I was reading a little bit this morning before work. I have not really been following Ruby
on Rails very much as I have slowly been drifting away from development over the
past 2 years. I watched a short
demo and felt very inspired and enabled after seeing a demo of how easy it is
for someone to build a web app with Ruby.
I have a couple of things in mind so I am going to try to find a little time
this weekend to research this a bit further.
After the boys went to bed (it is a school night... lights out by 8:30p) I went down
to work bench to melt some solder. I have the control board finished up.
Of course when I went to validate all of the test points with my DMM... the batteries
are toast and I don't have any spares. I had to fall back to an older Fluke bench
model DMM. I don't really trust the older Fluke because I picked up used and I have
not built relationship with it yet.
The point of validating the test points in this step is to look for shorts in the
soldering at some key points. There do not appear to be any shorts... but some of
the values do not match what the book says.
I am going to take this with a grain of salt until the real check out phase of the
control board later on. (By then I will have some new or rechargeable batteries in
my main DMM)
I have to say that it was a blast being able to spend an hour or so working the K2
kit project tonight. It will probably be Saturday or Sunday before I can get back
to project as we have family plans for Friday night.
I am trying to make this a more regular project every night or every other night.
(Otherwise it will never get done.) I would really like to have this on the air for
Field Day. Better yet, I would like to have this done so it can start driving my VHF/UHF
transverters which is it's real purpose in the life.
(I will try to post some pictures this weekend if time permits.)
We had a small snow-sleet event today. Around 4:15pm the power went out. I decided
to implement our basic emergency management plan.... I rolled the generator outside
and flipped the sub-panel from shore power to the generator. That provides basic power
for the fridge, well pump, furnace and a few lights and outlets in a couple of spots
in the house. Nothing fancy but enough to live on.
We took this as an opportunity to go out for supper. (We could have cooked on the
grill or done something else if needed.)
Our builder laughed at us for putting in a generator sub-panel and having a few of
the circuits moved around. He response was that the power never goes out. --Yeah,
right. The power has gone out several times in the 2.5 years that we have been at
the new house. We bought the generator this summer when we had longer power outage
after some big storms rolled through. (We had the panel but did not own a generator
that was compatible with our new home... go figure.)
I wish that we had spent the money when we built the house and bought one of the automatic
cut over systems to have everything on the generator system. Then the generator
would run on the big LP bottle that feeds our whole house.
Overall we can survive here during the standard kind of emergencies as long we can
top of the gas cans once in a while. It probably points out that we should stock up
our food shelves a little more and think through a bigger plan.
If you have a plan the chances are that you will not need to execute on it... if you
don't have a plan Mr Murphy will force you to make plan to execute.
Two more slots. Last night I turned on the radio for a few minutes and worked VP6DX
on 30m CW and 40m SSB.
I think that they begin to pack up today. I would suspect that these are the final
contacts that I will make with Ducie Island during this DX Expedition. It is incredible
the signals that they are able to work in the noise.
Sweet... I just got them on 17m RTTY. Now I need to focus on 10m and 30m.
I have VP6DX in my log 11 times in the past week.
The folks operating VP6DX have some great ears. It is amazing to work them on 160m.
I hope to try to get a couple more bands/modes with them before they wrap up the operations
there.
I am eating lunch and watching CNN for a few minutes.
Mike Huckabee: "I am not a Wall Street Republican.... I am more of a Walmart
Republican." (He is speaking live from Wichita, KS.) I suppose
that is an appropriate quote given that he was governor of Arkansas. (Home of
Walmart.)
He is an decent speaker given his background. It is interesting listening to his stories
while I eat lunch.
I melted solder tonight.
I spent about 30 minutes organizing the MISC and Control Board parts bags into my
parts bins to make things easier.
I then started building the Control Board for the K2. I have about 60 components
on the board so far which took about 90 minutes. I would guess that I am about 60-60%
complete on this board. Most of the remaining pieces are chips & sockets + a few
capacitors.
I will try to post some pictures later if time permits. So far my experience with
the Elecraft kits has been excellent. (My first kit was a XV222 transverter.)
Instead of watching the Super Bowl I cleaned off the top of my work bench to get ready
for a new project. I then spent an hour putting the errata notes into the instruction
manual.
I am getting ready to start building my Elecraft
K2.
It is almost time for dinner. I think that I feel like taking a nap instead of
watching the second half of the football game. 
