Must Be Art Weblog

This week I added a set of driving lights and a VHF/UHF ham radio antenna to the K1200LT motorcycle. The driving lights were a complete kit from CycleGadgets.com featuring PIAA 1100X halogen dichroic lamps, custom brackets, and a custom wiring harness. The installation required removing the large plastic fairing pieces from the front of the bike, which I had never done before. It turns out to be relatively easy, once you know how.

The ham radio antenna required a little bit more innovation. I started with the standard BMW bracket, normally used to mount a CB antenna on the right side of the bike, opposite the existing broadcast antenna on the left side. Of course the BMW bracket is designed to work with a special BMW antenna assembly, so it doesn’t have any standard fittings or connectors on it. I ended up drilling out the bracket to 5/8 inch, the diameter of a standard SO-239 style connector, and then cutting off most of the vertical length with a hacksaw. This allowed me to fit in a standard coax cable adapter (a Diamond C101), and mount a standard dual-band antenna, a Diamond NR-770HB. By good luck, the ham antenna is almost exactly the same height as the existing broadcast antenna.

For now, the antenna doesn’t do any good, because there’s no radio. I could park and hook the antenna up to a handheld radio, but that’s not the main idea. I still need to decide what radio to install and where the heck to put it. The standard BMW solution is to use a small handheld and put it in the oddments compartment on top of the bike just in front of the seat. That’s unacceptable, because the controls and displays are not accessible or visible inside the compartment.

The leading contender right now is the Yaesu FT-90R compact mobile transceiver, intended for mounting in a car. It’s pretty small, but bigger than a handheld (and bigger than the oddments compartment). The front panel can be mounted separately, and the front panel is really small and light (but not weatherproof). I can put the front panel on top of the bike just about anywhere. The problem is where to put the main unit. Which would be no problem at all except that it requires some ventilation for cooling. That may be impossible, and I may end up ignoring it and hoping for the best.

The other missing link is the user interface: microphone, speaker, and push-to-talk (PTT) switch. I can get the BMW PTT kit intended for the CB or FRS radio, so that’s easy. The microphone and speaker need to mount inside my helmet. That stuff is available off the shelf, too. I just need to work out where the wires will connect to the motorcycle and figure out how to interface them electrically to the ham radio.

Then I’ll get a chance to test my theory that two-way radio is too distracting to use in traffic on a motorcycle.

I just turned in my entries for the International Exhibition of Photography at the San Diego County Fair. These are the five images I submitted.

All were taken digitally with the Canon EOS 1Ds and printed on my Epson 2200 inkjet printer. Results are due to be mailed out on June 9.

It was a warm night on the mountain, and the skies were fairly clear, and I’m supposed to be coming up with a “Night” photograph for the Del Mar Fair, so I tried for some star trails above the house at Fern Meadow. Alas, the light pollution from L.A. is too bright for really long exposures. With the wide angle lens I wanted to use for composition, it takes minutes to get noticeable star trails. I did get some star map photos showing the house. Unfortunately they are too noisy to print big. Very long exposures is still a domain where film does better than conventional (as opposed to astronomical) digital cameras.

The Moon is dark during an eclipse. The Moon is small. And the Moon is moving. This is a bad combination.

A small subject means a long focal length lens. I don’t currently own any supertelephoto lenses, which tend to be big, heavy, and expensive. My longest lens is a 70-200 f/2.8 zoom, with a 2X teleconverter. That makes a 140-400 f/5.6. Long enough to show the half-degree-wide Moon in context with some landscape, but slow.

Dark subject + slow lens = long exposure

Long exposure + moving subject = blur

The really dumb part of this story is that I had taken the trouble to calculate the longest exposure that would result in minimal blur. I had even posted my results on a web forum. The answer is that shutter speeds have to be faster than about 1/4 second. But I did this calculation five or six weeks before the eclipse, and then forgot the answer. By the time I was out in the field trying to photograph the eclipse, I mis-remembered the answer as 8 seconds.

With a digital camera, getting a reasonable exposure is never a big mystery. You just look at the histogram display and adjust the exposure until it shows something usable. Using this procedure, I ended up with exposures ranging from 6 to 30 seconds. Unfortunately this resulted in so much motion blur that the resulting images are useless.

Somebody carefully surveyed my daily bicycle route, determined the least convenient place to have a breakdown, and scattered broken glass on the roadway at that exact place.

I had my patch kit, but had not bothered to bring the air pump. My old pump was designed to fit my old bike. To carry it on the new bike I had to bungee it to the rear rack. That looks silly and is a hassle, so I didn’t do it.

It was Monday in the early afternoon, so there weren’t many other bikers on Fiesta Island. I waited a while for one to come by with a pump. I managed to communicate with several as they whizzed by. Only one had a pump, and his only worked on Presta valves. My valves are Schraeder.

After a while, I gave up on waiting for a passerby. I put the tire back on, hung the tube around my neck (albatross style) and pushed the bike the rest of the way around Fiesta Island and down the road to the nearest civilization. Before coming to a gas station I found a car rental place, and they were kind enough to let me use their air.

The next day I went out and bought a new pump that fits the new bike, and installed it. That should protect me from flats by umbrella effect, but if it doesn’t I should be self-sufficient to fix minor punctures.

I found out today that there is an official canonical version of the AMSAT logo, and it’s pretty different from the one I’ve been using on the AMSAT web site. Unfortunately, the official artwork dates from 1969, so there’s only a hard copy, and scans from it look rather ragged by modern standards. So, I took this as an opportunity to improve my modest skills with Adobe Illustrator. I created a smooth resolution-independent version that more or less matches the official artwork.

I learned a lot. Mainly, that it’s hard to make an exact match for something hand-drawn. Even though I had the name of the font used, the text doesn’t quite match exactly. I wasted a few hours on this, and could easily have wasted a few more trying to get the match more exactly.

Check out this before-and-after animation, showing the scanned original and the reproduced Illustrator artwork alternately. This is a brutal way to make the comparison; even trivial differences jump out at you.