2020 February « The Fixer

outsmarting an egg sucking chicken

An occasional problem on The Easter Egg Chicken Ranch is the egg eating hen.

When one breaks open an egg in the nest and discovers interesting goo inside, she may never lose that interest. It is a high-order problem as there is no way I know of to figure out who the culprit is and remove the problem from the flock.

This ugliness cropped up recently with a new batch of hens coming on line.

My flock now stands at 2 great, peaceful, compatible roosters and 18 hens who know which rooster is the leader of her personal […]

lubricating sensitive joints

My ultimate test is what works for me. Without prior experience I rely on recommendations, reviews and research. In the case of my dietary supplements I experiment, personally perceive results, then stick with what works on my body.

I continually question my selection, wondering if each one of them continue to be best for me, most economical, necessary or warranted. The products in the marketplace are constantly changing as is my body and use thereof. Through a number of additions, deletions and brand changes, I am somewhat confident in my choices.

Fourteen years ago the surgeon who cleaned […]

coronavirus advice

Straight out of the box, The Woodpile Report hits a homerun out of the state. This is excellent advice for the possibility of the threatened pandemic. Throughout his post he touches on the latest rage in mass fear mongering several times. Each one is worth a good look.

It really does not make a lot of difference whether the flu is as awful as some reports have it or that reports are overblown as others claim. The second and third order effects will be a big deal.

We are already into quarantines exceeding half-a-billion people, states, countries, ports… global […]

2-way amateur radio repeaters

I created a presentation for our local ham radio club to explain the environment our repeater engineer was dealing with. The problem many great sites have is that their prominence attracts multiple transmitters with each addition making it harder for the repeater to pick up the signals we want out of the electromagnetic flood. Thus the situation I describe with this Downing Mountain repeater is common to many.

I called this “Tracking A Transmission”. We follow a signal from the operator’s mouth through his radio and up to the repeater overlooking Hamilton Montana. Once the repeater gets the information, […]

electricity, components & circuits

Chapter 3 in the Amateur Radio Relay League (ARRL) Ham Radio License Manual is the most challenging to most students. Remember that out of the 35 questions on your written exam, 26 correct answers is a passing score. You can afford to miss nine, or one out of every four and still earn your Technician’s License. You could miss, or even skip over every component and circuit question without failing your exam.

Do not get all balled-up in this one chapter.

On the other hand, it is cool, and even useful to understand a bit of this stuff. So […]

wave behavior

Whether it is a stone tossed into a glassy-smooth pond, sound waves coming out of a trombone or electro-magnetic waves enabling radios to communicate, the wave behaviors are direct relatives to the physicist.

One such person built a model to demonstrate wave behavior then his employer, Bell Labs, produced a movie of it. I almost called it a video, but those were not yet invented in 1959 when this was created.

Last year I pounded enough correct answers into my head that I passed my Amateur Extra exam. My motivation was that I really wanted to UNDERSTAND radio […]

Why The Fixer was AWOL

I changed my web hosting plan to save a few bucks. It has been a MAN VS MACHINE struggle to get my websites back up and available ever since. Perhaps old brain VS new technology … or patience VS intracacy … or something like that.

Machine slapped me around for several days now.

My web host encourages the use of a third-party service to prevent malicious players from flooding my website with bogus requests that would bury it and their servers hosting me. Siteground was wonderful, backing up and moving my stuff intact from one server to the […]

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