WACKY WEATHER

This morning's weather forecast was for hot winds peaking at 
40Km/hr. Indeed they were hot, but by the late morning they were 
gusting at 130Km/hr while the view was blanketed by coulds of dust. 
Followed by a brief lightning storm which thankfully didn't start 
any fires nearby like last time, although further north apparantly 
they haven't been so lucky. The reservoirs I visited up around the 
Grampians national park are now being used to fill up water bombing 
hellicopters.

It's quite a shock in such an otherwise mild summer, and I was even 
drawn to take some photographs of the sudden dust storm sweeping 
through. Now the wind seems to have finally dropped away, after 
staying up around 50-80KM/hr for the rest of the day. The 
temperature is set to go back down to unseasonably cool tomorrow 
and stay mild for the rest of the week, so the excitement's over. 
Indeed most of my excitement was watching the carport and wondering 
whether I'd done a good enough job of bracing it since it collapsed 
last week in a far more mild gust. No problem at all, so if 
anything perhaps it was lucky that it went earlier. Some 
electricity transmission towers apparantly didn't do as well, the 
news reports they collapsed in a meer 120KM/hr gust, shorting out 
one of the state's big coal poer stations and leaving half a 
million homes without power for much of the day.

I don't know whether it's related, but last night I got some 
excellent shortwave radio reception from the old ~1980s receiver I 
use sitting inside my house, using just its built-in antenna. I 
finally managed to identifiably pick up the WWV time signal on 
10MHz, broadcast by NIST in the USA. I've always been somehow 
envious of foreign time signal broadcasts and the idea of the 
synchronising wrist watches which have been made to work with them. 
OK so there's GPS and something called the internet, but the 
simplicity of the shortwave broadcasts really appeals to me. I've 
seen hints that similar services once existed in Australia, but 
there doesn't seem to be any mention on the web and anyway they're 
definitely long gone.

Anyway I was thrilled to find WWV amongst the crowd of Asian 
stations gathered around 10MHz. The regular audio tones, extremely 
distorted by noise and interferrence, interrupted each minute by 
the equally distorted UTC time announcements which were only 
marginally comprehensible, are somewhat hypnotising when turned up 
at full volume. If by some bizarre turn of events someone were to 
come to visit me at night, I'd like that sound to be what they hear 
emanating from my dimly-lit abode as they cautiously approach.

Radio Thailand also came in very strongly with an English-language 
service. The others, besides the usual Chinese CGTN News, were 
mostly mixed Asian language broadcasts which, with only a vague 
frequency scale to judge from, I never can really pin down to a 
station ID. I should try to fix up the old WWII HF receiver I've 
got one day and play with its precise frequency adjustments, 
although they're maybe not still so precise after eighty years. 
Interestingly the Shortwave Australia transmissions from a hobbyist 
north in the state didn't come in very well at all. Better tonight 
actually, so I guess his antennas didn't get blown out of the 
gumtrees he's strung them from.

 - The Free Thinker