Day 1 - Big Spring, TX

Thursday - We left the park at about 10am heading northwest to Big Spring, TX. Very little interstate on this route which is a good thing. I discovered a small water leak from my faucet installation. The cold water connection is dripping where the faucet connects to the Pex. I’ll try tightening it this evening. I should have installed shutoff valves on each line. 

The first part of the trip was through the hill country and very scenic. We are now going through mostly ranch land and it’s greener than the last time we were through here. 

Later - The fix for the leak was simple. Just tightening the connection. I thought that I had pinched the rubber washer. We are in an RV park so full hookups. We found that with the refrigerator, portable freezer, StarLink, and the converter running, we don’t quite have enough capacity on our Victron inverter to run the A/C. 

Tomorrow, we are continuing northwest into New Mexico. 

Only a Couple More Days!

Saturday - I adjusted the antenna for 20m while waiting for the midday test session to start. I used the NanoVNA to manually tune the JPC-12. It worked well with an SWR of almost 1.0. On 20m, I made about 40 contacts during the test session, so much more activity. 

Tuesday - I took the Ural out this morning to burn up the gas in the tank. I almost made it to Bandera before turning around. Around 5 miles from Hondo, I needed to switch to "Reserve", so the timing was just about right. The Exxon station at the east end of town had non-ethanol gas. I filled up, and it took 4.4 gallons. The bike ran much better on the way back to the park. Normally, 60-62 mph would be about all I could get, and the engine would bog down and lose power with more throttle. Not the case with the non-ethanol gas. It kept accelerating all the way up to 70 mph. This is how the Ural used to run in Alaska, where all of the gas is non-ethanol. I'm undecided on whether I should only use non-ethanol, as it is more expensive.

Yesterday's project was replacing the faucet in the class C. Wayne, another member in the park, gave us the faucet, which was brand new, still in the box, from Alliance. He said that his wife didn't care for the finish. This is a huge upgrade for the class C. We can now easily refill the Berkey without needing cups or saucepans. I needed to order a couple of fittings from Amazon, and they arrived overnight. Less than 24 hours from order to delivery.

While waiting for the midday test session, I have been running WSJT-x on 20m, making FT8 contacts. Over 35 contacts. No international contacts today, but it is the middle of the day. 

This afternoon, while waiting to see if anyone shows up for the afternoon test, I reconfigured the JPC-12 for 40m, and checked with the NanoVNA, before starting up Winlink Express and Vara HF. There was one email waiting to be downloaded, and the download speed was a blistering 382 Bytes/minute, not per second but per minute. The message was 2313 Bytes and took almost 6 minutes to download! This would make a 300 baud modem connection seem fast. I was using a station in Brownsville, TX, which was 376km away. I still think the technology is kind of cool.

Almost Ready

Thursday - The day started out cool-ish, but it was pretty warm and muggy by the afternoon. I was able to hit the Brownsville Winlink RMS station this morning to pick up my Winlink email, al6t@winlink.org. BTW, RMS = Radio Mail Server in case you were wondering. Very little FT8 activity on 40m today. I think I picked up only a handful of new contacts. All of them under 500miles. I switched to 20m and picked up an additional seven contacts almost immediately.

I laid out most of my hand tools today to try to figure out which ones I might need this summer. Unfortunately, that amounted to most of them. I picked up another zip-top toolbag since the old knapsack I was using had developed some large tears over the years. It was one of the vendor freebies from a conference.

Bridget noticed that the skylight over the shower was dripping water into the shower, so I just picked up a couple of tubes of Dicor self-leveling sealant to re-seal the skylight. 

Friday - The first thing this morning, even before coffee, I went up on the roof of the class C to add another bead of Dicor around the shower vent. There were some possible leaks, but nothing obvious. No cracks in the existing sealant. There was another dab of old Dicor in the middle of the roof, so I just cleaned the spot and added another layer of Dicor on top of it.

I tried FT8 on 40m again today but got very few contacts. I was too lazy to adjust the antenna to 20m as it was hot and muggy all afternoon.

Still Packing and Winlink-Wednesday

Wednesday - We've been getting lots of storms lately. This was last night. It was windy with rain, but not as much as the surrounding area. This morning, while walking to coffee, the streets weren't as flooded as they were after similar storms. There was some debris from trees, again, not as much as in some other storms.

It was clear, hot, sunny, and very humid by the afternoon. I continued to move stuff out of the class A and the shed into the class C that I "needed" for this summer trip. I don't plan on taking the Blackstone griddle or the large Starlink storage container this time. I moved the portable refrigerator/freezer and plugged it in. Since we picked up the small refrigerator for the shed, we don't have to bring all of the refrigerator/freezer items with us like we did last summer. The portable unit will actually get real use on this trip.

I still plan to bring the ham radio with me and this time I plan to bring the ATAS-120 antenna. I had forgotten it last year.

I checked in with Winlink-Wednesday again on 40m. This just means that I sent a specially formatted email message using the radio as the transport. I used an RMS stations in Lubbock and Brownsville. The JPC-12 vertical antenna worked well. Very low bit rate as in sub-1200baud modem speed.