooth menu. Pairing requires you to enter a code shown on the OLED display (not the most accessible method) but once that's done it seems to work.

First thing I do when I get a smart appliance is scan it with nmap. This has revealed some interesting Easter eggs, like my Davis instruments air quality sensors having a local REST API.

Doing the usual scan against my GE washer and dryer shows that port 53 is listening. What could that be for? Is there a way I can at least query their status locally or something?

When I got the washer and dryer I was excited about the smart home features because getting an alert when my laundry is done or starting the washer remotely so the clothes are done when I get home are genuinely useful features. However, last time I checked the app none of that was available, so I just have these Trojan horses in my home spying on me with no benefit in exchange. Their app wanted my freaking mailing address when I signed up for their mandatory account, so the features mentioned above are the least they could offer in exchange for my digital soul. But I digress.

My fridge is in a similar situation. It commits the additional cardinal sin of ONLY being controllable via the app, with no on-board temp or filter status indicators whatsoever.

I’m interested in tornadoes, as you can probably see from one of the stories I posted here. I think they have a lot of unused potential for speculative fiction and worldbuilding.

First let me speculate on why they don’t show up much in stories and myths. Compared to other natural phenomena like trees, mountains, stars, the sun and moon, and the sea, tornadoes aren’t particularly universal. They’re a distinctly American thing. They’re not unknown outside the US, but the US has both the largest number of tornadoes per year, and the most violent tornadoes by a wide margin. I think it’s no accident that the only book you can probably think of that features a tornado, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, was intended to be a uniquely American fairy tale.

So why do I think they should be used more? They’re freaking awesome, that’s why! OK let me be more specific. I’m not the first person to point this out, but tornadoes have a few unique properties that tickle some primal parts of the human psyche in ways that other natural disasters don’t.

First, they’re big, really big. The biggest on record thus far was over 2.5 miles wide, and they tower into the heavens like a skyscraper. But, and this is important, they’re not TOO big. They’re huge enough to inspire awe and fear, but small enough that our brain registers them as an object, an entity, rather than an event. A hurricane is arguably more destructive than a tornado, but it’s so huge that we can’t conceive of it as a thing on its own. It’s a phenomenon, a process, an event. You can’t point to a hurricane, but you can point to a tornado.

OK, so it’s a thing, a big thing, but it’s also a moving thing, a growing thing, dare I say, a LIVING thing. It’s born, grows, weakens and dies just like we do. And it doesn’t just move inexorably forward. It twists, it writhes upon itself, it turns this way and that, it slows down, speeds up, stands still. It moves as though animated by an unfathomable will of its own. And what a capricious will it is! It can raze one house to its foundation while leaving a nearby house untouched. It can reduce human edifices to rubble and human bodies to mangled piles of flesh and gore, but at the same time lift a cradle, sleeping baby and all, up into the air and gingerly deposit it in a nearby field, without waking the child.

And it most certainly doesn’t do any of this quietly. The sound of a tornado is most often compared to a freight train, but that simply doesn’t do it justice. It’s a grinding, roaring, shrieking, rushing, screaming cacophony.

So it’s a big, loud, living, capricious, calamitous thing. In short, it’s a monster. A monster whose coming is portended by prodigious omens—uncanny green clouds, icy stones falling from the hot summer sky, an eerie stillness. It’s a monster whose presence is heralded by the ghastly wail of the very sirens that were meant to prepare us for the absolute worst horror humanity could visit upon itself, a nuclear bomb, which is oddly appropriate, since a nuclear bombing is the way most people describe a tornado’s aftermath.

But what does this have to do with worldbuilding? A tornado could be a portal to another world, a god of destruction, a portent of doom, or merely an inciting incident. An everlasting tornado could be the pillar that holds up the sky, or the door to the realm of the damned. But it never seems to be any of those things. It’s just absent.

TL;DR: tornadoes are cool, more tornadoes, please.

Where a European knight has his horse, a yinrih Knight of the Sun has his mech. While a mech can be piloted solo, during combat a team consisting of a knight who pilots the mech and operates main weapons and a squire who monitors the mech's systems and occasionally mans secondary weapons is used.

This cockpit is typical of the mechs used by the Knights of the Sun. It's located in the machine's torso. The knight reclines in a seat similar to a bowl chair. There is a cleft in the chair between his legs to accommodate his tail, allowing it to actuate analog controls located at the base of the seat.

