hillbilly oracle

Solstice Dance

All of my funguary quilts together (*ᴗ͈ˬᴗ͈)🍄

Chicken of the woods, destroying angel, black trumpets, pixies parasol aaaand wrinkled peach mushrooms.

Choice new daffodils offered by H.A. Brown, Fern Tree Gully, Victoria, Australia. 1941. Catalog cover detail.

Something from the end of last year

3 color screenprint on paper

Free for 1 night only

a 1964 Mongolian stamp depicting woolly milk cap mushrooms

Storytime

I used to be more active in ham radio but fell off it. Tonight, I saw the storms coming in and decided to break out my little Baofeng radio and get used to programing it by hand. I got it tuned to the repeater run by a guy on my road and just left it on.

Well right as our internet started flaking out, the tornado warning came through on the radio. My phone didn't get it, my laptop couldn't, but my radio did. The repeater owner was taking reports and running the traffic to the local weather net so I could hear people report what they were seeing in real time. I heard that it was spotter confirmed and exactly where it looked to be - and that it was moving very fast.

This gave me enough lead time to get my parents and brother + his girlfriend to the basement. It passed just a couple miles to the north of us. We could hear it.

Here's the thing - anyone could do what I did.

You don't need a license to own a ham radio. You just need a license to transmit/talk on ham frequencies. So don't talk (unless you're personally experiencing an emergency and are calling for help) and you're fine.

Here's the handheld radio I used. (You can find cheaper versions)

I found the repeater info by typing "repeaterbook SKYWARN [my state]" into my search engine and looked for locations near me.

I took those numbers and used this tutorial to put them into my radio.

Note: I am in the US. Regulations vary in other places.

But yeah, especially if you're civic minded or preparedness oriented, ham radio is great. I'm so grateful to the people who maintain the repeaters around here. They do such a great job and it's a public service people don't know about.