Category: Uncategorized

Post #1601, illegal radio use!

 

Those of you who just got done tossing all your 3G phones may get a kick out of this.  Or maybe not.

Today I applied for and was granted an FCC license to operate GMRS (General Mobile Radio Service) equipment.

For just 35 bucks, I may now legally operate a GMRS radio.  The license is good for ten years.

But wait, there’s more!  The FCC tosses in licensure of my immediate family members, for free.

Such a deal!

There were only two qualifications:

  1. I could not be a convicted felon.
  2. I had to be dumb enough to think I needed a license for a toy walkie-talkie.

This post is mostly a note to myself, so I can keep straight everything I think I just learned about some of the radios that you, as Joe or Jane Citizen, can buy and use for short-range communications.  Unsurprisingly, I guess, that world has changed substantially over the past five years or so.  Owing, in large part to a 2017 revamp of the FCC rules covering those devices.

The main surprise is that these radios keep getting better.  Even in the age of cell phones.

To be clear, your kid’s Buzz Lightyear walkie-talkies don’t need a license.  Not now.  But, weirdly, until 2017, technically speaking, they actually did.  As evidenced by the ancient manual for the Motorola toy radios that I bought for my kids years ago, shown at the top of this posting.

I’m guessing the number of FCC seizures of unlicensed Buzz Lightyears was pretty small.

In any case, here’s the story behind my newly-minted radio operator’s license.  And everything I just learned about CB, FRS, GMRS, and other citizen two-way radios.

 

Background:  Swedish Death Cleaning

I’m going through an extended period of GRS (Getting Rid of Stuff, to keep it family-friendly).  My version of SDC.  It’s a long-overdue thinning out of 30 years’ accumulation of stuff that I don’t need, but is too good to throw away. 

Much of the volume of material is the result of those twin evils, Cheaper if Bought in Bulk and Free Shipping.  There’s a reason my wife revoked my Costco membership.

But in other cases, I own perfectly functional items that I no longer have a use for.  Sometimes I can recall why I bought a particular item, and the memory sparks joy.  But most of the time, it’s more a case of “What was I thinking?”.

Luckily, for most of my stuff, even if I have no use for it, somebody else does.

This week’s task was electronics.   Not computers — I dealt with my computers last year.  This is mostly radios, cameras, WiFi extenders, weather monitors, adapters, cables, and similar assorted other electronic junk.

Mostly, radios — lots and lots of radios.

Breaker 1-9.

Amongst which was a perfectly useful Citizen’s Band (CB) radio.  (Which, believe or not, has been officially re-designated by the FCC as “CB radio”.  So “CB” is no longer an abbreviation for anything.)

Worse, it was a virtually brand-new radio.  I bought it years ago, for a family vacation to Florida, thinking I’d use it to assess traffic conditions on the road.  And otherwise pass the time on I-95.  Only to find out that almost nobody uses CB any more.  Not even truckers.  Drove the length of I-95 and didn’t hear a peep.

 

But it’s not your grandfather’s CB any more

I found a good home for that particular unit.  So that’s a happy ending.  As part of the process, I decided to see what was going on in the world of CB.  And that led to something of a surprise: CB FM?

I knew that CB had been around, with only minor modifications, for decades.  It was first authorized by the FCC in 1958.  The number of channels was increased to 40 in 1977.  The use of some channels was restricted (e.g., channel 9 is used for emergencies).  There was, at one time, a requirement that you have a license and call sign, just like ham radio.  That was eventually dropped after people routinely ignored that requirement during the 1970’s CB craze.   (All of that information comes from Wikipedia.)

The point is that, aside from a few legal changes, and the increase in the number of channels, the technical specifications for CB remained virtually unchanged until very recently.  Other than SSB (below), until recently, I believe that every CB radio ever made for the U.S. market, since its inception in 1958, could communicate with every other CB radio.  Which meant that if a bunch of people wanted to communicate, and they all had “a CB radio”, then all that equipment would play nicely together.

