Going slow on holidays..Fire, LMR400, and Greenhouses...

I appear to have done something that I really haven't done since the pandemic started. I've slowed down. 

In fact, I think I've stopped. 

I spent a good chunk of Easter sitting outside. Not doing much, but just sitting there, breathing fresh air. 

We dropped the kids off between their grandparents on Monday, and on Tuesday, the XYL insisted that we buy some tarps to fashion some shelter over an old gazebo frame that the proper coverings have long since expired on (the southern exposure in our yard is tough on most things). 

Given the chill, I decided to pull out my old smoker - a cheap little grill style, and turned it into a mini-fire pit. 

Then somehow the entire afternoon was just spent outside, sitting around that little fire, keeping warm. Wednesday afternoon, having caught up on a few things around the house, was spent keeping that little fire alive. Having burnt half a bag of redgum Tuesday, I was intent on burning the last amount possible Wednesday - I hadn't planned on even starting it until it was dark, but the XYL enquired as to why I hadn't started it again at midday. 

It dawned on me that I'd actually finally slowed down mentally for the first time in years. I have a busy week coming up next week but this week is slow. There is plenty I could be doing. I just don't feel compelled to. 

It's a nice change. The TV hasn't even had much of a workout. It's been on here and there to watch something. Mostly I've just been outside, in our ghetto gazebo, with tarps flapping around (and I'm leaving them that way to avoid the whole thing taking off), with our little grill firepit, watching the wood burn and the smoke rise.

This ghetto setup might be handy next week as we start to piece together what we need for the new shed. I doubt the weather will be all that accommodating. 

I've had some more thought about antennas vs radios and what will make the most sense - and I think the short answer is that I need to leave the dipole alone and just wire all the way to the vertical instead. That's an extra 15m of cable. I need to do some precise measurements before I buy, but I suspect it'll be in the realm of 45m. Looking at the cable loss calculators, I'll be running QRP without even wanting to. 

It's looking clearer though that I'm going to need to consider sticking with at least RG213 or possibly LMR400.  On 40m, the difference between them probably isn't so bad. On 15m, the losses are getting noticeable. Using RG58, I'm loosing a lot of power and I don't have a lot to start with. After a quick look around, it seems the cheapest option is a 50m roll of LMR400 from SE Comms @ $200. 

It might be a little while before I get this done, but it's at least a plan. Something I have a lot of at the moment, but just not the budget for achieving.  One day I'll get there.

The switching plan I was thinking of earlier would have been doable, but I think it'd be better to get away from it. There's still a lot of conjecture around having multiple radios hitting a single switch and the scenarios where that's likely to start damaging radios. 

There's also the reality of having to go outside to change a switch depending on where I want to use a radio from. More so an issue when you consider that I mostly use the dipole on the IC706 - it's generally the better antenna and tends to be what I use for SSTV. The vertical is usually used for FT8. Given when I'm in the house I'm mostly going to want the dipole, it makes more sense to just leave it connected, and leave the vertical for the shed. 

Despite the extra cable length, it's going to simplify things.

In less radio related news..

I'm debating a greenhouse. Probably a polycarbonate type rather than the cheap "tent" style that I suspect will tear apart given our wind. Nothing terribly big. We're not green thumbs by any stretch, but we are working on having a lot of garden beds, planting out the front to obscure a retaining wall and so on. I suspect that there will be periods between buying plants and locating them, so a greenhouse will give us somewhere to store them and we'll have somewhere to cultivate the less mature plants we acquire until they're (and we're) ready. 

It'd be fairly trivial to run some poly tube in and setup misting in there. It also wouldn't be too hard to throw over a 12v line and wire in an LED strip for a little light.

If nothing else, it'd be a space for plants to grow to a size that they might survive the dog who'd otherwise trample, eat or defecate on them. 

It's something I need to think about reasonably quickly. I've got a small garden shed to move once this new shed is built, and the location and orientation of it depends on whether or not we're going to go ahead with this. 

The XYL couldn't care - she's not terribly interested in plants (not that I'm much better), but is open to the idea given how much future garden work we need to do. It might also give us something to engage the kids with. 

There was a good chunk of my childhood spent in a nursery, having had an aunt who had one at their home - quite a large one at that (interestingly, I had relatives on the otherside of my family who did the same). A lot of time was spent running around the smelly, damp maze full of endless punnets of plants. Later, having moved out into a rural "town" of Merino (now actually a village having lost its "town" status), we had a vegetable garden.  I absolutely hated them, but at the same time it was a good experience seeing how long it took things to grow from seeds to the point of being able to put them on a plate. I don't think it'd hurt the kids to put in some effort into doing the same.

If none of that works out, it'll become storage space for garden equipment. It's not like you can ever have too much of that.