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Post by papaof2 on Nov 28, 2022 23:10:26 GMT -6
Do you ever use weather.com to check the forecast for 400 miles West of you? Basically to tell you how bad your weather will be in s day or two. Here's the forecast for Tuesday - but 400 miles West.
Variable clouds with strong thunderstorms. Damaging winds, large hail and possibly a tornado with some storms. High 67F. Winds S at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 90%.
Don't think we'll be going out on Wednesday :-( The local TV weather-guesser isn't saying "tornadoes" but that will depend on how much the storm weakens as it moves East - or possibly strengthens as it moves a bit South.
Yes, I have a flashlight at hand and I have two new rechargeable head lamps (Vont brand, from a two-fer Woot sale on Nov 21) that are also charged and tested. Three (4?) levels of brightness in the white LED (plus strobe, of course!) and a couple levels of red LEDs (plus strobe). The light is small, lightweight and has an angle adjustment (in front of you to at your feet).
The red LEDs would be great if you didn't want to waken someone sleeping or if you're trying to move in near total darkness (possibly a good tool for smart burglars?)
I haven't yet run one of the lights to shutdown so I don't know what the real-world battery life is. Maybe Tuesday - very possibly real-world testing Wednesday ;-)
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Post by gipsy on Nov 29, 2022 13:24:15 GMT -6
You tube has some storm chasers on the storms right now. It could be really bad.
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Post by papaof2 on Nov 30, 2022 2:57:58 GMT -6
We're on the bottom edge of that big storm.
The "Rain/Thunder" in the overnight weather announed itself with a bright flash, followed maybe 10 seonds later by thunder that shook the house - concrete-block-filled-with-cement foundation, brick exterior does not shake easily...
There was another of those perhaps 2 minutes later but the hours since have just been rain, ocasionally very heavy rain and more rain.
There's a new stream running across part of the property in front of the house - and it oontinues downstream when it gets to the road...
Our power co-op has 7 meters out, urrently about 3 hours stale, but not really much rain-related activity - yet. I suspect there will be a lot of "fallen tree" reports, as 1.25 inches of rain with "locally heavier amounts" provide an excellent reason for trees to fall - especially big trees in older neighborhoods, where those trees can do lots of damage... I expect the TV newscasts to have several impressive images of big trees down over small houses.
I was just interrupted by a "Severe Thunderstorm Warning" for part of our county - maybe 10 miles from us. I won't be surprised if there's a warning with our location included in the next 30 minutes of so, as radar has that cell headed for us and I'm hearing thunder. At the moment, the weather radar is only about 6 minutes behind. That warning is for the long storm cell that runs across Alabama and halfway across Mississippi and it's covered with tornado watches and warnings in AL and MS. We're also getting some farm boy rain now - the kind where his description would involve the interaction of a bovine and a flat rock ;-)
And yes, I have a good flashlight in my pocket, a rechargeable on top of the fridge and the two new Vont head lights are charged and checked and close at hand. The solar backup system got its regular 10% disharge test two days ago so it's working fine and is again fully charged and ready for service.
Radar is now 11 minutes behind. Time to close that page and open it again to force a fresh display.
The updated radar shows a wider (and darker red) band about 30 minutes out. That band has to be a couple hundred miles long, so we will most probably get the forecast "Rain/Thunder" for multiple hours...
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Post by papaof2 on Nov 30, 2022 3:29:52 GMT -6
Our power co-op's outages are up to 306, with the biggest group being 285 - and right in the middle of where the thunderstorm warning was located.
The other power co-op in the county has fewer than 5 meters out (maybe that's "so far"?)
Georgia Power has 2560 meters out across the state, with the biggest single outage being 1079 meters near Gainesville.
I'm certain that all the numbers will increase when people wake up cold - if their power is out their furnace will not be trying to warm the house from the current outside temp of 56F. I'm helping the room I'm in by having the gas logs on - the flames also provide a degree of psychological warming ;-)
We're currently in a short break in the thunderstorms and it's just rain - all the way to the state line. However, one or the other of the two legs of this storm will come over us in the next hour or so. I'm typing on a laptop that says it has 5 hours of battery remining and it uses a wireless mouse so I'm not likely to be close to anything running on grid power if we do get local lightning.
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Post by gipsy on Dec 7, 2022 19:22:28 GMT -6
It's been a weird day. There is absolutely no wind not even enough to rustle the few remaining hanging leaves and that don't take much.
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Post by gipsy on Feb 16, 2023 17:21:12 GMT -6
Lets see. It was snowing when I got up, then it rained, then the sun shown, then it started snowing again, and it ended with a couple hours of sleet.