The only technical innovation (or equipment incompatibility) was the gradual addition of single-sideband (SSB) transmission, in addition to standard AM.  Even with that, I believe that every SSB unit sold is also capable of broadcasting and receiving standard AM signals.  Without going into detail, you need specialized equipment to translate SSB into intelligible speech.  If you only have a standard AM receiver, SSB transmissions sound like a cross between Donald Duck and voice synthesizer.  You can tell that somebody is talking, because it has the pattern of human speech.  But you can’t make out a word.  (It’s downright creepy to hear somebody laughing in an SSB transmission heard on a non-SSB radio.) If you ever tune in to ham radio bands, and hear something that sounds like speech, but isn’t, that’s probably SSB.

 But, to be clear, CB uses AM transmission, and AM radio isn’t “nice”.  It’s static-y, for want of a better term.  And the weaker the signal, the worse the sound.

But in July of 2021, the FCC approved use of FM transmissions on CB channels.  The radios themselves have to be capable of both FM and AM, so they are backward-compatible with the original standard.  But they will allow individuals who purchase new, FM-capable CBs to communicate using a far less static-prone FM signal.

Based on the reviews on Amazon, the resulting voice communications are a lot cleaner and a lot easier to listen to.  Judging by the price, you more-or-less get the FM option for free.  Give it another couple of years, and I’d bet that, with the possible exception of those who require the additional range offered by SSB, you won’t find a unit offered that doesn’t have FM.

So, weirdly enough, 67 years after the standards were first established, in a country where everybody has a cell phone, you can now get these niche-market radios with an FM option.  That, along with the general improvement in electronics in general, means that you can now get a CB that has pretty good (or at least, non-annoying) sound quality.  And yet, by law, every CB radio can still communicate with every other CB radio, using the original AM standard.

Who would have guessed that in the era of the cell phone, CB could still evolve?

FRS, GMRS, kids’ walkie-talkies, and the risks of believing what you read on the internet.

As part of this process I exhumed three old kids’ walkie-talkies.  Probably bought them in the early 2000s.

They still work, and they are occasionally useful things to have around.  So I looked into getting them up and running again, starting with the users’ manual.

To my horror, I discovered that these “toys” required an FCC license for legal use.  The users’ manual said so, with zero ambiguity.  Using these “toys” without a license risked fines, imprisonment, and confiscation of equipment.  All that time, I thought I was just having a good time with my kids.  And the FCC could have come gunning for me at any moment.

But that didn’t quite make sense.  These things look like toys.  We used them as toys.  And the only other people we ever heard, through these radios, were clearly kids.  Using them as toys.  Yet, there was the manual, straight from the manufacturer.  FCC license required, under penalty of law.

I looked around and found numerous seemingly-well-informed internet sites that said — again unambiguously — that any device capable of broadcasting on these channels requires an FCC license.  In particular, use of any 22-channel walkie-talkie absolutely required an FCC license.

Seemed kind of silly, but $3.50 per year seemed like a small price to pay for staying on the right side of the law. So I got a license.

But, at some level, who’s kidding whom?  I could go on Amazon and see 22-channel walkie-talkies that were obviously made to be toys.  Barbie walkie-talkies.  Buzz Lightyear walkie talkies.  Hello Kitty walkie-talkies.  There’s no way that the FCC is going to confiscate a kid’s Buzz Lightyear walkie-talkie for lack of the appropriate license.

And, as it turns out, that license requirement was the law, when my walkie-talkies were made.  But what most internet sites failed to mention is that the law was changed in 2017.  As with CB above, this market continues to evolve, and the law is evolving with it.

Not only do those little half-watt toy walkie-talkies require no license, but you can now buy and use the 2-watt versions without a license.  Anything more powerful than that requires an FCC license for legal use.

You see a lot of stuff about this that comes across as just so much gibberish.  So let me try to distill the current law.  Without resorting to any of the arcane language that we have inherited from prior law and regulation.

Family Radio Service (FRS) and General Mobile Radio Service (GMRS) are two FCC-authorized radio communications options intended to be used for short-distance, low-power communication.  Once upon a time FRS consisted of just a handful of channels, restricted to very-low-power (half-watt) transmission.  And GMRS encompassed a larger set of channels, and allowed mostly higher transmitting power (and allowed the use of remote antennas).

