A Saturday without the heat...

Finally, a Saturday that I'm home and it's not too hot. 

I pulled a rack of baby back ribs out of the freezer yesterday... they've been there a while and I needed to make space for the new rack of beef ribs that arrived yesterday that I threw on my butchers order... the XYL couldn't buy any meat at the supermarket, so I did the BBQ happy man thing and ordered a good sized BBQ pack that I split down into usable portion sizes so we have plenty of meat should this situation not improve for a while. 

I may also have ordered an emergency 40 pack of loo paper that I'm fairly sure will be like 400 grit sandpaper. We're not out yet. Hopefully we won't be. At least there will however be a contingency plan in place. 

Anyway, the baby backs are in the smoker. The smoker is in the kids old' cubby house. Stops the wind blowing out the flame, and keeps it away from the house. The weather is favourable to a few hours of that running finally. It's not really kosher running something like that inside a building - but it's hardly sealed like a house. There's plenty of air flow. If it does catch on fire though, I'll still be annoyed. 

It has a Wifi temperature monitor setup monitoring both the smoker temperature and meat temperature. It's pretty effective at letting you know when you've had heat run away - which has happened once on account of the box that holds the smoking chips progressing from a slow high smoke burn to rising flames coming up over the water container (that sits directly above the wood box). The app is cloud based, so it can be monitored remotely as well. Handy if a trip to the nearest big green shed for more gas is required mid cook (though I've since learned to keep 2 bottles in rotation).

The Icom IC-208H was due on Thursday. It's still not here - it's in transit with AusPost still. A little disappointing - I'd hoped to be playing with that this weekend and working on making the remote head.. remote. 

I've got a lot of stuff in transit and most is moving no where fast, which is frustrating. 

The circuit board etching kit was apparently collected by Aramex last week in Sydney, but so far hasn't even been scanned back into their depot. It'd be nice to even have that just so I could get that little project under way. 

The new vertical antenna has finally left the US. Apparently if left LA a few hours ago after a fairly slow journey around the US. 

I'm looking forward to getting that assembled, though I must say the manual looks to be garbage and there aren't any great videos on putting it together. If someone would hurry up and buy my old rack and fridge, I might have enough garage space to be ready to get it assembled. 

The manual does recommend having a rig setup at around 6 feet for initial tuning. I think I'll just attach it to the PA stand that I use for the screwdriver antenna. Easy enough to use that to get it to height, big enough base that it won't topple over in our wind tunnel of a yard, and not too difficult to bring back down as I work on trimming the capacitance spokes at each end. 

The only major drama I foresee is the actual mounting. The pipe I've ordered has a diameter much too wide for the antenna to mount on. I may have to do some additional work to make that happen.