Solar System Upgrades

A few scratches on the hands this weekend from spending a couple of days rewiring the “aisle 3” solar array.  There’s some experimenting going on, some changes to system design, and a couple of useful hints to share. Ham radio and drone-lifted ham antenna adventures are on hold this week as other, more pressing work of Life has come to the foreground. Oh, and the #22 AWG wire was mis-shipped, so maybe that will show …

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Design of Dronetenna #1

[Part 2 of our exploration of drone-lifted antennas for Ham Radio use.  See last week’s article “Goodbye Radio Towers, Hello Drones.”] Drone s– particularly used for lifting things – is an incredibly cool technology. Already, commercially available fishing drones operating up to with up to 8-pound loads are available.  Not cheap, but out there. $1,500 class and up.  Dandy if you like surf fishing and you’re not right off the end of a beachfront runway. …

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Weekend Shop Tips

We may publicly post some of our occasional emails to friends and family on the Ultra-Make site because living can be complicated. So, tips to give you a let-up can be useful.  These are short and we hope useful! Shop Tips 101 #1 (Cale’s wife is an Educator) So, this caught our eye. Folding rolling cart with handle. dbest products Quik Cart Collapsible Rolling Crate on Wheels for Teachers Tote Basket 80 lbs Capacity, Made …

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Goodbye Radio Towers – Hello Drones

Although major retailers, like Amazon and Wal-Mart, have extensive drone offerings, the uptake of this new technology into amateur radio has been somewhat slow.  The objective of this article is to review some of the basics, perhaps overcome some ham radio community reluctance to drone adoption and do some “blue skying” for what’s a very cool technology. Ham radio towers could be a thing of the past… Drones to Take Towers – The Basics The …

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The One-Hour Cat Shelter

Cat House Fun Time! Nasty, bitchy-bad weather is rolling into Texas today. And since I was hoping the winter would be mild, we kept putting off building a cat-shelter for the half dozen to dozen feral cats in the woods around here. By coffee-hour Saturday, 9:30 AM, there was no way around it. I’d have to cowboy up and build them a quick, safe hangout where they could do one of their pile-on’s (clowders) and …

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