After the Storm (s) - "Wind Pruning"?

Like a lot of folk here in the U.K. I've been outside catching up with some property maintenance during what appears to be a welcome break in the long sequence of Atlantic depressions we have been suffering from lately.

Fortunately for me (I do not wish to appear selfish but I can only state the facts, as I see them!) in my part of the world, North West England, we appear to have got off lightly compared to our our countrymen in the Southwestern corner of our island, so my "property maintenance" is basically the cosmetic job of tidying up the detritus left by recent storms using a stiff broom and a manual spring lawn rake.

What has been interesting to me is that whereas I have been used to raking and sweeping up last  year's leaves deposited by the wind, nearly all from neigbour's trees and not my own (such is life!), on this and recent occasions, this "detritus" has actually been in the form of small twigs as much as, if not more than dead leaves.

This has caused me to ponder whether, assuming that the weather eventually returns to something like normal, this

wind pruning

of the trees will ultimately reap some benefit.

Mother Nature has a habit of being very resilient to disturbances in the normal scheme of thing - the regeneration of woodland following forest fires is perhaps a classic example of this - so I wouldn't be all that surprised to see renewed and vigorous growth when the warmer weather returns in a few weeks' time.

If the weather pattern steadfastly refuses to return to anything like "normal" then all bets are off, of course!

"Misleading" is the politest term I can think of to describe this . . .

For more years than I care to remember, I have been a user of the old "Norton File Manager" application in its various guises (e.g. it was packaged as part of Norton Navigator some years ago).  Back in the days of DOS I used XTREE a lot, and "NFM" seemed to be the logical progression from that.

Now, I have to admit, NFM's days are numbered as it doesn't work reliably under Windows7 - it keeps on crashing with "Smartheap" errors.  Upon look for an alternative I came across something called "WinNC" which purports to be a "Windows Norton Commander Clone".

There was a "try before you buy" download available so I thought I'd give it a go.

Frankly it's far more flashy and cumbersome than NFM ever was, but it seemed to work reasonably well, and eventually I felt tempted by the popup splash screen you get when you start the application :-

Consequently I decided to have a little look at the purchasing options, as just less than 20 Euros was quite tempting.

Upon following the link what I was presented with was this :-

. . .which got me somewhat annoyed!

Trying an alternative route and looking at the GB Pounds options produced this :-

. . . so I really don't think I'll bother, in fact I think I'll uninstall it and look for something else!

I understand perfectly (thinking of a famous quotation my Mark Twain) that taxes are unavoidable, but that isn't the point here.

Which as a shame really, because at the price quoted in the application splash screen I was sorely tempted.

A (Christmas) Magic Smoke Event . . .

I have recently been giving one of my "old ladies" in the guise of my 1982 vintage FT-101ZD Mk3 a "run out", promoting it to "main station rig" status for a few days despite the fact that I am aware that it is still in far from perfect working order.

It's basically a nice set, so that was no major sacrifice.

However, after the radio had been on for a few hours I suddenly started to get a distinct smell of "something" from it. I've smelt very many electronic faults in my time, but this one seemed rather to smell of a pan on the stove burning dry, but I quickly realised that there was no pan on the stove in the kitchen, and that the smell was indeed coming from my '101.

I removed the power and found a flashlight so I could investigate the cause, and spotted a little plume of smoke emanating from the left hand rear of the rig, and I also noticed that this corner of the rig seemed to be rather warmer than normal.

Straight away I disconnected all the external cabling, and, having allowed a reasonable time for the internal high tension power supply to discharge, I removed the top cover thinking that the sooner I could get at the innards, the more likely I was to identify the source of the problem.

Thus I homed in on the "Rectifier B" board and quickly spotted a rather distressed looking electrolytic capacitor which also seemed to be unusually warm to the touch.

Rectifier B Board in situ - PB-1968B

Now it may be recalled that this radio, bought originally as a “spares or repair” item from EBay, has had a chequered history having done questionable service as a high powered and illegal CB rig. It had no doubt been abused, quite possibly by someone less educated in the finer arts of the tuning and conservation of valve/hybrid rigs, this abuse being most keenly felt by the power supply stages. I had already rebuilt the “Rectifier A” board which had expired completely, and it now appears that I should have paid rather more attention to the “Rectifier B” board, which supplies screen and grid bias supplies to the output stages.

My own fault and hopefully any collateral damage will be minimal.   Looking on the bright side, as one of my “Twitterati” so nicely put it, at least it was “Christmas Magic Smoke”!