Brian Greene

that the Irish Justice Dept. thinks Extraordinary Renditions are songs on ‘Your A Star’.
ER has no sponsor on RTE1 on sundays. [George Lee where are you to explain the down turn in Ad spend]
iTunes music store does not stock Teenage Kicks by the Undertones, what would John Peel say.
the Bush administration. [i must listen to less airamericaradio.com]
why iran needs nuclear power when it has so much oil, and Europe’s need to stop it.
Bertie Ahern’s leg injury, or is it DVT from frequent flying.
why Irish people pay Sky to deliver RTE TV. [if Dempsey cant make peace with SKY & RTE over Ryder Cup, why does he allow our national broadcasters to pay NDS charges to Sky when ITV & BBC don't by being FTA ]
The boss of GAMA Ireland wants to get elected to Dublin Chamber of Commerce.? class action! indeed
that Mary Harney might tell the hospitals that the next cleanliness inspection is in early FEB ‘06. [which day Mary, go on tell us, we'll wash the dishes that day!]
Google Earth has more Northsiders scanned than Southsiders.
Windscale fires from Sellafield; the United Nations and the EU.
why aid has not reached Pakistan, Sri Lanka, US Gulf coast months after disasters.
House Prices in Ireland
having to find time to blog about all the above -ends-

Last weekend I retreated to Leitrim away from QRN (electrical noise) for a SWL (shortwave listeners) dx-pedition. It was to also double as a Star Gazing weekend but cloud cover did in any chance off deep space or stars, as did the just larger than half moon in the South West sky.

so the trusty back up of Shorwave Listening / Logging was all that we could do, (we = me and my twin brother Donal) anyway it was near zero degrees and I wasn’t that interested in frost bite just because the city glow was gone, for all that is said for city glow, a good sprinkling of cloud means no stars either way.

So we needed a long wire antenna and the local hardware provided earthing cable at €13 per 100M, the Dublin price was €50 . So we ran a longwire into the fields and hoisted it my means of twine and rock high into the pine trees and we were set for a weekend of DX.

One star we did se on saturday was the sun, in blue and clear skys during the daytime. Alas the sun spot activity that day and previous 48 hours was not going to assist us with shortwave reception. Put another way if there had have been activity it could have given some boost to certain wavelengths of the SW band, but we weren’t getting any boost.

Here is a small selection of what my log book captured.

3345Khz Radio South Africa 20:01:00 07/01/06 english
5541Khz Radio Stockholm ATC 20:58:00 07/01/06 english
5775Khz Mi Amigo International 21:48:00 07/01/06 english

there was plenty of activity on the 48 meter band and most of it Pirate from Holland. Site conditions were good, the city has too much background noise to pull out those really hard to hear weaker signals, and the DX pedition was a success.

If I ever get to retire I would love to build an earth station in the bleakest part of Ireland so I could listen to the stars near a real coal fire. Would the Leitrim Co. Co, allow an Earth Station ???

Satellite grabs 02/01/2006 x 36 more