Geocaching 2009-02-01 GCYM2M

Find number 3 of 4 for the day. This should have been an easy cache to find.
This one was not only covered by snow (which we expected and planned for) but it was
also covered with ice. Luckily the ice was pretty rotten and Ben was able to remove
the cache.

This one might require revisiting in the spring as it might need to be moved slightly
so that it is hidden better once the snow melts. It could also use some cammo
tape instead of the electrical and duct tape.



This is a pretty neat cache. Nice container and I was surprised how much stuff you
can get into it. We also stumbled across our first Travel
Bug.

N 45° 06.837 W 094° 32.286

We will be logging the bug ASAP and then trying to find a new home for it. I think
that we are going to go out tomorrow (Sunday) for a photo and geocaching trip across
west central Minnesota. I am hoping that we can find a new home for the bug at one
of our stops.



Ben was pretty excited when he found this.

http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=54430f46-a1a8-454c-8594-896e663c47ff




Here is a link to the travel bug that we found:

http://www.geocaching.com/track/details.aspx?guid=87394f33-a141-48d8-95b4-78a8a19d1973




Here are some interesting notes about the bug:

Geocaching 2009-02-01 GCH3W3

Find number 2 of 4 for the day. I had never been to this side of the park and
did not even know that it existed. This was a tough one as the GPS got us close but
it was slightly further away from the coordinates then we were expecting. Happened
to be snapping a few photos of Ben searching when I noticed something slightly odd
in the distance. Needless to say that when we replaced the cache in it's hiding
spot we covered up what I saw that clued me in. 

N 45° 05.289 W 094° 22.937

I like the wooden nickels. We are thinking about getting some made up when we are
ready to start deploying some caches of our own. A quick picture and then everything
went back into the zip lock bags and into the can... hidden from view.

A fun park... someplace that we will visit again!

http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=a02b9c49-7c9f-4782-8e18-426034fbccb5

Geocaching 2009-02-01 GC1011D

Find number 1 of 4 for the day. There are several other caches in Dassel Darwin park.
We were unable to find the first one that we were looking for as it appears to cover
with snow and ice. I have about 450 cache locations loaded into the hand held GPS
and noticed that GC1011D was within hiking distance.



Ben found this one entirely on his own. Nice location. I bet there are lots people
and machines that go by this location without even knowing that this is nearby.

N 45° 05.631 W 094° 22.442

http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?pf=&guid=542dc222-a182-48dc-9172-4b891d6ad4fb&decrypt=&log=&numlogs=

Elecraft KAT2 tuner for the K2

This was a three night project for me.

Night 1:


Install the capacitors, resistors, relays, BNCs, and ICs on the tuner control board.
Probably about 45 minutes of sorting parts into my little parts boxes/bins. Probably
another hour of actual work on the board.

Night one picture:

Night 2:


About 30 minutes of bench time winding T1 for the control board then off to dinner.



Afternoon/Night 3:


Some serious bench time installing the relays, capacitors, toroids, header/pins, and
the wiring harness to the second board.  Once all of this was completed I then
had to remove the heatsink the K2 and add the RF connection to the main board in the
K2. After that you mount the KAT2 into the lid of the radio.

Night three photo:

All in all there is probably about 6-7 hours into this project. The tuner is awesome.
I am really impressed at how well it works. It is incredibly fast and has a pretty
wide match range.

Skiing & tubing

While most folks were watching the Super Bowl we went to Powder Ridge to play in the
snow. Cristy & Jacob went skiing (no pictures.) Ben, Joe, and I went tubing.

It is kind of hard to take pictures going down the hill on a tube  when it is
dark. I was surprised that I even got these with the little camera.

Jan 2009 Wrestling

Here are a couple of pictures that Cristy took of Ben and Joe wrestling in the Annandale
meet back in January.

Snowy Train

I have not posted many nontechnical photos this winter.  I took this train
photo back in December 2008 some time but had not gotten around to posting it.

This is the BNSF rail line that runs parallel to MN State Highway 12 in Dassel.

I have been holding out hope that I was going to get some cool winter pictures of
the trains going through deep snow out in rural Minnesota. So far this winter that
has not been reality for me... yet. We are heading into what is typically the
snowiest part of our winter season.  --Fingers Crossed!

Lego Robotics

A couple of pictures from the Jan 2009 meeting of the 4H Lego Robotics group
in Litchfield.



They have two sets of Lego Mindstorms and one NXT kit.

MNQRP Club - Jan 2009 Meeting

Some pictures from the Jan 10th 2009 Meeting.

I have some more pictures beyond these but this is a pretty long posting already.
It was a fun meeting with a lot of show and tell and pass around items.




Link to our club's website:

http://www.mnqrp.org/




Link to some of the topics and items that were shared:

http://cbjohn.com/aa0zz/index.html




http://www.kangaus.com/




http://www.qrpkits.com/files/MiniSolderPot.pdf




http://www.ohr.com/wattmeter.htm




http://www.norcalqrp.org/nc2n2xx.htm

Updated - Mio Moov 200 - Geocaching

Here is the modified CSV file that I am working with:

I ended up using the Spreadsheet app within OpenOffice to create some additional columns
and copied in the proper field names. This allowed me to create an XML format within
the CSV file. I then opened up the CSV file with with a text editor and ran a couple
find/replace commands to remove the commas and reformat some white space.

I then copied this XML and inserted it into: MyFavouriteLocations.xml

Initially the file was so big that the GPS kept crashing and rebooting. I then trimmed
down the size of the file by removing some cache entries. I cut it roughly in half
and that was enough to get it working. There are probably some extra lines in each
entry that could be trimmed back some more. I have been working on trying to figure
out which lines are required to make this work.



Another hint.... you can't have "&" in the XML. That will potentially
break some of the XML parsers. I was using IE to preview/test my XML and ran into
that issue for 3-4 of the entries.



I now have 100-200+ caches loaded in as favorites. It is not as nice as having them
in the POI database... but it is a start. This only took about 15-20 minutes. Not
as cool as a parsing engine... but functional for a once in a blue moon event.

Here is the XML format that you need: