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.