To cut to the chase:

Any device with a fixed (attached) antenna, capable of broadcasting at no more than two watts power, can use all 22 channels found on your standard kids’ walkie-talkie.  No license required.

For want of a better term (and possibly even technically correct), I’ll call those devices FRS radios.  Functionally, FRS no longer applies to a restricted set of channels, it applies to the limits on power and use of external antennas of any 22-channel walkie-talkie.  (There may still be a lower power limit on the original FRS channels, but the device itself will automatically take care of that.)

Any more power than that, or if you want to use a remote antenna or repeater, and you need a GMRS license from the FCC.   GMRS base units can operate at up to 50 watts, with reductions required around the subset of channels that was the original FRS channels.  The law also added new “interstitial” channels that presumably would be available to newly-manufactured GMRS radios.

My recollection is that my kids’ walkie-talkies worked exceptionally well.  Certainly had far better range that I would have imagined.  Now I can operate them legally without a license.  And I should be able to get license-free two-watt walkie-talkies with even better range.

Most importantly, all of that equipment will play nicely together.  The two-decade-old units and any modern counterparts.

That said, manufacturers have complicated the situation with use of various “privacy code” standards.  (See this reference).  But the bottom line is that if you turn that off, every FRS/GMRS walkie-talkie or base station can talk to every other one.  Still.  Newer ones will have access to a few more channels.  But that’s the full extent of incompatibility.  My old units are weaker than is now allowed by law.  But they remain usable, decades after they were manufactured.

Post #1569: When the Rapture comes, will fetuses count as part of the 144,000?

Purely as a matter of probability, when the Rapture comes, at least one of the 144,000 will be pregnant. Unless pregnancy at the time of the Rapture automatically bars you from heaven.  Which would have to be God’s Own Catch-22, given the number of religions that frown on birth control. Continue reading Post #1569: When the Rapture comes, will fetuses count as part of the 144,000?

Post #1550: A recent Washington Post article on research about food.

There was an article in the Washington Post yesterday, Diet soda is fine, and 3 other food truths it’s time you believed, by Tamar Haspel.

I believe it’s the first and only time I’ve seen the phrase “observational study” in a popular press article.  I was so impressed I wrote a lengthy comment.

Which, because I have nothing better to blog about today, I’m reproducing below.  Obviously, you should at least skim the article if you want to make sense of the comment.

…

On your first point, this is also the reason poor people eat a poor diet. Try planning a month’s worth of meals at the current SNAP limit of $194 a month. You — like poor people everywhere — will find yourself loading up on starch, sugar, and fat, and skipping the fruits and vegetables. Rice at $0.60/lb provides about twenty times as many calories per dollar as apples at $2/lb.

(Highest calories/dollar among grocery-store items? Vegetable oil. Fried food, anybody?)

Second, bless you for using the phrase “observational study” in a news article. I was a health economist by trade, and if there were one little bit of understanding that I wish I could spread, it’s that not all “science” is created equal. Randomized controlled trials sit at the top of the heap, in terms of their strength of inference. Observational studies sit at the bottom. (“Natural experiments” of various sorts sit in-between).

Whenever you see the results of a study, the first thing to ask is whether or not it was a randomized trial. Hint: Almost no studies of diet are randomized trials. And if not, then is there a plausible alternative explanation of the facts, e.g., fat people drink diet soda, instead of diet soda makes you fat?

Finally, I note the absolutely toxic interaction between the frequently false and counterintuitive “findings” of observational studies, and the modern media’s thirst for click-bait. This virtually guarantees that every oddball and counterintuitive (and wrong) conclusion by every half-baked academic researcher will be hyped. And that any actual science — which by-and-large tends to show boring things, e.g., weight loss is all about restricting calorie intake — gets buried under an avalanche of pseudoscientific nonsense.

Post #1318: IED

 

I enjoy crossword puzzles.  And I’m not ashamed to admit it.

My puzzle habit was formed during ten years of daily commuting from the suburbs to downtown Washington DC, via DC’s Metro system.  Now, after more than three decades of puzzle-solving, I have an appreciation for the subtle science and exact art of crossword-puzzle making.