There is a joystick in each of the knight's four paws, each incorporating a chording keyer for input. Yinrih eschew billions of buttons for different combinations of keys pressed simultaneously.

Instead of screens, output is furnished by a HUD visor worn by the knight and hardwired to the mech.

This input/output scheme, using an AR or VR HUD and chording keyers, is common in most large vehicles in addition to mechs.

Missionaries plying the yawning gulf between stars have to overcome two problems. First, yinrih cannot lose consciousness without dying. Second, faster than light travel is as yet impossible. While yinrih live over 700 Earth years on average, that's still not long enough to survive most interstellar missions, even at the quasiluminal speeds attainable by Claravian womb ships.

The solution is to suspend the missionary's metabolism while keeping the brain active through Science™. But this presents a third problem. In metabolic suspension, the mind is quickly driven mad by the lack of sensation. This is solved through the Simulacrum, a Matrix-like artificial reality presented to the missionary to keep the mind sane. Subjective time perception is also accelerated to make the journey seem to pass in a few weeks rather than centuries or millennia.

But this solution, too, creates its own issues. Namely the Voice. The Voice is a phenomenon manifesting as an intrusive train of thought attempting to convince the suspended person that the Simulacrum is reality, the only reality. Missionaries who give in to the Voice are said to have dissociated. So we're left with two undesirable ends of a spectrum. If the Simulacrum lacks verisimilitude the mind is driven mad, but the more realistic the Sim is, the stronger the Voice becomes. Total dissociation is next to impossible to reverse, and even if the victim is made aware of the true nature of the world they perceive, they're often too neurologically dependent on the Sim to survive outside it. Suspended missionaries undertake a regime of prayer and meditation to keep their minds anchored in reality.

Suspended missionaries can still interact with the outside world. There is a spartan operating system environment that missionaries can access outside the Sim. Here time flows normally and the systems of the womb ship can be accessed, including an ansible to receive FTL communications from mission control as well as remotely operated robots to repair and replace worn-out components during the journey.

The capsule is completely flooded with neurogel, which surrounds the suspended missionary, cushioning them against high G-forces and creating a link between the brain and the ship's systems without any implants, indeed without having to shave one's fur. The missionary's lungs and digestive tract are also completely filled with neurogel, further cushioning them and providing a liquid breathing medium for when their metabolism starts up again but they haven't yet left the capsule.

The posture of the physical body is significant. It is a pose often assumed by mystics in contemplative prayer. It is not known if this posture was necessitated by the nature of the suspension capsule, and was later emulated by the faithful, or if the designers of the first suspension capsules were accommodating preexisting devotional practice.

Firefly the Apostate is permanently sealed in a modified suspension capsule called the Eternal Womb. He lapsed during a failed missionary journey, his companions were killed (some say at his own paws) and, lacking the faith to resist the Voice, he dissociated, becoming dependent on the capsule to survive, even after regaining mental awareness. The fact that the leader of the militantly atheistic Partisans is forever frozen in serene meditative prayer is an irony frequently noted by his detractors.

EDIT: the white background was bugging me.

This turned into more of a rant, but input is welcome.

There doesn't seem to be a FOSS (or even low cost) wifi analysis tool. Ekahau, Chanalyzer, Acrylic, etc. are all $$$$$$. What's a guy trying to get relevant certs to do?

Wireshark will only show you actual wifi packets if you have the precise combination of wifi adapter, OS, and driver, and packet capturing is just one component. Spectrum analysis and evaluating mobility are also important. Seems like you have to already work in the industry to have access to these tools, and nobody's going to hire you without relevant certs which require knowledge of these tools.

(update: Someone's bound to mention Kismet. I only have a windows laptop, and kismet doesn't work [well] under windows. I do have access to a linux desktop, but wifi analysis on an immovable desktop isn't terribly useful.)

I have an Ethernet cable running PoE+ to a wifi access point outside my shack that is very close to my radios. It exhibits the typical QRM pattern, with birdies at regular intervals making a warbling sound when the rig is on SSB.

I've eliminated this problem before using chokes, but this cable is thicker (meant for outdoor use) and much closer, it runs along the same cable runway as my antenna feedlines.

I'm pretty sure the cable isn't shielded. I just bought the cheapest thing I could find on Amazon. I wouldn't trust it if it did say it was shielded. Anyway, would getting a higher category of cable help the issue? Should I try choking the cable at a different point? I did it at the switch end, not the AP end.