[Kzyxtalk] Toying with the ether. An equipment check.

[Marco McClean]

KNYO is set up in such a way that I can just check the schedule so I 
don't screw anyone else up, and get on the air and play with the 
transmitter and test things in the middle of the night, and I did that a 
little earlier tonight (3 to 3:30am).

This sort of thing always reminds me of the middle 1980s when I was 
building transmitters in the kitchen, in Caspar. I'd turn on a 
transmitter that was a pile of parts a few hours before and put a stack 
of records on the changer and wander up the street in the fog with a 
pocket radio to see how far it went. We were close to the sea cliffs, 
across the cow field. Salt spray in the air. When the air was right the 
power wires would arc over the insulators to the wood of the telephone 
poles and gently snap and flash. Caspar is the only place I ever noticed 
that happening... Wait, no, that’s not right; I remember seeing that in 
San Francisco this last winter. Ward and Amy took us to a Thai 
restaurant, and it was raining like crazy off and on, and wires were 
arcing on several poles in the quiet between downpours.

In the middle-late 1980s I was teaching at the Whale School in Albion, 
among other things, doing radio drama over the phone from the Whale 
School live on KKUP in Cupertino, making little Tesla coils with the 
kids. I remember how magical it felt when Juanita and I would sit on the 
floor in the kitchen in our first place together, with the lamp off, 
playing with long streams of sparks from one of these homemade toys and, 
when our eyes had adjusted, admiring the little clouds of blue corona 
discharge around the corners of the woodstove and on everything else 
metal nearby. I still associate that calm, numinous, comforting 
/scientific/ feeling with the smell of ozone. And it's still a kind of 
magical experience turning something on that you’ve made with your 
hands, even though it's just familiar computers and the web anymore (on 
this end, anyway). And I got email from people who were listening, so, good.

Here's the recording of the short impromptu set of test music, ready to 
download. There's a little triumphant-sounding swearing in it; I'm just 
saying, in case that bugs you.

http://tinyurl.com/KNYO-aircheck-2016-08-17

(If your email program doesn't show that as a clickable link, you can 
copy and paste it into your browser.)


--
Marco McClean
memo at mcn.org
http://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com