A view of the home office. There are a few computers and servers, all doing their thing. All machines run Kubuntu and yes,
the Commodore 64 still works, including the disks that were made in the 80s.
There are two Dell servers here, hosting 6 virtual machines that do protein folding simulations for
Standford University's Folding@Home distributed computing project.
The project studies how proteins misfold and how that leads to diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer.
Besides radio, computers, and electronics, I also study biology, specifically how genetics and epigenetics
are implicated in various forms of cancer. In the US, 1 of every 2 men and 1 of every 3 women will get cancer
at some point in their lives. That alone should encourage us all to live a healthy lifestyle and and get a
checkup annually.
At left is part of my G5RV antenna which I use on most all bands. Although it's
not very high up, the performance is excellent. I have it hanging between two trees and used a
fishing pole to get them up there.
Below is shown a dual-band J-pole along with a
10-meter dipole that are mounted on the roof.
It looks like the sunspot cycle is headed on an upward swing. In my 25 years of
amateur radio, The sunspot cycle peaks have been lower than previous cycles. I have yet to "work 10
meters with a wet noodle" but I've managed to work plenty of DX, even in bottom of the last cycle.
Few sunspots = fewer contacts but there are still plenty of contacts to be made and one need not wait for a contest to make them.
Speaking of contests, I don't care for them much. They tend to clog up the bands so when I am on the air, it's usually
on a week night.
I like working 20, 40, and 60 meters. I like checking into the occasional net as well as Parks on the Air stations. My favorite activity is hunting
down DX stations. The farthest stations I've logged so far are South Africa, Japan, and Russia.
A close-up of the radios, not including the HTs. To the right is a dongle and home-made preamplifier I use for exerimenting
with software-defined radio. I'm currently using Cubic-SDR and plan to test some others made for Linux. I've also taken up
an interest in radio astronomy so I'm learning more about that as well.
A close-up of the two Dell servers, a switch, and an appliance computer called a "Clearbox" which has been re-purposed
to serve as an APRS gateway. It also controls one of the several webcams I use for my home security system. This system
uploads video to the same server that hosts this website whenever it detects motion.
I have another server in storage, just in case one of these gives up the ghost. And besides,
they aren't exactly quiet, they use about $12/mo. worth of electricty, and can really warm up the room when they're all
running. Due to the heat and cost, I usually just have one running at a time. The Clearbox and main machine (the black tower)
are always online. The tower also runs some VMs of its own as well as my ownCloud and NFS servers. I built it a few years back
with a 6-core AMD CPU, 16 GB of RAM, and a combined storage of almost 10 TB between several HDDs.
Spare time is something I don't see much of but on occasion, I like to fire up the old Commodore. It's amazing that this
machine, built in 1983, still works. I have a second 1541 floppy drive that's connected to an old '386 computer. That
setup allows me to download old Commodore software from the internet (yes, it's out there!) and save them on the 5-1/4
floppies. I find it even more amazing that the floppies still work after all these years.