It's heating up. I enjoy how the city radiates heat from all directions, loosening my muscles. I embrace the floppy feeling. Yet Vienna is not yet built for sustained summer heat. Its surfaces are mostly sealed, there is too little vegetation, and it does not cool-off enough at night.
I am standing in the blazing midday with sun cream and sun glasses but no hat. I am still learning how to live in a country that is a little hotter, a little drier than the North of England where I grew up. A group of young school children pass, all wearing matching caps. I take note. Buy a cap. During the satellite pass I try turning on a feature of the software defined radio programme called Automatic Gain Control or AGC for short. Gain is a property of the antenna, which can be manipulated in the software … and this still confuses me. Usually, I use the programme's waterfall display to manually adjust the gain, however today, keen to improve my understanding of gain and the software, I experiment with turning the two AGC functions on and off, and then both on at the same time. The waterfall display turns from blue to yellow to red. To my ears, the signal to noise ratio sounds worse, however the resulting image looks surprisingly uniform. In my studio, M, shares with me a weather forecast from the ORF, Austria's national public broadcaster. She wants me to know that Saharan Dust is forecast for Friday.