Today out in the blazing 80 degree heat, I managed to get the floor up to the treehouse and get it installed. The Doug fir is about 140' tall, and is 19" in diameter at the level of the floor. I figure it's around a hundred years old or there abouts.

I used two sheets of tongue-in-groove plywood, on top of the 2x4's and 2x6's that I managed to get put up last year. It was a little bit difficult to get the hole in the middle for the tree cut right... Had to refactor both the tree bark and the cutouts on both sides. It didn't turn out exactly square as I'd hoped it would... but it should be good enough. There's only a small gap in one corner that I can fix easily.

Next it's time to cut out the trap door, and figure out how to build the stairway up to it. Then, it's walls, roof and siding. More to follow...

I finally got tired of waiting for my old slow computer so I decided to upgrade it to newer technology. I got a Biostar motherboard with lots of features, for only $56. I got an intel Core 2 Quad 2.5GHz chip, so it should have a bit of horsepower I think. It's not the fastest thing on the planet, but I don't think it's too underpowered either. I got 4GB of DDR2 800 RAM, which is the max the motherboard can use. That was one limitation, but didn't seem to be a big concern since I wasn't going to use more than 4GB anyway.
I also got an external USB port for the rear panel, because this board has a total of 10 USB ports on it. I also got a card reader with an additional front USB port on it. As it turns out, the Antec case has a card reader on it, and it isn't interchangeable with this internal one, so I will just use the built-in unit. The board has built-in graphics, an nVidia GeForce 7100 which uses shared RAM. Not so good for gaming and the like, but I can make do with it. It has both a DVI and a VGA port on the motherboard for dual video output. It has 4 SATA2 ports, supporting RAID0, 1, 5, and 10. However, I am only using one IDE drive on this desktop. I have another one of these boards in a Windows Home server box, running all 4 SATA drives and a couple IDE drives as well. It also boasts a Gig-E network card and high-def audio built in to the $56 motherboard...


I took apart the case, and began to remove the old boards. It's an Asus board with a single core Athlon 64 running 2.2GHz, so it has a bit of power. It was much higher end a couple years ago when I got it. The case is an Antec Aria, for a small footprint, but still takes a standard ATX size motherboard.
 It is kind of tight in there... The DVD and hard drive mount on the top in a swing-up detachable arrangement, which makes it easier to get in to the board. The old heatsink and cpu are much bigger than the new one, so there will be a bit more air space inside.

Here is the new board installed, but not yet hooked up. Note the three white IDC connectors near the edge of the board - those are 6 USB ports, the other 4 are already on the back panel. I did not end up using the 4-port card since the 2 front USB ports and the card readers used up 4 ports already anyway. I continued hooking it all up, and everything seemed to fit properly.


Here is the other side view of the completed unit, just a half-hour to get it all swapped out and running again.


There are a lot of cables, but there's much more free air space now.

Vista's processor rating is 5.9, the RAM is 4.8. Graphics for Aero is 3.3, and Gaming Graphics rating is 3.0 so barely enough to get by. With the RAM, the CPU, and the motherboard, total upgrade price came to $400 even. It's a bit pricey, but the 45nm technology on the quad core chip gives me a lot more total computing power for a lot less power consumption and dissipation. I figure that total power savings over the old board will save me the cost of the chip ($266) over its three year planned lifetime.

Not a bad box for just a few C notes. We'll see how well it runs Visual Studio now...

Here is a talley of today's spam, all of which ended up in junk mail, thankfully.

Prescription Drugs      4
Viagra, etc.              7
Male Enhancement     9
Won the lottery!!       2
Money to lend           3
Software sales          2
Porn                        1
Money laundering       10
    From Nigeria :

FROM THE DESK OF MR. WILLIE OBIANO
FIDELITY BANK NIGERIA PLC
2, KOFO ABAYOMI STREET ,
VICTORIA ISLAND LAGOS-NIGERIA

Degree/Diploma          2
Stock pump & dump    1


What's your spam breakdown? Be sure to leave comments so we can compare and contrast. This is important stuff...

Ballard is sort of a different little animal... a Seattle neighborhood on the west side, just north of downtown a mile or so. The phrase "ya, sure, you betcha" will probably be spoken at some point. Don't be alarmed. That's just how they roll down there.

We went for the standard tourist attraction there, the Hiram M. Chittenden locks. On the far side of the locks, beyond the dam,

there is a fish ladder with windows under water where we can view the salmon making their way back to lake Washington for spawning.

(Note fish in lower window.) We only had a half dozen fish visible today, but that isn't too bad considering it's just the beginning of July. The fish traffic really picks up in August and goes through September. There were a couple nice looking fish though... 28" for the largest, and it looked like about 20" for the smaller ones.

I'd eat em.

There is a very nice park there, with lots of grass for a nice picnic lunch, which we did not make use of on this visit. We watched a whole lot of boats lock through in the large lock. One of the boats was a very large yacht "Piano Bar" from the Cayman Islands
 
(at least registered there - someone apparently knows how to spell off-shore bank account...). Apparently it's owned by the founder of the Yellowstone Club (according to Googevil). Anyway, this massive thing rose almost 20 feet in the large lock from sea level to lake level. It is always pretty cool to see boats rising and falling in the locks.

