Welcome to the February 2004 edition of BeechLog.

Hello everyone, I've managed to get another issue out as you can see! Once agai

Roger GØHZK, Editor

Contents

Bandplanning in the USA
Music downloads and speed cameras
Rogers PC hell
Holidays 2004
Movies 1936
The Mellotron
Useful Links

Bandplanning in the USA

Last week I came across a web site featuring details of a new American proposal on bandplans. This had a number of intentions, including better alignment with countries outside the USA, and accommodating new modes more easily.

The problem in the US is that bandplans are legally binding, so any changes need to be authorised by the FCC, which is a government department. Some folk on the net (Walt etc.) have advocated compulsory bandplans over here, so it is interesting to see the problems that US amateurs are experiencing.

The extension of forty metres will eventually make it easier for US amateurs to have international SSB contacts. What is more interesting is the proposal to change mode related sub-bands. The general idea is to split them up according to bandwidth rather than actual mode. So CW will share a segment with narrowband digital modes, and SSTV will share with SSB, go get the drift.

As you might expect, some US amateurs are not at all happy with this proposal! There are some eloquent replies in opposition to this idea, although I can't help thinking that these are just protests against any change. Many people have only ever used one mode, often CW, and cannot understand why they might have to move frequency a little to make room for other modes. I have seen messages decrying the use of modes such as PSK, and we are all well used to amateurs who maintain that CW is the only mode used by "real amateurs".

Allocating sub-bands according to transmitted bandwidth will give the US an opportunity to re-think how amateur bands should be divided up. What was right a few decades ago may well be different today. Average receivers are more stable, more selective, and have less unwanted outputs than thirty years ago. Today there is no sensible reason why CW should have wide exclusive sub-bans, when keyboard modes should be limited to a narrow range of frequencies.

I don't know whether there will be any serious discussion on this, or whether the proposal will be quietly forgotten. I know some people think that any change is a bad thing, and that new modes are just toys for new amateurs, but it's about time that there was some fresh thinking, rather than just squeezing in a few new sub-bands now and then. Just look at the VHF bands over here, the bandplan has become so complex that it's almost unmanageable. If you think about it, only things like repeaters and beacons really need their own bandspace. The 150kHz for CW is really ridiculous, even during contests and lift conditions. It might be a far better bet to simplify the band and let similar bandwidth modes coexist. Popular frequencies might still be appropriate for modes like meteorscatter, but we ought to be able to respect such operations during the few days during the year when they are possible.

Music downloads and speed cameras

OK I know this isn't about radio, but to be honest my aerials are down and there's little chance of them ever going up again. I may end up as GØHZK/P from now on. But I've written disparagingly about music recordings before, and see no reason to stop.

It seems that at long last, some music is being made available for legal download. But although they don't realise it, people are being conned. It works like this - a CD pop single costs £3.99 in the high street, but can be downloaded for 99p. Sounds good (pun unintentional), until you find that the track may only work on the PC you dowloaded it to. The digital rights management will probably give you much less freedom than the more expensive CD.

Now, who in the BBRC buys pop singles anyway? Not me! I buy all sorts of odd stuff. Recently I bought Larks Tongues in Aspic (King Crimson, 1970). You can't download that legally. I have also bought Bachs Goldberg Variations. Now the download people consider all music as 'songs', and the Goldbergs consist of 28 variation, i.e. 28 tracks on the CD. At 99p per song?? The iTunes site didn't have the Goldbergs, but there were some classical concertos. A concerto usually has three movements, or 'songs' as they now seem to be called. So with each song costing 99p, that's £2.97 per concerto. You can get about four concertos on a CD, that's £11.91 to fill a CD.

It doesn't seem much to be a saving to me. I've been putting off buying the Murray Perahia recoding of the Goldbergs for months, since the CD is £16 in Slough, £14 on the net. Maybe I should wait 'till iTunes has them, hmm 28 tracks at 99p per song...

What gets me is that no-one seems to have noticed this. They compare 99p with £3.99 only, I suppose media people are unable to count tracks or work out multiples of 99p. But to be fair, there are some new dowload services that intend to offer album content at about half the CD price.

I'm particularly annoyed at the word 'songs'. While the likes of Schubert wrote material which would be correctly referred to as songs, most other non-pop music is called by different names. And much of the pop (well, 1970 underground) music I listen to is instrumental, and this music was certainly not called 'songs' 30 years ago.

