Attack of the birds

We have been having intermittent problems with our forced air furnace this fall. It
is a Rudd Achiever 90 Plus. I was noticing that Induced Fan Blower Motor was not always
spinning up or it would overheat and cut out.



This morning the upstairs portion of the house was 65 degrees compared to the
68 degrees in the basement. The basement floor has in-floor heat so it is normally
68 overnight and 70 during the day. The whole house was being heated by the basement
floor.... not good.



I call my Heating/AC/Plumbing guy down the road that did the original install 2 years
ago when we built the house. He suggested that I remove the subsystem because he thought
that there was a dead bird inside the PVC vent or right at the blower motor.

Sure enough Sam was right on the money. As it turns out this is a common issue with
the Rudd system because there is no filter on the vent.  It took me 10 minutes
to remove it, clean it, and reassemble it.  --Don't doubt Sam.  :-)

Winter is coming

It is in the twenties this morning. We had some very large snow flakes falling that were about 1.5 inches across. The snow did not amount to anything but the frost on the ground is the hardest frost of the season so far.



I have the infloor heat in the basement running. I have been using it for the
last two weeks or so in mornings. It runs for a little while in the morning and then
my office is warm for the rest of the day.



We have most of our fall outdoor chores done for the season.  I need to clean
out the third garage stall so that I can get two vehicles and the tractor in the garage
now that winter close by.

Elecraft 222Mhz Transverter

I started building the 222 mhz transverter kit this afternoon with the football games
on the tv in the background. So far the front panel PCB is complete. I need to find
one replacement capacitor for one that split while working with it.

Overall I need to say that the board layout is very good and the instructions are
very clear. The front panel PCB has about 50 initial components and it took about
90 minutes +/- to complete.

I am going to try to keep squeezing in a little time here and there to keep the project
moving along.

Fall Projects

N0FP came over around lunch and acted as my spotter as I lowered the HF tower. I worked
on the HF tower today fixing a 10m element and adjusting my 40m dipole. About 20 minutes
of tuning but quiet a bit more time once you rig the tower and hookup the tractor,
etc.  (I worked on the VHF/UHF tower and the 222MHz system yesterday.)



I bought five trees and 15 bags of mulch today since things are discounted 30%. Zestar
Apple, Crab Apple, Choke Cherry, bali cherry, and an Autumn Ash. The Autumn Ash turns
red and purple in the fall similar to a Maple tree.  These are all decent sized
trees.




Pretty nice sunny weekend... temps were cool so a light jacket was in order. I have
almost all of fall chores done... about another day of work and then we should be
ready for the winter season.

--Reposting because it went to wrong blog... go figure.

NG0R - EN25

For those of you that wonder where NG0R is really located here is a good map. I am
located in the SE corner of EN25. EN25 is 45 minutes west of the Twin Cities. (I am
about 55 miles west of the metro area.)



Here is a link to the site that created the grid square map: http://f6fvy.free.fr/qthLocator/fullScreen.php?locator=EN25 which
I discovered on the Northern Lights
Radio Society email reflector posted by W0ZQ.

Sad Faces - Photoblog

Here is a link
to a photo that I really like on my photoblog. I can't explain why I like this
one so much, it makes me pause and and reflect.



I took this picture a couple of Saturdays ago while on a photo trip with my son Jacob.
The property owner would not grant us access to walk around on the property so I walked
around the outside of the fence until I found this image.

Xtratyme Sucks

I normally wake up at 5:30am and then read email and followed by RSS feeds for
about 15-20 minutes each morning before getting into the shower and getting ready
for work.

Today is the second day in a row that my ISP's upstream feed to the Internet has been
down. I live out in the middle
of no where central Minnesota and consider myself lucky to have the low bandwidth
broadband connection that I have. (It is enough to be able to work from home most
days.)

My ISP is Xtratyme and boy they sure suck.
They are nice enough people but their business model is a wreck and it shows.

Argghhhh!!!!!!!

Cool photo trip

I finally got around to working with the images of the photo
trip that I took with Jacob. One day+400 miles=13 really good images. I am pretty
pumped about the images from that trip.



Our family went camping last weekend (May 18th, 19th, and 20th) at Fort
Ridgely State Park. Overall I was pretty disappointed with the photo opportunities.
I still need to transfer the images from the CF card to CDs before I will look
at them. I suspect that are probably three or maybe four good images
from the trip.



It is getting harder for me to find new images in our local area. The interesting
thing is this project is driving me to explore new areas of the state and
also to shoot images outside of my comfort zone. Shooting outside of my comfort zone
is now opening my mind to new ideas.




Back in the days when I was tv photojournalist I had to work with whatever was
in front of me. The beauty of that model is that you learn to make it work... you
don't have much choice other than to make it work. After a while it is not so hard
to get the image. I am noticing that I am slipping back into my photojournalism model
which in my case is a documentary style.



I have noticed that I am thinking further into the future about what the next photo
might be or what elements it might contain.

Missed Forcast

I took a little nap after lunch today. I went to sleep and the temp was in the low
70s. I wake up and walk around the house and notice that the house is pretty warm.
I check the NOAA
website and it says the temp is 91. The original forecast for today was for
something in the 70's.... I guess that they were way off!



Good thing that we have been watering our trees again today.

Saturday Photo Trip

Here is the approximate
route that we (Jacob and myself) took on yesterday's photo trip. We decided to
head in a northwesterly direction to visit some area that we had not seen before.
We had a good time and hopefully captured some good images.



We shot pictures of: horses, trains, windmills, old farms, flowers, old cars,
farmers in the fields, and a Dairy Queen in a small town.

It was a pretty interesting day because it was a grabshot approach vs. a genre approach
to my photos. The grabshot approach is a little more challenging for me because it
is completely random and the subject matter is completely different with every picture.
I am uploading the images to my network right now and then need to burn them
to DVDs. Once all of that is complete I can actually open them in Photoshop and see
how they turned out.  If I get 4 images that I end up posting to my blog
then I will consider this road trip as successful.