I'm as bad a Blogger as I am a HAM.

Well, it's been a while.

Bathurst has come and gone. My first real "outing" of any significance since 2019. And it was an experience.  And by that, I mean it was wet. Very very wet. That was a great week to have a caravan, a generator and a built in bathroom.

I've been fairly busy since then. Doing what? I'm not sure. Honestly, I can't even remember. A lot of work. Constantly trying to find "nice" days to get the grass cut - the problem with having a battery powered mower - even an 82v one, is that long grass is hard on it. A week of rain and the grass is too much for it, even at its highest settings. I've managed to get half the backyard done before I've had to resort to the whipper snipper. 

Then there's the corner of the yard that has been a swamp - thanks in no small part to the neighbours rather large garage having the holes for the downpipes in their guttering dumping right near the fence... without any downpipes directing the water to the drains. That's been some hard cutting and the kids cubby house has been something closer to a houseboat for the past couple of months. At least when we put it in, we put it up on bricks. The run of LMR400 going along that section of fence that was sitting on the ground - well, let's say I no longer need to bury it.

I've had some radio time - mostly getting back into FT8. I jumped on to 10m where there appeared to be a competition on and had a bit of action there. I'd been fighting the IC706Mk2G to get it to talk to flrig or WSJTX. After an inordinate amount of screwing around, I finally discovered that I had the addressing in the radio configured differently to what the templates for that model default to. Fix that, things work properly again. 

I haven't had as much time as I'd like - the youngest with ADHD has been becoming a little more challenging once his medication wears off - something that is both more time consuming and quite simply tiring. By the time I get him into bed, get through the oldest wanting some attention, I'm usually over the whole thing and ready to sleep. 

I was, up until the interest rate hikes, looking at potential new radios to play with, but alas, the additional hundreds going into the mortgage each month has meant that isn't going to happen. I need to be content with what I've got for the moment.

The shed - ever since it was built, I've had to have power cables running out there to top off the batteries as the solar simply hasn't been able to keep up. Some days yes, many no. I got sick of the cord being in my way finally, and ran a heavy duty extension cord through some suspended conduit. There's a smart power point in the shed that will turn on the battery charger at night for a few hours. That charger is noisy - in the RF sense, so I don't really want it on during hours that I'm up. The upside to this configuration is that I can change the schedule as the seasons change. 

I've also had network cabling running out there since May. I never intended that, but it's been a "short term" solution while the specific wireless access point that I need comes back into stock. Apparently it should arrive in the country tomorrow so I'm closer to getting rid of that nasty little thing. Once it's configured up, it will create a wireless mesh to an access point in the house (basically line of sight out of a window), and will uplink a small switch. This particular access point is the only Ubiquiti model that is weather proof and runs at 24v (I have a 12v to 24v converter for it already)... and allows me to connect a switch to it that it can mesh into the rest of my network. 

It'd nice to get those last two bits all polished up. That would mean that the shed is "complete" finally. Once the network cable comes down, I can properly secure the conduit to the catenary wire and make it look a bit tidier. Initially the power running out there was an extension cord on the ground with an area in the middle cable tied up to the wire to allow me to walk under it. Mowing the lawn required moving the cable around to get it out of the way. Now, with everything suspended, things look a little less ghetto. 

My wife did comment yesterday that I need a path out there. I don't disagree after the past few months of getting wet, muddy feet. I was running back and forward to the shed during the 10m FT8 competition. According to FLrig, my SWR was high.. something it seems to report a lot with the Xiegu G90, but I wanted to check it.. and a couple of other things, whilst I was remoted in from the house. Grass turned into mud by about the third pass. The SWR, FWIW, was fine.