Closer to getting the shack connected....

Today I ordered a 50m roll of LMR400 to hook up the vertical from the side of the house down to the back shed.

Yeah, yeah.. I hear the screaming about why I would buy that cable to run HF? Two reasons: 1) Line loss.. or lack there of. Yes it matters @ 10w. 2) Cost.  The smallest roll of RG213 I could buy is 100m @ $350. At $200, it's still a value proposition. Otherwise I'd have gone with the RG213. Expensive either way you cut it, but the only tidy way I can run it is around the fence line, it's gotta be on the ground and out of the way so I need something pretty reasonable.

At some point that means I can get the vertical hooked up and start using HF out in the shed. I hadn't planned on doing it quite so soon, but I want to get back into FT8, I want to find a use to get back out there.. and some stuff sold on eBay to fund it. 

I'm going to upgrade my network too - there are parts that are problematic, and my router is simply getting too old to handle some of the processing that I'd really like it to do. The replacement isn't particularly cheap, but it's designed for folks like myself and has a lot of bells and whistles that nerds like - IDS, IPS and what not - all that can be run without massacring bandwidth like my current router does. It's fine without it, but as soon as you start turning features on, it really starts to struggle, and it's prone to hanging.

On that, I'm waiting too for Ubiquiti to hurry up and get stock into the country of a particular outdoor access point that I desperately need and have on back order. My old dodgy wireless bridge setup that allows the cameras hanging off the shed to connect to the network uses 2.4GHz as does the Solar controller's WiFi adapter and for whatever reason at certain times they will all drop out and just not come back for hours. It doesn't help that they're both inside the shed, but normally the signal strength is still pretty good. The intended replacement will be running 5GHz, so that should be less of an issue. 

I'd complain about how noisy 40m has been for the past couple of days, but then I remember that I've had the charger on the shed batteries given the solar production hasn't quite been up to it (and I see no point letting them cycle too far down unnecessarily). That doesn't do me a lot of favours. Luckily I rarely use it. 

One of the cameras on the shed is a new always colour job - instead of traditional infrared, it uses white lights. Even in infrared mode, the white lights are on instead. In colour mode it manages to keep a fairly large chunk of our yard visible in the dark. Impressive for a sub $100 camera. I think I'll use more of them in the future. The light itself isn't ideal to look at, but it doesn't light up the yard when you're out there that much. 

The constant load on the shed is around 20w. It's going to go up when some new toys get here, but it's pretty reasonable given it's drive by 340AH worth of batteries.