In the park today there was a complete orchestra, giving us all a nice bit of music to listen to on a perfect summer day. The temperature was a perfect 70 degrees, with a light breeze. Sunny and warm, just right to be outside in the park. Should have brought my emergency backup frisbee with us from the car, but didn't think of it until later. What kind of a slacker ex-Califoreigner am I anyway. Totally, dude. But I digress.

Apparently the small lock is having some issues with its gate hinges, so it isn't being used much this summer. Too bad, because it sure is nicer to lock through being able to tie off to the floating cleats rather than having to man a line, reel it in, and keep it taught for the 20 minutes or so it takes to flood the large lock. It would be even harder if there are a couple more boats rafted on too... I've taken my boat(s) through the large and small locks both, and the small lock is definitely easier. The currents in the large lock are incredible too... looked literally like a river in there when the large lock was filled to lake level. I've seen a swarm of salmon swimming around in a large school in there too, in Augusts past.

It was nice to visit the locks again, perhaps one of these days I will get the boat ship-shape again and lock it through. Or I could just sit around and blog. Hmmm...

Well, it's independence day again. Flags are flying. It's raining. Cassanova owns my shoe.
And he says "Yeah, what's your point?" So everything is pretty much normal around here.

Did finally get around to putting up a swing on the corner of the partially started treehouse. You can't see it in the picture, but it's what the ladder is leaning up against. The floor joists are all that's built, and up 9' on the doug fir. So I figured I'd hang the swing off the corner. It sure did make all the wood rock up there when my son was testing the swing. I had intended to put up a diagonal support for each of the 4 corners but hadn't done it yet. It was required for this one, and it made the corner rock solid, even when swinging. He sure likes to swing on his new swing too, so that's a bonus. Someday I will actually get to building the rest of the dang treehouse.

The Segway 2's control unit runs on a CR-2430 lithium ion watch battery. Just thought I'd share that tidbit.

It's not a great design in my opinion to have a non-rechargeable battery. They could have designed in a loop coil with a diode and put in an alternating current magnetic field in the unit so that the field induces a current in the loop and it then could charge a small battery.

If my $50 electric toothbrush can do this why cant the $5000 Segway...

"CQ Field Day, CQ Field Day from kilowatt seven romeo ... K7R!"

That phrase is now permanently burned into my synapses. After operating or logging for almost the entire time from 11am Saturday to 11am Sunday, that phrase has been said literally thousands of times. I did take a nap between 2am and 5am Sunday, but basically that was just because the noise on the 80m band was so loud and my back was thrashed from sitting at a wooden picnic table for hours and hours. We operated continuously either calling CQ or scanning and pouncing on others calling CQ. It was interesting some times that we could hear two parties clearly who couldn't hear each other very well at all.

From what I heard, the propagation wasn't very good. Most of the contacts I made were along the west coast. Alaska, BC, Washington, Oregon, California. We did get some southwest and east coast stations too, but mostly on the west coast. The antenna was a sky-loop, suspended up about 60 feet, from half a dozen ropes to tall trees all around the perimeter of the lawn. It was a pretty amazing sight for a temporary antenna. Thanks to Icom for letting us borrow the 756 Pro III radios, those were pretty cool. I learned a little about the rig, but mostly just enough to operate for the contest. It sure would have been fun to make some foreign contacts for sure though. Here is a video from a guy in Seattle (K7HV) who made contact with one of our stations as his second contact.

As a team, we made lots of contacts in a lot of different modes. I personally operated the SSB station on 20m, 40m, and 80m for the day. We were operating 5A (5 simultaneous transmitters), completely independent of commercial power, on a total of three generators. I don't have the final numbers yet but I think the team logged over a thousand contacts. We used the N3FJP logging software which is user friendly but unfortunately relies on continuous network connectivity which is hard to keep running 24/7. I hooked my laptop up to the 27" wide screen LCD TV so the operator could get a clear picture of the software with the callsign and location and make sure both the operator and the logger got the data correct. That part wasn't a hardship...

The generators were fairly reliable until we realized that one was putting out only about 70V so we had to shut it down. The second one ran fine until 9PM when its solenoid failed, and the crew had to figure out how to repair the thing in the heat and growing darkness... They got the job done and got it back on line within an hour. Since we had the radios running direct from AC power from the generators, not only did we lose all wifi communications, we also lost contact time in the contest. Next time we will run all the radios off of car batteries, charged by an Astron charger running off the gen. We probably could have run the radio for 4 hours just off the battery I figure. My generator has a direct 12VDC output as well as the AC, so I could use that for a much more reliable and direct approach to emergency power.

The weather was hot as hell. And I've been there (SoCa), so I know. The thermometer under the awning at my operating station read 95 for almost the entire day Saturday. It didn't cool down to even 80 until after 9pm. There were few breezes and they only blew hot air around. It was really pretty brutal being out on the grass for that long in that heat.

We shut down Sunday at 11am, just as it was beginning to top 90 degrees again. Fortunately, we were all packed up and leaving the park by 1PM. We had a large crew, so cleanup was pretty fast. All in all there were some fun times, but the heat and bugs at night really took most of the fun out of it for me. For sure the next time I do emergency communications, I will be operating INSIDE my trailer instead of next to it.