Upgrade to the VHF/UHF Antenna mast
Made it from one stick of thin super-strut. Next time I attempt something like this I will use the normal thickness stuff. When I was done it was a bit flimsy. I had 4 foot left so I cut it in half and sandwiched them together with 3/8's bolts. The antenna on the left(Open stub j-pole) goes to my FTM400 and the antenna on the right(Tram 1480) goes to my FTM100 that is slave to my HRI200. I ended up buying another FTM100 since a radio had to be sacrificed to the Yaesu gods for the HRI200 to work.
Battery Box (part 1)
I've been meaning to work on this since field day, but haven't had a chance to get on it. Here's what I have for a start so far. I had most everything except the wood. I drew it up in CAD to get the most space with the least amount of wood. The latches I got from some forgotten unstarted project. The hinge I found in the bed of a golf car in the bone yard. Handles came off one of my homemade rack mounts. Total investment so far is 33$ for three pieces of 1x12x48 pine.
These are the same batteries I was using from field day. I managed to get 4 more from the ebay inventory. The plan is four will be for radio ops and the other four soully for the invertor.
I'm going to pick up some paint next, whip out my detail air brush, stencils and make it look like an ammo crate. Or maybe camo like I did my VSR.
Wi-Fi 7-Day Programmable Thermostat
Well this little thermostat has been the bane of my existance. Every time one fails it's 200$ I'm out. It will be the coldest day of the year and wake at 3am to the AC blowing. Or come home in the summer to the heater being on. After a bit of arguing with Honeywell and a bit of disrespect I have sworn them off. As these devices fail I'll be purchasing Nest thermstats.
However I decided to do some testing on the device. I started noticing some inconsistancies. What acted like a crowbarred relay tests showed they were fine. So I did some searching to find a customer that said his device was flipped out and did everything in reverse and one post suggested changing to heat pump. That solved his problem. Hmm. I wonder. I threw a 24 volt source to it and went to setting #1 to see what it was set at. The default setting is 0 for conventional heat and air. It was on setting 1 for heat pump. There was other settings changed as well except WiFi and schedule. So it wasn't like a voltage spike scrammed it. It was selectively changed.
I pulled my manual thermostat from the garage and reinstalled this one. And low and behold it worked. Now this is concerning. There's only two ways to change these settings. From the panel or from from the Honeywell management portal. Guess where it didn't happen at. Bingo! I didn't get up at 3am to switch to a different climate control type on the coldest day of the year. What better way to artificially roll in more cash for Honeywell. At 200$ a pop this has cost me 600$ in thermostats and 180$ for a technicion visit. So 780$ lost.
So my recommendation is to stay away from Honeywell. I have now have it installed in my garage. And my Fortigate running packet capture on their server to capture the next time they pull this crap.
UPDATE: I found thermostat #2 and did the same thing and it to was changed to heat pump. Chances are if I still had the first one I'd find the same thing. This is very dishonest.
Brief shop cleaning
I haven't posted in awhile as I have been out of sorts. Went to the emergency room a few weeks ago with 3 kidney stones. 10mm, 3mm on the right and 7.5mm on the left. I ended up with a stent installed about a day later. Then it's been nothing but hurry up and wait to have a procedure done to have them blown up. Yesterday I tried to do some cleaning in the garage and work on my wife's bike that Bob WB5WLZ gave me. I was just rolling around on my drum throne when I turned the wrong way and went from rainbows and lollipops to hell on earth. I have a week until the first procedure and 2 weeks after that to have the silly straw removed.
Kat loves the retro look of the bike. It dates back to the 70's from a company out of Dallas. I'm going to see if I can carefully open the light and install a small super capacitor and a kingbright LED. Tires, liners and tubes should be here today. If it all works good I'll take it apart and powdercoat the whole bike. Possibly the same blue and the shiny make white.
Here's where I got with the desk before I got shutdown by the pain.
My Childhood
I probably mentioned this story before to my friends, but to the folks that are new to the site. Many years ago in the mid 70's I found a radio just like this one in the trash. I took it home and tore it apart and then reassembled it. Only to find that it worked afterwards. In south Texas at the time there wasn't allot of options for TV and radio, but I had found this one station that at 10pm would play radio serials and these were those serial (link below). From there on I was bringing all manor of junk home and learning and building new things just for the end result. It was like junkie needing a fix. It just snowballed from there to where I am today.