But it seems that the digital world has dumbed down everything into 'songs'. I presume that a 'song' from a spiky haired pop idol winner, or a slightly clad buxom American waif lasts the traditional three minutes, so the music capacity of a portable player can easily be rated. It's like the 'instantaneous peak power' of flashy audio equipment, where a 10 watt amplifier works out at several times greater (I came across a PC speaker system the other day, which claimed an output of 188 watts).

I must be a miserable old man to think along these lines! Portable music has improved over the years. The original Philips cassette had a capacity of 60 minutes, later expanded to two hours. Quality varied - tapes stretched, tape hiss could be obtrusive, wow sometimes made the sound wobbly, but they were very popular nonetheless.

Modern digital players have sorted out most perceived quality issues. Noise is low, wow is a thing of the past, as are chewed tapes. The tiny 128 meg solid state players will hold 2 hours of music, which can be quite good quality if you find the right player. The hard disk players with 40 gig capacity will hold thousands of tracks, although it may not be so easy to find the ones you want to play, and the batteries last only a few hours before a recharge is necessary.

I note that there will be some new Minidisk machines appearing in the shops at Easter. A new disc will have a capacity of 1 gig, against the current 177 megs. It has also been announced that current discs will have nearly double the old capacity after a reformat. New software will allow self recorded audio to be dumped onto a PC via USB, and also the machines will let you copy any computer files to and from the machines.

Along with up to 30 hours playing time on a single AA alkaline battery, these machines look attractive to me at least. Obviousy they have one fortieth of the music capacity of a 40 gig hard disk, but still will record up to 45 hours of music on a single 1 gig disc. You can always pop in another AA cell when the battery gets low, and pop in another disc to extend the music capacity.

Click here for more info. Anyway, the digital rights mechanisms adopted by download services may restrict the hardware you will be able to use for replay. And you bet your life that there will be mechanisms to prevent you shopping for your music in other countries. As I write, the CD-Wow Hong Kong website has been forced by the music companies to apply surcharges to buyers from Europe (although under pressure from guess who, they now deny this).

The more restrictions are placed on where we can buy and how we can play our music, the more likely piracy will continue. People will only buy if the product fits their need, or if the monopoly is solid. And prosecutions by the copyright owners will only upset fans and maybe even cause a backlash.

On that last point I am reminded of speed cameras. Last year I was caught twice. The first time I was clocked at 41mph on a dual carriageway near the Chalfonts. A fair cop, I owned up. The second time the Hertfordshire Police shortcut the system and sent me a letter saying something like "We have evidence that you were the driver...". This time it wasn't me, I had disposed of the car for scrap a few days earlier. The letter from the Police also stated that they were not prepared to disclose their evidence. To be fair to the police, I explained the situation, and heard nothing more from them. This past year has apparently seen over two million fines resulting from speed cameras, with a 50% increase predicted for 2004. And the backlash has begun. There is a web site showing photos of dozens of damaged installations. One such camera I pass daily in Maidenhead has been facing the hedge for several weeks!

I don't condone speeding, even though I have been caught. On that occasion it was unintentional, I was on an unfamiliar road, and the limit applied by default, not through the display of signs. These often seem to be located in order to catch out motorists - one not far from FCVH is on a dowhill stretch just round a bend.

Contrary to public belief these cameras do not make money. The bureaurocracy required to run them soaks up all the income. In my mind they would be better served by decent signposting and a change in the law to require councils to signpost 30mph restricted roads properly. At present 30mph restrictions may apply just because there is no other signed restriction, and it may be illegal to display 30 signs in these instances.

In my drive home from Reading, the speed limit changes several times before I reach Maidenhead. I defy anyone to say what it is along some stretches of the A4, as the signs either point the wrong way, are hidden in the hedge, are are just missing. The limits are often illogical. One dual carriageway has a 40mph limit, but there are no obvious signs, and the road is fenced from pedestrians. Another stretch has 50mph, even through villages with shops and houses. Another part is either 60 or 30, the jury is out on that stretch. When I worked in Woking, on my way home I passed one of those signs that lit up if you exceeded the limit. It was painted black and merged into the other road clutter, but most people were aware of the limit and it did not usually light up. I am sure that these are quite effective, and have no expensive bureaucracy behind them.They reinforce a sensible limit in a way that doesn't mess up normally law-abiding motorists.

