Well after four months I have been able to take the time to get this website looking more like a site I would want to visit day in and day out.
Today was a busy day for me. I started the morning with my daily walk with my beautiful wife. When we got home I noticed our neighbor was working on his barn that he has been wanting to finish. There was a concrete truck poring concrete for the foundation. Now that the foundation is set, next week will be the start for the finish. The big question I had was, what was the cost of the concrete. I have a tower for my HAM radios that will need anchors for the guide wires. Each one will be a cubic yard of concrete barred four feet underground. Two years ago I hand mixed 32 bags of concrete for the base and I don’t want to do that again.
I have big plans. For starters, I am being required by Mrs. J to remove the antennas from the roof which is why I have been looking for a good tower for almost two years. I was blessed to find one that is mine for the taking but it will take a crane to get it down. Last Monday I went with a fellow HAM to look at it and it was not setup safely. They used muffler clamps and instead of the U-bolt, they used lag-bolts into the side of the house to secure it. So the safest way to remove it will be to rent a crane. Our Plan is to hook to it from the roof and lay it down so I can take it apart on the ground
The home owners are excited to get it off their house and have friends that have smaller towers that they want removed as well. That will give me 100 feet of tower.
I will be able to take down my small TV antenna and cameras I have looking around my property, and move them to the new tower. The other thing our HAM group is working on is connecting three of our repeaters with microwave network connections so we can link the repeaters without using the internet. Right now we are using hot-spots and they are linked over the internet. With this tower I will be able to link to the network and be a gateway to the internet.
The other thing I did today in this 80 degree heat, Cut down a tree while Mrs. J was in town delivering eggs. It is one of three I need to remove so our main solar array isn’t shaded in the mornings. When I set it up six years ago this wasn’t a problem. Now we don’t get much sun on them till close to noon. I built a small array to help with the early mornings and the late evens to give us just that little extra. So far after building the small array, we have been not had to fall back to the grid, over two months now.
