Category: Blog

COVID cases are still climbing up for Georgia. We’re headed toward the record high for the state we had back in January.

The good news is it seems the shots in January are working.

Narrative: Opened the house windows, it was very cool outside this morning. I loaded up the garbage cans and set them on the curb. Trouble is that I put it out there with the cans side by side. There’s supposed to be 3 feet between the cans! They put a tag on the garbage cans to remind me next time, i’m glad they picked them up. (They apparently don’t have to.)

We ordered some more supplies like a day timer and a coffee pot, they should arrive today.

Huge day for my new UAT978 receiver, 33 aircraft and over 7 thousand reports sent to FA. I did move the antenna to the corner of the home to get it clear view of the sky.

I worked with my new “Machinists Level” that we got today. It is very sensitive and there was little here on the estate that could be used as shims for the telescope deck. As it turns out the deck is not machined and I had to use the underside of the deck instead. The leveled telescope was easy to align tonight.

COVID cases are still climbing up for Georgia. We’re headed toward the record high for the state we had back in January.

The good news is it seems the shots in January are working.

Narrative: Opened the house windows, it was very cool outside this morning. I loaded up the garbage cans and set them on the curb. Trouble is that I put it out there with the cans side by side. There’s supposed to be 3 feet between the cans!

COVID cases are still climbing up for Georgia. We’re headed toward the record high for the state we had back in January.

The good news is it seems the shots in January are working.

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Narrative: Played with the telescope camera’s a little during the night.

The camera sits on a box to protect it from the sun and is handy to diagnose a failed movement of the tripod.

COVID cases are still climbing up for Georgia. We’re headed toward the record high for the state we had back in January.

The good news is it seems the shots in January are working.

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Narrative: Getting organized, we’re going to get buried unless we compartmentalize the areas we are responsible for. Voicemail for Atlanta will be sent to Kathy’s E-Mail, checking to make sure they arrive for Pahrump too.

The dehumidifier in my Atlanta garage is filling it’s bucket a lot faster than I had anticipated.

I put a pump in the bucket and set a timer to run every 24 hours, I had to change it today to 12 hours. (And might even set it to 8 hours.)

Back from WM, $250 in groceries and sundries.

Tags and sequential numbers for our estate inventory arrived today.

Reassembled the telescope so we can take some pictures of the sky this evening.

We bought a new cover to protect it from the sun. It works really good until the afternoon sun bakes the side of the cover.

Then i add a car windshield insert over the top of the cover until the sun gets lower on the horizon.

COVID cases are still climbing up for Georgia. We’re headed toward the record high for the state we had back in January.

The good news is it seems the shots in January are working.

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Narrative: Final packing before the limo gets here. We moved up our trip to the airport by 30 minutes because of the threat of rain. No traffic to the airport, nor was their any traffic at the airport. The lines for baggage drop-off were also non existant. Security was a breeze and the only complication was our gate was in the International terminal (Concourse F)

Shuttle to get the car was no lines, nor was there a line at the rental agency. We had lunch at Palace Station and then went down for a nap before driving to Pahrump. The room had no water, no way to flush the commode! We left the hotel and headed to Pahrump about 2, everything here was in good shape. We flushed out the water pipes and turned on the hot water heater. I also adjusted the thermostat schedule to lower the temperature at night to 87.

I put the “radar box” receiver on the Flight Aware Raspberry Pi and it worked with no changes. The only issue I have with the radar box receiver is it gets very hot.

The heat is transferred down the SMA connector so I put a heat sink on that. I checked and the heat sink is working great, the receiver is not smok’n hot anymore. If I had used a large format cable, it would have absorbed the heat from the receiver.

I put the antenna out on the back porch roof and we are getting excellent results.

It is receiving UAT978 past 85 miles, which is pretty good.

I checked their feeder coverage and my new site was listed on Flight Aware.

I noticed the humidity of the garage had drifted north. I assumed that the bucket on the dehumidifier was full. I ran the pump manually and the dehumidifier started running again.

COVID cases are still climbing up for Georgia. We’re headed toward the record high for the state we had back in January.

The good news is it seems the shots in January are working.

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Narrative: Getting organized and sipp’n my coffee.

Moved the Dehumidifier, but I had to reprogram the NODEMCU to reach the wireless in the linen closet. I’ve run the hose from the DH into the sink so that it drains automatically. In past trips we’ve set the humidity to 60% so that the bucket doesn’t get full, now we don’t have to worry about that. I ran the dehumidifier pretty hard all day, pump works as intended. In fact the pump always runs when the DH is turned on by the NODEMCU. (Apparently the water dripping off the coils when it is off is enough to fill the pump compartment.)

COVID cases are still climbing up for Georgia. We’re headed toward the record high for the state we had back in January.

The good news is it seems the shots in January are working.

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Narrative: Church service this morning so we had a large breakfast and that took up most of the morning. I’m still working on clearing up the mess I created by traveling 4 months out of the year and I’m still traveling! If nothing changes we’ll be spending two weeks at each of the two houses for several months.

COVID cases are still climbing up for Georgia. We’re headed toward the record high for the state we had back in January.

The good news is it seems the shots in January are working.

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Narrative: It’s 10AM and I don’t have much to show for it. Talked to mom for half an hour, I’ve not even had breakfast yet.

We’re trying to get organized and get rid of the junk lying around the house so that our kids will have an easier time with our departure. We’ve been in his home for 37 years and we’ve accumulated a pile of STUFF. At one point we built a storage shed out back. When that crumpled and leaked we rented a 20Ft storage unit for our overflow! We condensed that down to my cave, and it’s at least waist high in stuff still here.

COVID cases are still climbing up for Georgia. We’re headed toward the record high for the state we had back in January.

The good news is it seems the shots in January are working.

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Narrative: It’s 10AM and I don’t have much to show for it. Talked to mom for half an hour, I’ve not even had breakfast yet.

I’ve put a UAT 978 receiver together for Pahrump.  (They don’t have one.)  There’s about 4 ADSB sites, but no UAT that I saw.

I cannot buy the 978 antenna or filter anymore.  (I don’t even know if they make them.)

Apparently they are using the 1090 filters (which cut off at about 980Mhz) and the 1090 antenna for UAT.

I am very happy with my 978 antenna and 978 white filter?

There is a third party magnetic mount and radar box also makes a UAT receiver. (I don’t know if it will work with the FA image.)

But I’ve ordered both of them, I should be able to test it next weekend in my spare time during the 110Degree heat of the day.

COVID cases are still climbing up for Georgia. We’re headed toward the record high for the state we had back in January.

The good news is it seems the shots in January are working.

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Narrative: Georgia can be rather humid and the garage feels it even worse because of the water that runs under the door. I put a dehumidifier in the garage which can easily maintain 55% humidity. The problem is that the bucket can get full in two days. The larger units have a pump that can vacate the water, but that would generate too much heat for our small garage. I bought a tiny pump the other day, and I do mean “Tiny” to put in the bottom of the dehumidifier bucket.

Need to find one of my battery chargers for the van whilst it’s being stored.

This small charger should be enough to keep the battery charged. I may put a timer on it so that it’s not charging the battery when the garage is 100 degrees. (Battery voltages need to be lower when the temperatures are higher than normal.)

Tonight we loose our broadband connection so that our ISP can improve their performance. According to an E-Mail that I got yesterday our connection to Pahrump may drop between midnight and 8AM tomorrow. The firewall has a cellular hot spot for backup Internet. When I tested this earlier this month it took about 30 seconds to rebuild the tunnel to my Atlanta network.