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January 6, 2005
Yesterday I finished minor revisions to Ken's files as described below. This morning I take the long (42 miles), lonely (I will pass six cars), and lovely (wetland and levee country), drive to Rio Vista, California. I'm taking my cat to the vet to get its rabies shot. This road uses one of the last two public car ferries in California. Can you take a boat ride on the way to your vet? The cat will throw up along the way, I will take pastries to the office staff. Life is good.
January 5, 2005
Finished cleaning up the Daily Notes files. I'm now going to add to Ken Schmidt's files which discuss tower or cell site leases. (internal link) I'm also still trying to decide on advertising rates. Much to do.
Improved Mobile Telephone Service Update
"IMTS is alive and well in 2004. Whidbey Telephone still runs a VHF system in Washington State, and IMTS is available on both UHF and VHF in Bend, Oregon. Most of the remaining IMTS systems in the U.S. serve rural areas where cellular is not available. In some cases its used as a rural fixed service where people can use IMTS for their home telephone."
Rich Williamson W7KI
http://www.northwestradio.com (external link)
The status of IMTS has always puzzled me. I wrote to Rich and Geoff Fors to ask if the FCC database could give me a printout of operating IMTS systems. Geoff replied, "The FCC database isn't going to be too accurate because a lot of the licensees are holding onto the channels but not actually using them for IMTS."
He continues, "I am surprised Whidbey Telephone Company (WTC) is still using IMTS since there is no support whatever from any manufacturer. I am also under the impression that Whidbey has cell phone coverage anyway. Very often the telephone companies themselves were the largest users of their IMTS systems after cellular became widespread. I can tell you for sure that the low band Bell MTS manual service is gone, in that the FCC auctioned the channels off some months ago (at least in the Western USA.)"
"The Pacific Northwest always had a high concentration of IMTS car telephone systems compared to the rest of the country, and Canada always had a lot. I don't know what is going on in Canada today with VHF IMTS but they had (have?) a somewhat advanced IMTS system that had a receiver signal strength comparator to automatically force the radio to change channels as you drove from one area to the next."
"I have been trying to buy one of the smaller IMTS switches on ebay to create an experimental system, but a friend in New Jersey always beats me to them. At some point I hope to have Henry Kissinger or Jesse Jackson negotiate a truce between us so that I might be able to win one of these terminals."
January 4, 2005
Continued housekeeping. 14 pages revised yesterday. 440+ to go. A plod.
January 3, 2005
Miserable progress revising the Daily Notes files as I described in my comments for January 2d. See below. But I must remain positive, even in the face of negative work. Sigh. Speaking of being positive, Geoff Fors (internal link) was kind enough to share his conclusions with me about selling on e-bay. This should help many of you:
Selling on e-bay
Hello Tom:
Here are my thoughts about selling on eBay, which I have been doingsince 1999:
You need a PayPal Premier account (external link), the one tied to your checking account. Get a "sacrificial" checking account first which doesn't have much money in it, such as the Washington Mutual free checking account, and use that one to interface with PayPal. That way you won't have to worry about some hacker cleaning out your real checking account, although that's very unlikely anyway.
Accepting money
Taking money from foreign accounts may get you top dollar or get you ripped off. You have two choices:
1. Set your PayPal account preferences to reject payments from foreign accounts, that is, 'accept USA PayPal only.' And set PayPal account preferences, too, to reject payments from people with unconfirmed addresses.
OR
2. Set up an account at BidPay to take money from foreign bidders. This is a Western Union auction payments site, http://www.bidpay.com (external link) Customers pay you through BidPay using their credit cards. No cost to you and BidPay mails you a money order. Otherwise, foreign bidders can pay by postal money order in US Dollars or cash by registered mail.
In either case, foreign or domestic, do not accept personal checks at all. A United States Postal Service money order works best for customers who deal in cash. Require a two week holding period on Circle K, 7-11, grocery store and other unorthodox money orders. This will discourage people from choosing a check or strange money order over a United States Postal Service money order. I have never heard of a forged or fraudulent postal money order, but if you wanted to be sure you could cash it at the post office before you ship the goods.
Shipping
Foreign shipments can be by US Post Office, air mail only. Don't use surface mail, it will take utterly forever and your buyer will be fussing about where his stuff is, if it shows up at all. Put in the auction listing that foreign sales will have no tracking available, and usually no insurance, and that the buyer bears risk of loss if they choose to bid. Also put that you will not falsify customs declarations. It's simpler to put "no foreign sales," but if you want top price for something, you often need to check the "ships worldwide" option at e-bay. FYI, the majority of my deadbeat bidders have been foreign, in fact all but one.
The best method to ship, for me anyway, is FedEx Ground (external link). They gave me an account and a roll of bar code labels and I just drop the boxes off with atally sheet and walk out. They bill me weekly, which helps for income tax recordkeeping. They are cheaper than UPS and far cheaper than the Post Office and tracking is provided automatically. The post office has no tracking, just a delivery confirmation service, but you should always pay the delivery confirmation fee if using US Mail to prove the buyer got his stuff. I give three fixed rate shipping costs in the listing so that buyers know exactly what shipping in the USA will cost. There is also an ebay zip-code shipping calculator that you can set to match your own parameters, but curiously, it doesn't offer FedEx Ground as a choice.