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Post by papaof2 on Feb 16, 2023 17:37:49 GMT -6
Sounds like some of our weather - if you don't like the current weather, check back in an hout or so.
However, we do have "Heavy Rain" forecast for late today. From the hourly rainfall potentials, probably 1.25" in 4 hours. Not much wind, but that much rain could lead to power outages: vehicle accidents during/after the rain, trees falling some hours later because of softened ground. At least I know the backup system is good for at least 8 hours (from the recent outage of 7 hours, 59 minutes). It's maybe 15-20 degrees warmer today than then, so probably more hours of available power because the furnace blower (460 watts) will run much less. Good to have a spreadsheet to be able to compute those things and nice to remember enough of it to be able to do an off rhe cuff estimate.
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Post by gipsy on Feb 22, 2023 15:47:18 GMT -6
Olive is here. The trees have a coating of ice, but it is raining otherwise. Not going out today.
Glad our power lines are underground.
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Post by papaof2 on Feb 22, 2023 19:00:24 GMT -6
Our power is underground - but only up to the main road. Then it's aerial along tree-lined roads for 2-3 miles to the substation. Fortunately, we only have rain in the forecast for the next week - and today's official high was 81, although the thermometer on the screened porch showed a bit higher than that.
Recently we've had more problems from a wiring junction that's a mile or so from us. It's at the right point to kill power to 676 meters (including us and a grocery store) and we had an 8 hour outage 28-29 January and a 2 hour outage a year and a half ago. Same failure point; same number of meters out. Until a couple of years ago, I wasn't tracking where the failures were or how many meters were affected so there may have been more failures at that same place...
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Post by gipsy on Feb 22, 2023 19:11:45 GMT -6
They built a generating plant using Methane from the garbage dump about a mile from the house so we do ok.
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Post by papaof2 on Feb 23, 2023 18:05:50 GMT -6
Do your electric outlets ever smell bad? ;-)
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Post by gipsy on Feb 23, 2023 19:04:10 GMT -6
lol
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Post by gipsy on Mar 2, 2023 9:13:20 GMT -6
Yesterday it was 55 and tomorrow they are forecasting up to 4 in of snow.
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Post by papaof2 on Apr 27, 2023 8:55:57 GMT -6
Hour of showers, hour of light rain, six hours of rain, two hours of thunderstorms, five hours of scattered thunderstorms, hour of isolated thunderstorms, two hours of scattered thunderstorms, hour of cloudy, six hours of scattered thunderstorms, hour of isolated thunderstorms.
Think we might have some power hits today, tonight and tomorrow?
Early today, Georgia Power had 1089 meters out from one tree down. I think the odds are good for our power co-op to have a number of outages in the next 24 hours or so :-(
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Post by papaof2 on Apr 28, 2023 8:22:12 GMT -6
We were a part of those outages. Hit on the power, room goes dark except for the TV and the USB LED strip plugged into the back of the TV (nice to have that 800 watt pure sine wave UPS I keep posting when it's on sale at Woot). Power was off maybe a minute.
However, as frequently happens with a major glitch on the power (power hit or nearby lightning strike) one garage door opener was triggered and then locked up with the door up. Resetting that requires removing power from that opener - either going down to the basement and turning that breaker OFF and then back ON about 20 seconds later or I can climb up into the bed of my truck which gets me high enough to reach the ceiling-mounted outlet for that opener and unplug it, wait 20 seconds and plug it back in.
I haven't done that in a while and my body was not happy about it :-( Good that I have a new, unopened bottle of Rx pain meds.
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Post by feralferret on Apr 28, 2023 11:33:59 GMT -6
I recently had a UPS that would randomly turn off with no warning under normal conditions. It turns out that this was a symptom of the battery going bad.
If you experience these symptoms, check the battery voltage with it disconnected. Of course turn off and unplug the UPS first for safety.
I didn't have another of the correct battery, but I had a slightly larger (physically and capacity) used good battery. I made a cable to extend the leads outside the case to reach the battery sitting next to the UPS. It has worked perfectly.
