A big thanks to Rich R up in the Lake District for sending us some brilliant pictures of last night’s aurora. Crazy stuff indeed!
And below is our favourite video of ham radio propagation when an aurora is taking place, with some wonderful voice sounds. Captain Scarlett are you working the weekend supermarket security shift tonight as the Mysterons are back and we need you. Cheers Rich for the pictures, brilliant stuff!
Looks like we’re getting a new lawnmower tomorrow so we’ll be cutting the grass as soon as we assembled said device. We’ll be cutting all of it in the front and about three quarters of it in the back, keeping a bit wild as per. We’ll be waiting outside at Argos tomorrow at 11am tapping our imaginary watch if we see a member of staff through the window and will be mouthing “It’s gone eleven, it’s gone eleven”.
A big thanks to our good friend Nic G The Fellow Traveller for this great picture of spring bloom in New Jersey. Cheers again Nic, we look forward to more pictures!
People complain about listening to music on shortwave radio, they say “The quality is no good” “It’s in mono” and “there’s fading and crackling and lots of weird noises that change the sound of the music”. That’s the reason why we love it!
Here’s nearly half an hour of Test Cards on Radio from last Sunday including the mix from One Deck Pete called “A Trade Test Transmission” at 5.49. It was recorded by Aleksandr Myadel in Belarus, cheers to him for putting it online.
As promised here’s a couple more photographs from Arizona thanks to Debby H who passed them on. The above is a great flowering mesquite in a car park of all places. We’d love to see one in a car park around here. It mentions on the Wikipedia page that it can be invasive so perhaps not. More about the species here.
And this is a good one, a saguaro with some great little flowers on the top. We’d love one of these in the back garden! Lots of interesting stuff on that cactus here. Cheers again Debby, great stuff!
Here’s the audio of Test Cards on Radio that was broadcast to Europe earlier today via the services of Shortwave Gold. The show is an absolute must for fans of test cards and TV trade test transmissions alike and features all kinds of frequency tones for screen calibration purposes and test card related music from around the world. The show features DJ Frederick Moe and Justin Patrick Moore and at 09.49 in is a mix from One Deck Pete called “A Trade Test Transmission”.
The tracks are:
Test Card – Let Single Sideband Loneliness Receivers Be Happy
TV2 – Antenna
Young Marble Giants – Posed by Models
Billy Hope – Riding West
Stereolab – Flourescences
S.N.R.T.M – Mire B/Mire Test son
Have a listen to the show and calibrate your TV set at the same time!
If you remember recently, we had a post about cacti after our friend in Ukraine, Wlad (US7IGN) sent us some pictures of his cacti here. A big thanks to Debby H for passing on some great pictures from her friends in Arizona of some super examples of cacti out there.
The pictures she passed on include a couple from the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum near to Tucson which looks such a great place. See more about their cacti garden and the many interesting plants they have here and here.
Thanks again to Debby H for passing on the pictures and we’ll post up another couple later this week. All we can say cacti are great!
Thanks to Mike G and his partner Julia for sending us a couple more pictures of their garden near Coventry again this week. What we thought was a great looking brick wall is actually decking (above) and we love the raised bedding and can spy a great looking poppy getting ready to flower if we’re not wrong.
And look at their well colourful trees and bushes (below). They’re looking good Mike and Julia! Keep sending us those pics of your great garden. It really is good to see how other people garden. If you want to send us some pictures of your garden, balcony or windowsill gardening exploits drop us an email to one deck pete at gee mail dot com.
This Sunday 5th May 2024 on the shortwave bands, Imaginary Stations bring you a radio premier, Test Cards on Radio. It will be beamed to Europe via Shortwave Gold at 0900/1300 hrs UTC on 6160 kHz and then at 2000 UTC on 6160 kHz and 3975 kHz.
A few years ago our friend from Berlin Phil Harmony told us a fact that we didn’t know. He said that chillies and other peppers are perennials, that is the plants will last a few years if they’re kept out of the cold and frost. The plant comes from the tropics where there is no such thing as winter or if there is, their winters are nowhere as bad as ours.
Last year we did a swap of a comfrey plant and got a couple of pepper plants in return (here). One was an Apache Pepper (main picture) that we grew on the kitchen windowsill and a Pot Yellow (above and below) that went outside but sadly didn’t bring in over winter so it’s now gone to the big greenhouse in the sky. Both peppers were easy to grow and gave us some crazy hot chillies that were put to good use here. Pot Yellow grows into a nice plant as well and gives you a fair few hot fruits too.
The Apache pepper was kept indoors on the kitchen windowsill and is still with us now, has just flowered and the first fruits are starting to appear (main pic at the top). The only thing we did with the plant over the winter months was cut down on the watering and just watered it when the compost looked like it was drying out. More on overwintering chillies and peppers here.
And talking of Phil Harmony here’s a great free dub download from a few years ago called Dubnight Compilation Vol.3. compiled by Phil Harmony & Moshi Kamachi here. Download and dub out!
Weeds up to me knees 