To my, the fact that 2 million were fined for speeding last year just shows that the system is not working - it is not stopping people speeding. Just as making the most easy and natural way of obtaining music illegal will not preserve the incomes of record company managers.

Rogers PC hell.

In the past I have written much about the fun I've had building and improving my computer using cast off bits from here and there. Eventually all good things come to an end, the supply eventually dried up, so now I have to buy the stuff I need.

Generally I don't get the latest fastest components, these are too expensive. The last major upgrade featured a new cabinet, cpu, memory, and motherboard I bought at a Montem computer fair. I stuffed all these bits together, and it worked! Well, for a few months anyway. Then I started to have problems with the dratted thing not starting. After much messing about, I isolated it down to the graphics card. So I bought another one, and guess what, that didn't work either.

A spot of Googling found many others with the same problem - it is a feature of my motherboard! So I went to the next fair and bought another one, this time from a more reputable manufacturer.

I installed this along with the new graphics card, and wow, it all worked at last. My Windows 2000 partition booted with a message like "all your hardware has changed and Windows can't cope", and the Windows XP partition blue-screened (the first time I've seen this). The Linux partition booted with a message like "would you like to remove the old hardware drivers and install your new ones?", which it then did faultlessly.

Linux is very nice, but most of the stuff I use runs only on Windows, so I rebooted from the XP CD and chose the 'repair an existing installation' option, which it then did. Windows XP was in action again, although the USB ports play up a bit, and sometimes it boots OK but turns off the monitor. Choosing the 'last known good' option from the boot menu has cured this so far, fingers crossed.

Since then I decided to improve my backup procedure by installing a DVD writer. This has actually worked quite well, I can write all my precious stuff to two discs instead of the dozen or so CDs I needed before. However this created a further complication, as I found that the new drive did not always write audio CDs that my car player could handle (everything else plays them OK), and it also was rather slow at reading audio CDs too.

So I needed some way of keeping the old DVD drive as well as the CD writer and DVD writer. With my two hard drives, that's five ATA devices, and PC's handle only four. So I bought a PCI ATA card, which means I can now install up to eight drives.

This card requires its own bios to be loaded at bootup, and does this by modifying the master boot record of the main hard drive. This works well, but had the side effect of removing the Linux boot menu which also used the mbr! I can boot into Linux with a floppy though, but found that Linux now cannot play with my CD drives.

Anyway, Windows has its three optical drives working well now. I discovered that the old Toshiba DVD-ROM cannot read DVD+R/RW discs, not surprising as this format was not available until recently. But I found some hacked firmware on the web, bit my lip and flashed it into the drive, so now it reads all types of DVDs and has also forgotten about the silly DVD video regional coding system, so in theory I can now play any DVD.

I decided to vape the Windows 2000 partition, as I had another experiment to try. I had read on the web that it was possible to integrate the XP service packs and many other patches, and burn a new bootable CD which would install all this stuff together. This involved installing some strange application that would lift the boot software off the original install CD. Goodness know what it did, but it all worked, and I was able to install a second XP SP1 and patched partition in one go! This worked very well, even the USB works properly.

Well, my PC was sorted, now onto the next. My middle son had saved up some money with which he bought some parts to upgrade his PC. The only parts he wished to retain were his graphics card, CD writer and DVD drive. The parts were duly ordered on the net, and a few days later they arrived.

Building a PC is easy, all you do is plug all the bits together and that's it. But not in this case - when I turned it on, nothing happened. Well the hard drive started, fans whirred, but that's about all. No beep from the speaker and the monitor remained in standby. I spent ages checking connections but to no avail. I tried the RAM in my PC, and the hard drive, they were OK. I put an old Pentium 1 motherboard in Ben's new case, and that worked. So it was either the motherboard or the CPU. I didn't have any parts to substitute, so I was stuck for a while.

However I had a friend at work who was always updating his PC, so later in the week I came home with another Athlon CPU and motherboard. Trying to be logical, I fitted them into Ben's case, and everything worked. Next step was to try the known good CPU in Ben's motherboard. Of course that did not work any better than than with the new CPU. So this suggested than Ben's motherboard was no good.

