Misc. Activities

Friday - Today was a very quiet day for me. I set up some Christmas decorations around our lot. Just several strings of lights around the porch and a couple of inflatable things in the yard. Nothing to win any prizes, but I am trying to tie it in with HomeAssistant to turn them on/off based on sunset and time-of-day. The hassle is that the Raspberry Pis don't have a real-time clock.

I manually set the date and time and set the shed lights to turn on 30 minutes before sunset. 

Later - For some reason, HomeAssistant was ten minutes late. I can't figure out why. But at least the automation works.

I played FT8 again today, but on 15m instead of 10m and 20m. I picked up twenty contacts very quickly, with several from South America, Canada, and the Caribbean. These locations were along what is referred to as the "grey line," which marks sunset.

Monday - Saturday was spent setting up holiday decorations around the park. Lots of extension cords are needed for the lights around the tree trunks. Plus playing around with FT8. I'm over a hundred contacts so far, with the furthest in Western Australia. It really depends. 

Next Monday - Last Saturday, several of us formed a team for the park gingerbread house contest. Everything needed to be edible but they allowed us to use hot glue as the provided icing wasn’t took a long time to harden. I made a batch of royal icing which hardened pretty quickly. We used this for most of the decorations. 

It’s been a while since I last posted.