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Post by papaof2 on Apr 28, 2023 12:25:52 GMT -6
The only consideration in using other than the original battery is how long the electronics in the UPS can run without overheating. If your 800 watt-rated UPS is running a 150 watt load, it can probably run happily for a very long time. If the original battery provided 3 minutes run time at full power, you probably don't want to use a bigger battery so you can run that unit at 800 watts for an hour because the UPS usually has no way of getting rid of excess heat - very few small UPS units have a built-in fan. If you can add an adequate fan (maybe fans?), you might be OK using a much larger battery to give a UPS longer run time. There is at least one video on YouTube about using a UPS as your permanent inverter in a solar backup system. That should get a LOT of thought because you're probably planning to have some nearly continuous loads (fridge or freezer or small window A/C) on that backup system and you need to know how much heat the electronics in the UPS can handle and for how long - not something most people ever give any thought to :-( They seem to approach that modification with the same lack of thought as the ones who try to start a 14" or 20" chop saw on an inverter only to smoke that inverter. It's entirely possible the chop saw has a 40 amp or larger start current and the 4000 watt inverter isn't designed to handle the 4800+ watts of startup power for the number of seconds that saw needs to get up to speed. If the lights dim when you start a motorized tool on grid power, it probably needs more startup power than your inverter can provide. I have a GS10 "Soft Starter" from www.raymondinnovations.com/collections/soft-starters to drop the startup current on my circular saw to something that the 1600 watt inverter generator or the 2000 watt pure sine wave inverter can handle. It should also work for the 10" table saw but I would have to be careful about feed speed when cutting thick lumber with either saw. If I need either of those saws, I probably need more that 1600 watts of power and I have a 3000 watt 120 volt gen and a 5000 watt 120/240 volt gen for the bigger loads. My 810 watt rated pure sine wave UPS powers the A/V cabinet (50" plasma TV, DVR, DVD player/recorder, Blu-Ray player, VHS recorder/player, Android TV "box") but the maximum load is the TV (150 watts with an all-white screen) plus the DVR (20 watts) so a max of 170 watts. That's about 21% of the UPS' rated load, so using bigger batteries (it has two 12 volt, 7AH batteries for a 24 volt supply) to run that power level for a longer time would probably be OK. However, if I did that, I would be checking the temperature of the guts of the UPS every five minutes for the first hour or so (IR thermometer) to ensure it would not overheat. I tend to be gentle with electronics and especially power electronics (inverters, UPS units, big batteries, big battery chargers) and I do get very good life from those items. I replaced the original set of batteries for the solar backup system when they were almost 9 years old (typical AGM battery life is in the 3 to 5 year range) so I got unusually long life from that set of batteries. I have a modified sine wave inverter that has lived in the truck I'm driving for number of years. It's rated at 140 watts continuous, 200 watts for 5 minutes. I've used it to run heating pads, laptops, electronic test equipment, baby bottle warmers and I don't know how much else. The current truck will be 17 in September so I've had the inverter longer than that because I used it in the previous truck.
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Post by feralferret on Apr 28, 2023 18:12:37 GMT -6
The UPC (350 VA) I'm running with the external battery powers two devices, my cable modem and my router. The telephone service (VOIP) is built into the modem. Both are very small loads. I also have a 1500 VA UPC that was used for the servers where I used to work before it was replaced during a server upgrade. It runs my computer and monitor, and also my cordless phone base at my desk. I replaced all four 12V batteries with new ones that I got for free from work because the were overlooked when it was time to do a maintenance charge on them while sitting in inventory for use in repairing railroad EOT (end of train) devices. EOT devices are what send air pressure telemetry for the braking system to the locomotive from the back end of the train. They can also be remotely actuated from the locomotive to initiate emergency braking from the rear of the train, cutting the time in half to fully engage all of the brakes compared to a locomotive front of train only initiation. Most also have GPS receivers and cell modems that send position data back to the railroad front office. They mount on the tail end of the last railcar and have a red strobe that comes on in the dark. The internal generator operates off of the air supply for the braking system. This is what replaced the caboose on most trains. They also internally log the GPS data. I used my charger/desulfator on all of them to bring them back to essentially full capacity. I have salvaged quite a few older lead acid batteries with this device over the last several years. I miss all of the stuff I used to be able to get free from the recycle bins at work now that I am retired. Latest generation EOT. It has been on the market for almost two years. www.wabteccorp.com/trainlink-NG5-EOT?inline
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Post by papaof2 on Apr 29, 2023 8:37:57 GMT -6
I've seen the "red box" hanging on in place of a caboose and I guessed at it's capabilities since I learned that emergency braking could be initiated from the caboose in a "Mayday: Air Disaster" episode that about a runaway train. The extra engines that were picked up to help with downhill braking did NOT have working dynamic braking - but the engineer wasn't told that useful bit of knowledge. When the trainman in the caboose decided they were going too fast and got no radio response from the loco, he hit the emergency brakes - but that disconnected the dynamic braking so the train went faster - something he didn't know would happen.
