While I’m on the topic of batteries, I thought I’d write about recycling them.

This summer, the city of Ann Arbor converted to “single-stream” recycling. What this means is that now we just dump all of our recyclables into a single bin and someone, somewhere sorts it all out. When they implemented this system, they also stopped accepting batteries at the curbside pickup.

At the time, I thought, “How dumb is that”? People are just going to start throwing their batteries in the trash. Well, as it turns out, I guess that isn’t so bad after all.

The latest newsletter from the Ann Arbor Public Services Department notes:

It is generally accepted that used, alkaline batteries can be placed in the trash. U.S. alkaline batteries—also called one-use, disposable, dry cells, non-rechargeables, or nontoxic “green” rechargeables—have eliminated the addition of mercury since 1995. The resulting batteries are relatively inert.

Rechargeable batteries are another matter. The newsletter says:

Rechargeable batteries contain toxic, heavy metals, such as nickel-cadmium, lithium, and mercury, and should not be placed in the trash. Rechargeables should be taken to free drop-off sites at many stores that sell these batteries, including Batteries Plus, Best Buy, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Office Depot, Radio Shack, Sears, Staples [[and a bunch of local stores]]. Look for drop-off boxes at the Customer Service area. Recycle Ann Arbor’s Drop-Off Station and Washtenaw County’s Home Toxics Center also accept rechargeable batteries.

I still feel kind of funny about dumping the AAA batteries in the trash, but I guess it’s OK now.

Back in the day—and by that I mean before we had the World Wide Web—electronics and ham radio companies published catalogs. They were wondrous things. Paging through them, one’s imagination could run wild. As a kid, I would pore over the Allied, Lafayette, and Olson catalogs and just imagine all the cool things I could do with electronics and radio.

Real, printed catalogs have one distinct advantage over their Web counterparts—they can be browsed in a way that you can’t browse a Web catalog. The Web just can’t seem to duplicate the experience of paging through a catalog.  Maybe it takes more mental agility to point and click rather than simply flip pages. I’m not sure. All I know is that paging through a real catalog is a distinct pleasure.

I had such a pleasurable experience just recently when I paged through the <a href=”http://www.universal-radio.com”>Universal Radio</a> catalog. It came packaged with the LDG 4:1 Balun that I’d just purchased. (The reason for that purchase is another story, which I’ll tell soon.)

Just looking at the cover was a pleasure. The cover, as you can see above, is a collage of QSL cards from many different shortwave broadcasters. Like many hams, I got started in the hobby as an SWL, and the cover brought back some nice memories.

Another pleasure was being able to look at a number of products all at once, instead of one-by-one on the Web. In the shortwave receiver section, for example, the catalog has pictures and descriptions of five or six radios per page, so on a spread you can look at and compare up to a dozen different units.

I also enjoyed seeing some products that I didn’t even know existed.The specialty radios section, for example, included several models of “Internet radios,” which are capable of connecting to your home’s wireless network and connect to the digital streams of thousands of radio stations. Sure, you can do this with a computer, but these radios can also function as alarm clocks, and, presumably, have better audio than a laptop computer.

So, even though I’m a big computer and Net geek, I may just have to go request the catalogs of the other ham and electronics retailers and see how they compare to the Universal Radio catalog. With any luck, they’ll also bring back some fond memories and spur my imagination and help me look into the future.

Yesterday’s repair of my ICOM PS-125 power supply is a perfect example of the corollary to Murphy’s Law, “Everything is always more difficult than it first seems to be.”

A couple of weeks ago, the fan in my PS-125 started making a real racket. No big deal, I thought, the fan’s gone bad. I e-mailed Icom, and they tell me the part number is 2710000701, and it costs $13.40, plus tax and shipping. (The tax and shipping for this order turned out to be $8.64, which I thought was kind of high, but they did send it second-day FedEx.) The fan sat on my bench for the last week, but yesterday night, I got ambitious ambitious and decided to install it.

This is where the corollary to Murphy’s Law comes in. There are ten screws that hold the outer case to the power supply. I say “outer case” because when I got that off, I found that there was an inner shield around the entire supply.

Removing enough of that to get at the fan required the removal of 15 more screws. Once I got that off, replacing the fan was easy enough, but then I had to to button it all back up again.

My first thought was, “Boy, all this shielding is really overkill.” On second thought, however, I’m sure all that shielding is one reason why the power supply is so quiet. I have never heard any complaints about the PS-125 generating RF noise, something which cannot be said about other switching power supplies meant for ham radio use.

I also noted that there were some serious RF chokes on the AC input. These undoubtedly help prevent any noise from getting in or out via the AC line. So, while the repair was indeed more difficult than it originally appeared, it was worth the effort.

While the PS-125 has been “down,” I’ve been using the Astron 35A supply, and even though the PS-125 is now ready to go. I have that supply connected to a DC distribution strip that uses PowerPoles. When used this way, this supply can power both my IC-746PRO and the VHF/UHF rig and an accessory or two, and I don’t need multiple supplies on the bench.