Author Archive
Domehenge: Where the wild things are
Over the past two decades we have watched the ebb and flow of wildlife around our mountain top home. The first was a bear, which we never saw, but which visited our tent while we were back east and left his mark. We found our tent with four long slits in the side. He didn’t […]
20 Years of Geodesic Living: How it stacks up
I would like to go over the plusses and minuses we have experienced in building and using a geodesic dome as a residential dwelling. This is now our twentieth year in Domehenge , summer winter and whatever, on the top of Backbone Ridge in Garrett county Maryland. Thus, some of my comments may be more […]
A Daze Work
In the early 1950’s I was hired by the Navy Department, in particular, by the Inspector of Naval Materials (INSMAT). I had to go to electronic companies in the Long Island City area of New York and inspect electronic items and assemblies to ensure that they had no defects (or an acceptable few cosmetic defects) […]
Protecting Domehenge: When Lightning Strikes!
As we were spending our first night in a tent on the top of Backbone Mountain, say about summer of 1992, it came to pass that we had a small thunderstorm. The rain whipped about and the lightning flashed and with each crash I began to wonder if this was a good place to put […]
A Summer Job in the Days of Telegraph
When I was fifteen or sixteen I got a summer job with RCA as a messenger boy delivering and picking up RCA Radiograms in the Wall Street area of lower Manhattan. The RCA Central Office for New York City was at 66 Broad Street, in the same area as the Cunard White Star line office […]
Adventures in Strange Lands Part II : Meteor Reflections
The plane from Goose Bay, Labrador slowly drops into the narrow crack , thousand foot cliffs on either side, no sign of an airfield anywhere, nothing but the glacier dead ahead. Greenland—-the world’s largest ice cube! It’s two miles thick in the center! Then, suddenly, a sharp turn and “Plonk”—we immediately touch down. Engines roar […]
Adventures in Strange Lands
In 1954 I was working in Greenland at an Air Force base called Sondre Stromfjord. Built during World War II it was given the code designator “BLUIE WEST EIGHT or BW-8” The base was about a hundred miles up a long, deep fjord on the western (Baffin Bay) side of Greenland. The airstrip itself was […]
Morse Code: The original “texting”
Morse code is a very strange type of communications. At first glance it appears as simply a substitution of dots and dashes for the letters of the alphabet. But then, as you get into it, Morse reveals all the twists and side tracks and inconsistencies of any foreign language. And, let me tell you from […]
A DX-er’s Lament: There has to be a better way
Working DX can be really frustrating these days. Ham radio is supposed to be fun, talking to stations in far off parts of the world, using equipment you have built yourself, and so on! But sometimes contacting DX these days has evolved into a real mess. Let me describe how this has come about and […]
Alaska Adventures: Getting Wheels
There are many little adventures that I barely remember about my ham radio and other activities in Alaska. Here are a few of them. Charlie Bellman, whose call I think was W9KMH, was in charge of the motor pool. He and I had one good adventure. Now understand that no one had a private vehicle […]