Picture hosting
Don't use eBay's lousy picture hosting. Use the URL of the photos stored on your own server.
That's about what comes to mind at the moment. Hope that this advice is helpful.
Geoff
January 2, 2005
Good Sunday morning. It's raining here in the Central Valley of California, raining constantly, actually, bringing our precipitation total to twice normal. This means great gold dredging in spring. Continuing rains shifts gravel around in local rivers, sometimes covering up gold but more often exposing new gold to be discovered. But I musn't write too much about my mad passions of dredging, rock hounding, and prospecting. You'd read nothing else.
I'm struggling to clean up my Daily Notes files (internal link), some 41 pages of them. Removing dead links, taking out some worthless content, putting in links to Amazon. I'm also working on setting advertising rates, a mysterious subject that has few firm answers. What to charge? Based on what? Driving sales to an advertiser? Or providing better name recognition? I think the latter, rather than the former.
In the past, click throughs at my site averaged seven tenths of one percent. For every 1,000 times a page was viewed, on average, an ad was clicked on seven times. I understand this is a typical click through rate. You should doubt any site that claims click throughs above one percent. I don't know how many sales were actually completed, I suspect a very small percentage. I ramble. More tomorrow.
January 1, 2005
Happy New Year! I hope 2004 was good to you. Telecom should grow moderately this year as it did last year, but chiefly through cutting costs. This means fewer employees, less companies through mergers, and reduced customer service. Not everything is pessimistic; new services will come along, slowly, but they will arrive. I'm looking forward to how WiFi and hot spot technology, local area networks, will merge with the larger cellular radio networks. Of course, I'm interested because I am a nerd. Best wishes for the year, Tom
December 28, 2004
Frequent contributor to privateline.com, Ken Schmidt of Steelintheair.com (external link), was quoted often in a recent New York Times' article. Way to go, Ken! The article was about cell site leases and how they can add value to your property. I've archived it here. (internal link).
December 24, 2004
I wish you all a joyful and Merry Christmas. One of my New Year's resolutions is to update the content on this site. I may not do much original research and writing but the existing material here will be tended to. Again, a wonderful holiday season to you. Best wishes, Tom
December 19, 2004
More on The Merger
Many businesses use Nextel's iDEN technology for dispatch, a needed but niche service. Independent, local radio carriers may soon offer iDEN service to compete for dispatch when Nextel moves away from it. As they surely will. When Nextel started they killed off hundreds of Mom and Pop dispatch operations; it will be a happy day when independents move back to their old territories.
Nextel continues testing Flarion but the company will not say if they will go with this "loner technology" or with the mainstream EVDO. Field reports much higher data rates with Flarion than EVDO but lack of handsets and carrier commitments are stalling any rollouts. Sprint's mismanagement of their new spectrum seems certain. More later.
December 18, 2004
The Sprint/Nextel Merger
Their recent merger seems a mess. They use different technologies which right now aren't compatible, in fact, Nextel's system, Motorola's TDMA based iDEN, should have been retired some time ago. The future is with CDMA systems which Sprint uses. So what's going on? Even industry experts are baffled. Here's Ken Schmidt's (internal link) take on this:
"Here's what I've heard: Nextel is the voice platform -- Sprint's technology becomes the data platform, although this would require duplication everywhere. Nextel and Sprint both evaluate conversion to EVDO or to Flarion's high speed technology. I strongly doubt that they go away from the grain on EVDO."
"Here is what I think might happen: Nextel and Sprint both focus on business consumers so their network will cater to them. They may try developing high speed reliable data networks, while building a symbiotic WIFI network until EVDO comes online. This means they must come up with new, multi-function handsets, using advanced applications focused on business. Like tools allowing access to company databases and cross platform location technology that lets customers track equipment and personnel. We'll see."
"Go to this new web page at my site to read about how mergers may impact cell site leases. (external link)
Ken
December 16, 2004
Louisiana town awaits telephone age
By Ralph Blumenthal
The New York Times (All rights reserved)
"MINK, La.--It's no secret what the 15 householders in this tiny settlement want for Christmas: the same thing they have always wanted year round--telephones."
"Not bag phones, the primitive portable stopgap often carried around in a canvas case, which send residents out in their pickups searching for service 'hot spots,' but real telephones wired to a land line."
"Alexander Graham Bell's invention of 1876 never reached Mink, a onetime trappers' paradise in the Kisatchie National Forest in west-central Louisiana, although neighbors just down the road on Highways 117 and 118 were wired for telephones in the 1970s." [continues here --->, external link], was http://news.com.com/Louisiana+town+awaits+telephone+age/2100-1037_3-5488277.html
[Related article is here, internal link]
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