I could not test Ben's CPU in the old motherboard, since it was far too fast for the earlier board. So risking £50, I bought another motherboard in Slough. This was carefully assembled with the known good CPU, and switched on. The fans whirred, the floppy and hard drive initialised, and the monitor - stayed firmly in standby.

What on earth could be wrong? Was the cabinet somehow incompatible with the board? I checked all the voltages on the connectors, and they were all fine. I felt pretty low, but found a troubleshooting page in the back of the menu. This showed how to boot up the board in some sort of safe mode, and suggested that I did this and then cleared the bios cmos memory. Well this didn't work, but what's this, the clear cmos jumper seems to be in the 'clear' position? I hadn't touched the jumpers, not that there were many anyway, and the manual had firmly suggested that nothing was touched until everthing was working.

So I popped the jumper into the normal position, turned on, the speaked beeped and the monitor sprung to life. I replaced the CPU with the new one, set the bus speed to suit it, and voila! everything worked. Then I wondered if the other board may have had the same 'fault', but no. It was obviously faulty.

Anyway I had regained a little of the confidence I had lost in my computer hardware tinkering ability. The rest of the evening was spent installing software, and I finally carried it up to Ben's room late that evening. That hasn't been the end of it though. I also had to replace a hard drive in a PC belonging to my elder sons girlfriend, and she was so pleased that she's bringing me another broken PC to fix. And now the kitchen telly has packed up.

Holidays 2004

Last year was the first one for a long time in which I didn't get to visit any foreign soil. I dare say it will be the same this year, but you never know. My employer recently asked for volunteers to survey opinion on a new breed of in-flight entertainment, so I duly signed up. The deal is, that if chosen, I have to make two long haul flights in a week, and discuss the stuff with passengers and crew. The flights all originate in Germany, and I don't speak German, but what the heck. I might see Tokyo for a couple of days, or maybe Sydney, or possibly Santiago. All paid for, of course.

If this doesn't come off, I've been looking into something more modest. It all started when a workmate happened to be passing Victoria Coach Station and saw a bus come out with "Bucharest" showing on the destination display. Now that sounded different. One of the things about land travel is that you get to see the scenery on the way, not just clouds. Delving around on the net I found a price of under £120 for a return trip, perhaps similar to a scheduled air fare.

I'm not that keen on Bucharest. It might be very nice there, I don't know, but warnings in the press that its inhabitants were coming to the UK just as soon as they join the EU doesn't bode well. However the same fare applies to many other places in distant parts of Europe, so maybe I could go to somewhere like Rome or Madrid or even Istanbul.

Travelling over a thousand miles by bus does raise a few questions. I've never been able to sleep in these vehicles, and what about natural bodily functions? Add to that the chance of thrombosis. However the last long bus ride I took was between Milan and Florence, and EU law requires frequent stops so there will be chances to stretch the legs before rigor mortis sets in.

Alternately there's the train. I found a website today packed with useful information. For example a luxury high speed train will take you from Paris to Rome overnight in about 15 hours. This costs from £72 return. For £130 you get a couchette, so at least you can lie down and get some proper sleep during the trip. The only drawback is that it will be dark when the train goes through the Alps, and I'd miss all the impressive views. Perhaps there are day trains?

You can also get a EuRail pass for between £199 and just over £400 for aged folk like me. This gives unlimited travel over various zones and periods. Europe is divided into a number of zones each containing three to six countries. The £199 pass is for one zone and twelve days, the £400 pass allows all zones and one month of unlimited travel.

I like trains. You get a good view of the countryside and can stretch your legs at will. And you can use them as hotels. Proper sleepers can cost £50 extra per journey, but couchettes are much less. The Eurail pass does not apply to some journeys on prestige trains, but hefty discounts are usually available, like trips between capital cities for the cost of a Slough to Paddington ticket.

If you are really keen on rail travel, then The Ghan is the train to ride. In mid January this year a new line was opened in Australia, and the first train ever ran from Adelaide via Alice Springs to Darwin, that is from the south to the north of the country. This was a freight train, but on the first of February the first of a weekly passenger service left Adelaide and reached Darwin 47 hours later, covering nearly 3000Km.

Prices are a bit high, for adults the cheapest one way ticket is A$400, rising to A$1740 if you want to sleep lying down in comfort. And you've got to get to Adelaide first.

