Tech Net News 07-20-2019

Buzz_salutes_the_U.S._FlagI hope you come out and see us at Moon Day! We’re all here, and we’ll probably need some extra help this afternoon after 14:00 local, if you can make it.

Our next Lecture and Lab will focus on a DIY Mini UPS suitable for use with a Raspberry Pi or charging your phone. It has 5v and 12v outputs and uses only 1 18650 Battery.  The kit from the link above will be $10.  Bring your Soldering iron, hot glue gun, clippers and screwdriver.  If you don’t have any of the above, we will have extra on site.

The contest calendar is pretty quiet, but this is the season for sporadic-E and for the CW WW VHF Contest.

In news from the world of ham radio:

The world’s oldest living rocket scientist, Cary Nettles, W5SRR, is worth remembering as a contributor to the Apollo 11 landing and for his receipt of the NASA Distinguished Service Medal. If it weren’t for the R&D efforts on the long-lived Centaur booster, the liquid hydrogen stages of the Saturn V would never have worked. The Centaur continues to fly today!

The Boy Scout World Jamboree is about to start, and it will feature an ISS contact.

And the development team reports that the new FT-4 digital mode, in the latest version of WSJT-X, is ready for contest action.

And, in news from the world of science:

If you like birds and like art, this year’s Audubon Photography Contest winners are really beautiful. I can’t send you pictures on this repeater, so you’ll have to go and take a look.

If you take lots of vitamins from the store, you’ll be happy to know that you can start saving more money; virtually all supplements do nothing for your heart or life expectancy.

And it turns out that life expectancy is rising rapidly—for roaches. Roaches have evolved a new ability: the power of acquiring resistance to more than one kind of pesticide at once.

And this must be my week to present scary news, because if you’re not scared to go in the water, I can help you fix that. It turns out that ocean bacteria, including deadly, flesh-eating ones, colonize your skin with as little as 10 minutes of exposure. Surf’s up!