Getting Ready to Go

The weather has turned grim as evidenced by the exhaust from the power plant (right center) not going straight up but flattening out and turning towards the ground. Normally the warm exhaust rises towards cooler and cooler air. But now the colder air is near the ground, the exhaust heads down. This is due to a temperature inversion.

The danger associated with a temperature inversion is all the smoke and other particulate exhaust gets trapped near the ground. Ice builds up on the particles and you have ice fog which you could breathe in and the soot particle is now in your lungs. Our home is barely high enough to be above the inversion. If you are above the inversion, the temperature can be considerably higher than the low areas such as near the airport or North Pole, AK. For example, right now it's -37°F in North Pole, -35°F at the Fairbanks International Airport and "only" -24°F here at the house. There is a reason to get a home in the hills around here...

It's now time to start packing for Arizona. Back in November, I brought back the ActionPacker on the left with some tools that I thought I would need. The bin on the right is full of gifts, faucets, filters, etc. for the RV. Also in the pile of stuff are two radios gifted to me from Andrew. They had belonged to his dad who was a ham radio operator before he passed away. I'm taking down a dual-band, Kenwood HT which is probably much better than the Baofeng HT that I had picked up last year and a 2M, 50 watt mobile. I've tried the Boafeng HT in AZ but it didn't have enough power to hit the repeater. This Icom mobile has ten times the power but I haven't been able to test it since I don't have an antenna here. The Icom also needs a little bit of repair and the tools are in AZ

Also in the pile are three Raspberry Pi 3's and one Pi 2 (spare). The Pi 3's are for charge controller monitoring, Kodi media server, and 70 cm DMR hotspot. I brought them back so I could update the software using the faster Internet at the house. I plan on bringing some food items down such as my homemade granola, that delicious ramen I found at Costco and some Chinese sausage that was on sale at the Asian food store on Aurora. Maybe I'll bake up another batch of cookies as well if there is room.