Filling in a hard crossword puzzles requires an odd assortment of skills.  It becomes roughly equal parts of:

  • Knowing the structure of language (e.g., plurals usually end in “s”).
  • Straight-up trivia (e.g., Pierre is the capital of South Dakota).
  • Current pop culture (e.g., Grammy winners).
  • Older pop culture.
  • A good sense for puns, alternative word meanings, and the like.

Much of it has a unique crossword-puzzle slant, owing to a chronic need for vowels.  For example, ONO (Yoko), ARLO (Guthrie), OCALA (Florida) all appear in crosswords far out of proportion to their importance in the real world.  As do the many, many vowel-rich four-letter rivers of Europe (e.g., ODER, YSER, URAL, ARAL, AARE, …) .

The popular-culture aspects of crossword puzzles typically don’t age well.  It’s hard to pick up a 20-year-old book of difficult crossword puzzles and fill them in.  The world has moved on.  Pop-culture names and terms familiar to every well-read reader in 2001 are seldom on the top of the tongue two decades later.

That said, they are never truly current, either.  It takes a while for any new pop-culture phenomenon or phrase to work its way into the day’s crossword puzzles.  So what you really get in crosswords is pop culture with a lag.

Which brings me to IED.  That was in a puzzle I worked yesterday, with the clue “hazard to troops”.  It was, in that sense, a perfect crossword puzzle word.  Lots of vowels, and a term that every U.S. resident would have absorbed over the past couple of decades.

But IEDs haven’t been in the news of late.  Which is a good thing.  And I can only hope that this clue and answer will be completely mystifying to some puzzle-solver a couple of decades from now.

My point being that sometimes the news ought to be about what hasn’t happened recently.  We ought to see a great big headline stating that “No American troops died in Afghanistan over the past two months”.  Or that we failed to spend $20B propping up a corrupt and unpopular government over that same time span.

But that sort of obvious good news just isn’t what the popular press is all about.  Too many other things that are better click-bait.  U.S. casualties that didn’t occur are the sort of thing that will only sink into our collective consciousness a decade or two from now.  If then.

Meanwhile, I’ll continue to enjoy the absence of the IED from our popular press.  Even if that word is still in crossword puzzles, for the time being.

Post #1316: The universal state budget surplus of FY 2021 and the economic boom of FY 2022.

 

In Post #G21-058, I stumbled across an interesting finding.  More-or-less every U.S. state had a large (often record) budget surplus for FY 2021.  As far as I can tell, this has gotten exactly zero notice in the popular press.

Reading a few reports of these surpluses, it seems like various sources of state tax receipts started to pick up around April 2021 and just haven’t quit since.  And nobody is quite exactly sure why, although the obvious suspect is all the spending power that the Federal government injected into the economy over the past 18 months.

Now here’s the weird thing, and the main conclusion that I’ve drawn so far:  We seem to be in a genuine economic boom.  I keep looking for signs that revenue growth will be petering out, now that we’re reaching the end of the pandemic.  But there’s no sign of that in sight.

At some level, it shouldn’t be a surprise.  The Federal government has just gotten through two years of the largest peacetime economic stimulus in U.S. history.  A good chunk of that was simply saved, presumably to be spent later.

And now, with all that free money burning holes in many pockets, the result is just standard Keynesian economics.  There’s a whole lot of new economic activity, with a side-order of inflation.

But you’ll have to judge for yourself.  As I say, this started out as a study of state budgets, and rapidly turned into an analysis of just how rapidly the U.S. economy seems to be heating up.

U.S. Treasury Revenues are clearly up.

Let me start with the most stable source of timely national information on economic activity that I know of:  The Monthly U.S. Treasury Statement.  If somebody’s making money from it, it’s a good bet that Uncle Sam is taxing it.  So, putting aside the big lump of revenue that arrives at tax time, Federal receipts provide a pretty good estimate of the pace of economic activity.

Source:  My plot, of data taken directly from the U.S. Monthly Treasury Statement.

No matter which perspective you take — two decades, or five years — we have clearly entered a period of rapid growth in U.S. Treasury receipts.