It's amazing how much you can learn on The Smithsonian Channel ;-)
I'm a ham and once had some WabCo handie-talkies then some surplus Motorola handie-talkies from the military (I was in Air Force MARS). I ran across another ham who had designed a frequency synthesizer for that generation of Motorola talkies so I invested the cost of crystals for four frequencies in the kit he sold and had coverage of half the two meter ham band. That was long before the prices of commercial synthesized ham talkies had dropped to a reasonable level. Now I have some UV-5R talkies (maybe $30 each?) that cover two meters and 1 1/4 meters and a semi-kit radio from India that covers all the lower bands (80 through 10 meters). I still need to get a good low band antenna up but thumb surgery cost me a year and now chronic and occasionally debilitating back pain have limited how much I can move or climb ladders for two years so I still have a design in my head but I'm not able to get that design up 20 feet in the air :-( Maybe on a good day during the summer...
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Post by feralferret on Apr 29, 2023 17:04:59 GMT -6
Rock bound radios. talk about old tech. BTW I still own a couple of old 2 meter radios with crystals. They don't get much use.
I also have a UV-5R. Unfortunately the ones they are now selling have been frequency restricted on the transmit side. I wish I had gotten a second one before that happened.
Can you give me some info about the HF semi-kit radio? I would appreciate it.
With my vertigo issues, I try to avoid ladders when at all possible. My degenerative spine disease also limits a lot of what I can do and how long I can stand. It really sucks getting old and decrepit.
Yes, going into emergency braking disables the regenerative (dynamic) braking on a locomotive. I did QA for the electronics side of a Wabtec repair and refurbishment facility for eight years. I also did some fill in for the QA person for the air brake area. I know the braking control systems for the locomotives and railcars quite well. Also the "black box" data and video recorders, the PTC (Positive Train Control) systems, the general display and control systems in the locomotives, telemetry systems, and communications. For all of these modern all the back to 1950s technology (which is still in use on the smaller railroads).
My current 2 meter rigs are both Kenwood TK-790 radios that were used as part of the radio modem setups that the railroads use for trackside equipment control and telemetry links. I also have some ICOM UHF radios I am working to setup that were from a radio remote control for locomotives. It could be used for controlling the other locomotives in a consist from the head locomotive, or for remotely controlling an unattended locomotive within a switching yard. The Norfolk Southern yard near where I live has signs posted at the boundary of the yard warning that some locomotives are uncrewed & remote controlled. Talk about having a full size RC train setup! And they get paid to operate it.
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Post by papaof2 on Apr 29, 2023 18:00:42 GMT -6
The basic uBitX info is here: www.hfsignals.com/index.php/ubitx/I think it's now up to version six. The basic version is $129, covers 3 to 30MHz, CW and SSB and up to 10 watts output. The brains of the radio is an Arduino Nano. You will have to supply your own enclosure, power supply, microphone case, speaker to complete the radio. There are dealers who will 3D print a case with your call on the front of it. Version 6 is here: www.hfsignals.com/index.php/ubitx-v6/The "big daddy" sBitX (40 watts out, RPi 4 for control) is here: www.hfsignals.com/index.php/sbitx-v2/Go enjoy, but wipe the drool off before you sit down to type ;-)
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Post by gipsy on Apr 29, 2023 18:08:54 GMT -6
Big Daddy is no longer for sale
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Post by feralferret on Apr 29, 2023 22:15:49 GMT -6
If I can get a few things sold on eBay, I might consider springing for one of these. It's small and light enough to easily store in a Faraday cage.
It's a heckuva lot smaller and lighter than my old Hallicrafters HF transmitter and receiver,
I have several solid state receivers that are smaller, but don't come anywhere close to the sensitivity and selectivity of my old SX-111 receiver.
The only HF antenna I currently have is a 10 meter dipole. I have an old RCI-2950 Ranger transceiver that I can use on 10 meter AM, FM USB, LSB, & CW. It is also capable of operating on 11 meters.
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Post by feralferret on Apr 29, 2023 22:22:13 GMT -6
Big Daddy is no longer for sale Gipsy, I thought Big Daddy was Blanche's ex on Golden Girls.
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Post by papaof2 on Jan 5, 2024 15:03:42 GMT -6
The next model up in that line is available: www.hfsignals.com/index.php/sbitx-v3/Computer is a Raspberry Pi 4 (RPi4) and the radio has all the bells and whistles. $190 for the radio board. $399 complete with RPi4 w/2GB RAM.
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