N3VEM @N3VEM@mastodon.radio

#introductions Vance, N3VEM here. Into #hamradio, #electronics, and all things #maker. Heavily involved in #POTA (parks on the air) as a volunteer dev and running the helpdesk. #bigfamily and #gardening take most of my outside of work hours that aren’t radio related. I have a day job but it’s the least interesting thing about me😀. #UnitarianUniversalist I.e. love is love and justice is for everyone.

He started cutting a couple weeks ago, but finished it up today. In the meantime though, I think we’re actually going to launch from a farm that’s the neighbor of someone else in our family, because there is about 2x as much space there as there is behind us, before you run into things like roads and power-lines.

@qrper - I’m listening to the workbench episode you were on recently - love the Murphy workbench idea - I’ve been scheming doing similar, but one the hoists up to the ceiling in the garage, so that we’ve got a better place to work on some of our rocket projects with the kiddos

Got some fairly cool nights this past week, which means it’s time to make sure the pellet stoves fire up for the season.

Accidentally called a fax machine today, and it gave me dial-up flashbacks

I’m starting think that people who claim that socialized medicine would cause long lines and terrible service, have never gone to the doctor or a hospital in our privatized system…

I don’t want to speak too soon, but it seems like this isolator may have been the final trick I needed. Did some test transmission in psk31, and all seemed well. Gonna knock out a couple other things, but then might do some digital stuff tonight😀👍

Had been lamenting to one of my coworkers that we’ve yet been able to get Carolina Reapers to grow. He then gifted me some of his home-made, fermented, hot sauce. Perfect! Nice flavor, hot enough to make my bald spot sweat, and left that nice, tingly, endorphin boosting sensation after 👍

11yo and I listened to the score to #spamalot during the evening cleanup and her little siblings bath bath routine tonight, and now I can’t help but be in a good mood 😀

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I won week 1 of sportsball Pick ‘Em at my work, by picking which colors I liked better on the little icons on the website.

I already have a name in mind for version 2 of the radio rocket, now that the next step is building the actual main rocket parts, but my inner 12yo kind of wants to call it the Ham Rocket

Engines have arrived! The 2 packs of Estes engines are for the kiddos rockets, and the reloads are for the radio rocket. For the #hamradio folx not as familiar with mid and high power rocketry - when you get to 29mm diameter and larger engines, reload systems are pretty common because reusing a metal casing and dropping in a ‘refill’ becomes more cost effective. I stuck one of my casings in the pic for size reference:

Just watched the first row of corn in the field get cut, so it’s likely to all be down within a day or two, which also means it’ll soon be time for some #hamradio rocket launching. I’ll try to keep folx posted on launch time, in the event anyone is close enough to Witmer PA that they want to see if they can receive the APRS packets - they’ll be sent with no path info for early launches, so you’d likely need to be within a few miles.

Throughout the month, different Wednesdays are meetings for the different #pota teams- tonight is the dev team meeting. If you have anything you’d like me to pass along to all the awesome POTA developers, let me know!

Oh no. Already having a scheme for radio-rocket version 3, with a fairly specific use case. Chill Vance. Finish the first 2. Don’t start another project…

The corn in the fields is starting to get cut, so I just clicked order on a batch of engines so the kids and I can do a launch day sometime later this month for their rockets, and for the Radio Rocket V1’s maiden test flight.

Think I’m going to change the code on the radio rocket version 2, so that instead of json packets, I just send a stream of characters, in a scheme kind of like our #hamradio stuff does for cat control. Should be able to fit a lot more data in a single packet if I’m not using up the space for all the json formatting stuff (I.e. all the {},: charters and dictionary references etc)

Electronics bay for version 2 of the radio rocket looks shocked.

@smitty I just ordered a usb isolator with the external power input based on the convo from the recent workbench episode, so you can report back that you guys successfully helped someone spend money during that episode 😛

Did a first ever for me today - tiling a shower ceiling. I’ve done all our floors, and some walls, but this was my first upside-down tile work. So far they’re all still up (but i guess the next 24 hours will be the true test?) and I only got a ‘little’ sloppy in the process.

I've pinged out some random stuff, but I finally typed up a quick summary of the stuff around Radio Rocket version 2, and did a quick video to show how 2nd version will fit together.

https://n3vem.com/blog/RadioRocketV2/