There are some good bargains on buses in far off places too, if you can manage to track them down. New Zealand has a bus pass that allows 12 days travelling, including cheap hostel accomodation if you wish. There are some interesting bus holidays in the USA, such as a 14 day coast to coast route served by buses equipped with bunk beds. These are intended as holidays in themselves, with stop offs in tourist locations, northerly and southerly routes, meals cooked on the bus. Of course these routes are not suited to those who really like to pay £100 per night for hotel rooms, but they must be a pretty good experience for those who want to see a lot of the USA for less than £400. Other buses cover other tourist locations over the pond, some even venture into the central American countries.

If you need to arrange your own acomodation, it can start getting a bit complicated, especially if you don't want to stick to a fixed itinery. Wherever you go, hotels can cost a lot of money so it is worth looking for alternatives. Many large cities have hotels which offer minimal facilities, for example there are many in the centre of Rome which charge about £30 for a room. These one star hotels have their own marketing networks, and can easily be booked on the web.

There are many hostels too, which offer a mixture of private and dormitory accomodation. In Rome, there are loads with the latter asking just 20 Euro a night. It probably helps if you travel in a small group, so that you are not alone in this sort of establishment (Some places like this have an age limit - people my age are excluded as they are assumed to be sufficiently wealthy to afford decent hotels).

In the less popular cities, especially in the less developed parts of Europe, private rooms can be just as cheap. In Prague, for example, I found rooms at around £10 per night. In warmer countries you can do without, according to my workmates, who told me tales of sleeping in parks, on beaches, etc. They also have stories of brushes with the local constabulary, which in some supposed civilised countries can cost you more than the hotel price you saved. Not for me. Airports can be useful places to sleep too, although they are not usually located in city centres. And there's always the risk of getting your baggage nicked.

You can also save money by sleeping on the train. As I noted earlier, couchettes often are inexpensive, so an overnight trip between city centres may save you both time and money.

However all this supposes that I will actually have some money - I might have to be content with a day trip to York or an afternoon in the tropical house at Kew Gardens. But it's interesting finding out the non-package options, and there's always next year.

Movies 1936

Recently I bought a DVD containing the film Night Mail. My wife probably thinks that I am crazy, for this was a short film made by the GPO in 1936. Probably I am crazy, for today everyone wants to buy the specially extended 'directors cut' of the latest Hollywood movie, which comes on five DVDs with spoken commentries by everyone who worked on the film.

Night Mail has none of this. Because it is so short, the BBC film West Highland is also included, which ups the playing time to nearly an hour. The BBC film is very worthy, indeed I remember seeing it when it was broadcast in 1960.

While we hardly think of the GPO as a film maker of repute, when they came to make Night Mail (for internal use, I believe), they took more trouble that you might expect. The film was made by John Grierson, a prominent documentary maker of the time. The 'script' was written as verse by W. H. Auden, and the music by Benjamin Britten. Seldom have the pictures, words and music dovetailed together as in Night Mail.

West Highland is a film made by John Gray of the BBC. A documentary about the railway line to Mallaig, it doesn't sound very exciting, does it? But it was one of the last of an era when such films, like Night Mail, were made with artistic quality of equal importance with the message (sorry I cannot write anything with even the slightest artistic use of words).

1936 heralded the start of a short era of classic films featuring great music. While I cannot deny the effort put into Hollywood film music during this period, the music of many British films was applied with more sensitivity, preserved the musical value, and was used more sparingly that the wall to wall sound of Hollywood.

In the UK and in Europe many classical composers were persuaded to write for the cinema. William Walton produced music for films such as Henry V, Hamlet and Richard III. Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote for wartime films such as Coastal Command, and Scott of the Antarctic in 1948, the latter being worked into his Seventh Symphony later on.

Sir Arthur Bliss wrote the music for Things To Come (from H G Wells), after Sergei Prokofiev turned down the job. Alan Rawsthorne scored The Cruel Sea. Malcolm Arnold did The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Inn of The Sixth Happiness, Whistle Down the Wind, and of all things The Belles of St. Trinians.

George Auric, who scored La Belle et La bête (Beauty and The Beast, a French vomit-free non-Disney version, and far superior in all respects), later scored numerous British films such as The Lavender Hill Mob, Passport to Pimlico, Titfield Thunderbolt, and Dead of Night.

I suppose the fact that I enjoy such films shows my age! I can't easily describe what it is about them, its something about the use of language, gentleness and lack of graphic violence - even Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949 - music by Mozart), a comedy abour a serial killer, preserves this Britishness without stooping the the gaudy nastiness of similar films made today. This film took a lot from My Learned Friend, the best film featuring Will Hay. Such films do appear on DVD now and then, I saw a set of the Ealing Comedies in HMV a month or so ago, but when I went back to the shop with cash in my hand, they had all gone.

I do watch the odd American film now and then. I saw that one about the child drowned in the well (can't think of the name - it was based on a Japanese film). I've also seen all the Lord of the Rings films. But the best film of the last few years must be Amelie de Montemartre, French but the pictures tell the story. Hollywood could never make anything as good as this.

There are still good British films, although there's little hope when the biggest audiences are drawn by dross such as Eastenders and Coronation Street, and of course anything with the word 'celebrity' in it. You know, I would make a fine miserable old git.

The Mellotron

Those of you who are as old as I am may remember the Mellotron. I say this because I have been boring my colleagues at work about this magical device, and none of them had any inkling of what I was talking about. Well, most of them were younger than I, so I suppose that explains it.

The Mellotron is a musical instrument, a sort of forerunner of the digital synthesiser, and its hey day was probably around 1965 to 1980. Back in the sixties digital electronics were in their infancy, but some people had the foresight to see the need of a keyboard instrument that could play sampled sounds. Since the likes of hard disks and memory were too esoteric, the samples were recorded on magnetic tape.

The Mellotron keyboard has 35 keys which cover nearly three octaves. But it's what goes on inside that is a great interest. Each key controlled its own tape, yes, that's 35 tapes inside. What's more, there were no reels. Each tape is six foot long, and in the rest position it is held in a sort of W shape. When a key is pressed, the pinch roller associated with that key 'catches' the tape and runs it over the replay head. The 'played' tape just drops into a sort of bin. Being only six foot, and playing at 7.5 inches per second, you can hold the key down for up to eight seconds before you run out of tape. When the key is released, a mechanism pulls the tape out of the bin and back into its W shape. You can see a diagram and photos here.

Mellotrons had an unfortunate reputation for reliability, as you might expect! However they make a unique sound, which was very popular with progressive rock bands in the sixties/seventies. They supplemented the popular Hammond organ, another large heavy electro-mechanical instrument which was popular at the time, and many band managed to tour with them, which didn't help in the reliabilty stakes.

Unlike modern instruments, switching from one sampled sound to another is not an easy task. Each tape has three tracks, so you can switch between these three sounds instantly. If you want any more, however, you have to take the thing apart and swap the tapes. This is 'easier' than it looks, it is a matter of releasing the frame that holds the tapes, removing it, and substituting another.

What does it sound like? I suppose the most well known recording is The Beatles 'Strawberry Fields Forever' which feature the Mellotron 'flute' sample. This was recorded in 1967, and most other bands 'found' the Mellotron later on. It was very popular with The Moody Blues, Roxy Music, Strawbs, Tangerine Dream, Bee Gees, Black Sabbath, Rick Wakeman (who co-invented the Mirotron, a similar machine that used 8-track tape cartridges), and many others. More recently band such as Oasis (who I have heard of) and numerous other (who I have never heard of) have revived the instrument and you can see a more comlete list of albums if you have an hour or so to spare.

The Mellotron still lives, and the recent revival means that there is now a cottage industry of restorers. And the Mellotron is back in production, no longer in the UK but in Canada. See Sound on Sound's Review for a history and review of the modern Mellotron.

Useful Links

Rogers Locator calculators, I'm slowly getting the bugs out, and one day should be able to refine the code a bit.

Here is the very firstRAE from 1946. See if you would pass it!

Here's a historic net document, Tim Berners-Lees original usenet post about the World Wide Web.

Copyright and Technical Stuff.

BeechLog is Copyright Burnham Beeches Radio Club 2004.
Copyright of individual articles and pictures remains with the authors.

Any opinions inside this issue of BeechLog are those of the authors, and must not be assumed to be also of the BBRC.

Roger GØHZK, Editor