Flash GDP estimates are running to double-digit growth.

These get a little murkier, as they are no longer hard data, but are estimates from somebody’s economic model, fed by current data.  For this, I’m relying on the Atlanta Federal Reserve’s GDPNow estimate.

“The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the fourth quarter of 2021 is 8.5 percent ”

They also note that their model is well above the “blue chip consensus forecast” of real GDP.

Virginia’s general fund revenue numbers are running 10 to 15 percent above the same period last year.

Source:  Virginia monthly revenue letter, September 2021.

And, from what I can tell by casually checking a few other states, this is not unusual.  Seems like a lot of states have seen broadly-based revenue growth continuing well into FY 2022.

Whether or not state tax receipts will continue to grow is the question of the moment.

The fact that started me on this analysis — the large number of states with record FY 2021 budget surplus — has not gone unnoticed in the academic press.  Of the articles that have focused on this, the Pew Charitable Trust managed to hit the nail on the head.

Awash in Cash, State Lawmakers Ask How Long the Boom Will Last, dated July 26, 2021, by Sophie Quinton. 

By now, more-or-less everyone involved in state finance has noted the jump in revenues in FY 2021.

But here are two conclusions, based on that article, that I find remarkable.

  1. Nobody has any idea how long these higher revenues will last.
  2. A far as I can tell, other than direct federal payments to states for COVID relief, nobody has any firm idea of what caused the jump in revenues, including tax revenues.

Here’s a quote that pretty much sums it up:

“The growth trajectory—it’s higher than we expected,” said Adams of Idaho’s Division of Financial Management. “I don’t anticipate that it will continue at this pace. I don’t think anyone does, frankly.”

Kate Watkins, who leads the team that prepares revenue forecasts for the Colorado legislature, said she expects Colorado’s revenue growth to flatten out.

“In many cases,” she said, “we’re still waiting on data to validate what the story is moving forward, whether or not this is really kind of a blip or if it really is a sustainable growth trajectory.”

As I read it, the reason there’s no “smoking gun” is that revenue growth is quite broad-based.  Not only is income tax withholding up, so is sales tax, so are corporate tax payments, and so on.

Basically, we seem to be in the middle of an economic boom.  One that doesn’t seem to have gotten much attention.  But one for which the Federal and State tax data, and the flash GDP estimates, suggest is pretty substantial.

Amidst all the negative press regarding the President, I sure haven’t heard much about the U.S. being in the middle of rapid GDP growth.  The only sign of that has been the steadily falling unemployment rate.

But, as far as I can tell, that appears to be true.  I started out assuming that we were in the middle of some temporary bubble in state finances caused by direct Federal pandemic relief.  But now, that appears to be wrong.  For whatever reason — making up for lost time in the pandemic, spending all that free pandemic money, or who knows why — we’re suddenly in the middle of economic good times.

 

Post #1313: Nuts, peppers, and storing up for winter. Part 1: Nuts.

 

With the onset of cold weather, I’m now waiting to see what this year’s crop of nuts is going to look like.  I am of course referring to events of two days ago, here in Virginia.  I’m hoping that our newly elected leadership will be in the mold of traditional (that is, rational) Virginia Republicans.  But ever since the last Republican administration here, which I will describe briefly below, that assumption of rationality has been questionable.

Anyway, this started off as a post on gardening, but quickly morphed into a post on politics.

Let me start with the interesting fact that you probably haven’t realized, first.  And then get into it.

Continue reading Post #1313: Nuts, peppers, and storing up for winter. Part 1: Nuts.

Post #1265: Missing cute young white women with unusual names.

 

This post has no relation to anything else on this website.  I’m just conveying something my wife noticed years ago, that still appears to be one of the iron rules of news coverage.  I think it says something about how the news functions in modern America.

In order to attract national press coverage, it’s not enough that a person go missing.  People go missing all the time.

Not enough that the person be a woman.  (Or female minor).  Plenty of women and girls go missing.

It’s not even enough that the missing person is an attractive young white woman (or cute little kid).  Which, you will eventually notice, characterizes every one that dominates national news.

