Day 81, 82, 83, 84 - Lakehills, TX - TT

Thursday (81) - After all those years in AK, it's nice to be able to pick up ripe avocados in the grocery store. Avocado toast is still a favorite for breakfast. All the fresh produce available around here is nice. 

Since Bridget is in AK. I went ahead and signed up for quite a few amateur radio test sessions all the way through next Wednesday. On Thursday, I'll be heading for the San Antonio airport for a short 3 days in AK. I'll need to get a Covid test on Tuesday morning. That will be well under 72 hours before my flight to AK starts. 

Right now, I'm between test sessions so I decided to try and make chicken adobo. I don't think I've made it before though I am doing a couple of substitutions within the recipe. Liquid aminos instead of soy sauce and apple cider vinegar instead of cane vinegar (I've never heard of this ingredient before). Plus, I added some dark soy sauce to the braising liquid for color. It's simmering away and with a wonderful aroma. I ended up tasting pretty good though I think I could've used more vinegar.

Friday (82) - I just finished the first testing session and it's starting to get a bit warm. I think that this is the high temperature for the day so I may not need the A/C. Being Friday, the place is starting to fill up with the weekenders complete with their outdoor speakers. The campground is incredibly quiet during the week.

Yesterday, I connected the Ubiquity radio in the RV to the campground WiFi. It really isn't that far away but the signal level was -85db. Very low. But it did connect and I was getting about 100kb/s of throughput. This turned out to be too low even for the dmr transmissions as there was about 20% packet loss. Since it's a digital signal, the audio sounds pretty poor.

Someone had asked about the range of the hot spot. I took the Anytone radio while walking around the campground. Using a hotspot service called "Parrot", I called the hot spot with a short message and the hot spot repeats your message. I needed to crank up the output power of the Anytone but was able to reach the hot spot from over ¼ mile away.

I made my Covid-19 PCR test appointment for 9:30am on Tuesday.

Saturday (83) - Two test sessions today. One at around noon and one around 4. This is the time the Zoom sessions usually start now when the tests start. 

After the session, there was a lengthy discussion about capabilities of the Anytone DMR radios. Even more RVs came in today. All looking for the mythical 50amp full-hookup site. 

Sunday (84) - A quiet day. I modified the 8266 circuit board in the right-front armrest to add in a relay to control the porch light. I then created an automation that turns on the porch light at sunset but only if the awning light is turned off. If the awning light is on, it turns on the porch light when it shuts off. In either case, the porch light is turned off at sunrise. I had changed the bulb in the porch light to an LED while we were in Harlingen. So leaving the light on all night doesn't seem to be an unreasonable thing to do.

Even more RVs came in today. Some had tags indicating that they were only staying for a couple of days but were intent on finding a sewer site. Doesn't make any sense.