What’s Propfire?

Why it’s the solar / radio propagation add-on plug-in thing for Firefox of course. Over 50,000 downloads to-date!

Thanks to those who requested an upgrade.

However, the article did have a glaring error that I need to mention. It credits ENIAC as the first electronic computer built at the University of Pennsylvania.

While ENIAC was certainly a major milestone in the development of computers (and truly was the first general purpose electronic computer), ENIAC was not the first electronic computer.

In 1939, John Vincent Atanasoff, prototyped the first electronic computer at Iowa State College (now Iowa State University) in Ames, Iowa. This machine, dubbed the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) was little known until a highly publicized court case in the 1970s.   The judge ruled that the ABC was “prior art” which voided the Sperry Rand claim that the ENIAC was the first electronic computer.

So, here’s to you John Vincent Atansoff… let’s hope that QST sets the record straight.

I found this to be an interesting exercise. Perhaps, you’ll find it interesting as well.  If you look at the long list of countries and their number of amateur radio operators on the IARU site, it’s hard to get a feel for where folks live. Maybe I’m just a "visual learner", but I find that I can distill the data much better in a graphical form.

For example, looking at the map, you can quickly see just how few ham radio operators are licensed in Africa. Wow! Relative to the size of that continent, it’s almost zero.

Another striking aspect of this map is the huge number of operators in Japan. Amazing. South Korea (RO Korea), Thailand and and Taiwan also claim to have impressive numbers of ham radio licensees.

• Work… My division of Emerson is still digesting a company  that we acquired almost two years ago. Acquisitions are never easy in the corporate world, but this one in particular has consumed a huge amount of my time and forced me to step up the travel.
• New PC… It’s good to get some more computing horsepower to get things done – but it is certainly a pain to setup. During the transition, I’d lost the ability to use Windows Live Writer (Microsoft’s free blog manager).
• Vacation… Last week, we took a much needed family vacation to Orlando, FL.  It was time to make sure The Mouse was well fed ($).  Thankfully, some hotel bargains and many thousand frequent flyer miles helped reduce the pain.
• Spring!  We had a seemingly endless winter here in central Iowa. Ice storms and blizzard conditions wore down even the die hards.  Unfortunately, it looks like there was some antenna damage on the Cushcraft XM240 – more on this later.

  Along with the Spring thaw in Iowa we get rains and quite often flooding.  The terrain is relatively flat at my QTH.  Great for working DX without annoying mountains in the path – but terrible for drainage.

  Consequently, I’ve had water issues in my basement. To counter this, we have installed three sump pumps in a pit. Even with the sump pumps however, there is a risk of a power outage or pump failure in the midst of a series of storms. To put my mind at ease while on vacation, I installed a "Sump Pump Webcam".  I was able to ensure that my basement was dry from Orlando via my PDA phone and laptop. If I did have  a problem, my neighbor had a key and could come in and get things running again.