Day 16 - Quartzsite, AZ

A nice end to a nice day. I ran the generator this morning for a couple of hours then the solar took the battery bank to 92% by evening. Given the shallow sun angle, that’s about as good as I can get. I haven’t looked to see how much power we are producing but it’s something like 75 amp-hours per day or about 17% of our capacity.

One of the attendees brought his Moog Synthesizer and played for about 15 minutes. He just started building it four months ago and has been teaching himself to play. He was pretty good. He said that learning to play was the last item left in his bucket list. He sailed solo around the world as the prior list item which is why the “Captain” hat.

There are a lot of unusual mobile antennas around here and I’m looking forward to the mobile HF antenna tour tomorrow afternoon. “HF” is high frequency with wavelengths of 10 to 160 meters. There was a presentation on mesh networks for ham radio. I wasn’t sure what to expect. Apparantly, fequencies that accessible to ham radio licensees are adjacent to the WiFi frequencies. With different firmware loaded on common WiFi hardware such as Ubiquity and TP-Link, you can access those frequencies and set up your own mesh network with distances of up to 50 miles. They have it set up here at Quartzfest and tying in to a ham operator in town with a high speed connection. I need to look into this more.

Late this afternoon and into the evening, the musical instruments came out. They tried hard to get some audience participation but most people, like me, preferred to just be entertained. It was a nice way to end the day.

And, there is enough bandwidth on Verizon to upload pictures.