Before you hop on my case, let me note that she is far from the only person to have picked up on this.  Nationally-recognized media experts have said (almost) the same thing, as in this recent New York Times article.  And similar commentary elsewhere.  I believe the coined phrase is Missing White Woman Syndrome.

But this is as far as mainstream media critics will take it.  Plenty of serious people have characterized this repeating phenomenon as MCYWW (missing cute young white women) stories.  Or equivalent.

But, in fact, few recognize the final requirement, which is that the MCYWW must have an unusual name.  It’s never Anne Smith, Mary Murphy, Liz Russo, Emma Garcia, and so on.  It has to be something weird enough to be “sticky”, or the story doesn’t get any traction.

And so, the reality of it is not that these are MCYWW stories.  They are MCYWWWWN ( … with weird names) stories.  Without the unusual name, it might get local coverage, but it never snowballs enough to get national coverage.

This isn’t to make light of the death of the person who most recently was in the national news.  It’s to highlight that there’s a strong element of “National Enquirer” in U.S. national news now.  I have no need to know about this poor woman who was apparently murdered by her boyfriend.  And neither do you.  But this story — told over and over — is just sticky enough, once you add a memorable name, that it manages to make national news.

I am completely unable to prove this, looking retrospectively.  We all know the name of the current MCYWWWWN, but that that name rapidly fades from memory.  Without that, I’m unable to separate the last few such national sensations from those who received merely local news coverage.

But looking forward, be on the lookout.  When the next MCYWW story hits, look for the WWN part.  I’ll bet you it’s there.  As a result, you’re seeing that story only because of some fundamental aspect of what Americans do and don’t recall when they read the news.  Without the unusual name, the story just doesn’t stick, and it never gets national press coverage.

Post #1199: This one simple hack eliminates 99% of disinformation!

I have a simple, humble request to make of our mainstream media:  If you must have comments on your stories, please randomize the order in which comments are shown.  Or, if not, do anything other than show the first-written comments first.

I was looking at a perfectly reasonable story about the current COVID-19 outbreak in Florida today, on what turned out to be the ABC News website.

And immediately following the story, in the comments section, were four pieces of what was clearly professionally-written disinformation.  Clearly working from a common pool of talking points.  Tightly written so as to hit as many hot-button issues as possible.  Obviously designed to deflect attention from the current situation in Florida, and by inference, the Republican governor of Florida.

I can only assume that whatever organization that is responsible for those comments has bots that look for newly-published on-topic articles.  They then strive to be first in line with comments.

And as a result, everyone who reads the actual news article and bothers to look at the comments is also reading that disinformation.  Lies and misdirection clearly aimed at nullifying the actual news coverage.

And so, ABC News ended up lending its entire new apparatus the forces of disinformation.  For free. 

This is really stupid, and needs to be stopped.  We have enough problems without allowing the purveyors of nonsense to piggyback on legitimate news sources.  For free.

At the minimum, if comments were shown in some random order, that would prevent organizations from hawking news articles and placing their previously-composed disinformation pieces first in the comments section.  Such a policy would not only dull the high impact of that disinformation currently has, it would reduce the incentives to publish those professionally-written comments in the first place.

Anyway, I’m just pointing this out.  My observation is that a policy of showing comments in the order written is just asking for your platform to be used by the aggressively for-profit disinformation industry.

Even if you can’t get rid of them entirely, you can certainly structure your website so as not to encourage them.  And to make it more expensive for them to keep their taking points in front of your viewer’s eyes.

In in that context, the last thing you want to do is let whoever gets first crack at the comments to get the most prominent spot in the comments.  And yet, that’s what ABC News appears to be doing.  You’re letting the enemies of information use your resources, for free.  And no matter how you slice it, that’s just plain stupid.

Post #1024: I just got my first smart phone, and I’m beginning to understand what’s wrong with America.

Sometimes there is value in being an outsider.

I’ve just gotten my first smart phone.  I guess I’m only a decade and a half late to the party.

But as a result of my tardiness, I am now deeply weirded out by things that I assume all Americans now simply take for granted. Continue reading Post #1024: I just got my first smart phone, and I’m beginning to understand what’s wrong with America.