Giving the Station an Uplift

Dealer’s photo of the lift

Purchased a refurbished 60ft (18m) four wheel drive diesel boom lift with the idea of completing a series of projects at the home QTH, transporting it to the Island QTH to complete similar projects out there, and then selling it onwards.

The hope is that the net costs will be less than leasing a lift for a season, and the high-availability for a prolonged period helps me actually get the work done.

Some of the projects (more as a reminder-to-self):

Home QTH:

• Antenna work with the Skyneedle at its lower level
• Tree trimming (much to do here)
• Putting up a large loop antenna
• Installing a large dipole antenna
• Repair of a small spot of woodpecker damage on the house
• Removal of some unused/obsolete dish antennas from the house
• Power washing the Workshop roofs

Island QTH:

• Tower work, including mounting the T-8 and T-28 log periodics and cabling the tower
• Minor Tree Trimming
• Wasp Nest removal, general inspection, any repairs of the high parts of the Island house
• Installing a large dipole antenna

Work QTH:

• General Tower Servicing
• Servicing Light-packs mounted high on buildings
• Some minor Tree Trimming

I had been on the prowl for a suitable lift since before Covid, but hadn’t come up with a decent affordable unit.  Seems most used lifts are either mechanically very worn out or are too big & expensive. I had recently been offered a used 125ft lift (38m) for less money, but I have no need for such a beast.  This 60ft unit is actually at the larger end of my search parameters (45-60 ft) as it is.  The very big lifts require a semi lowboy setup to move, are very heavy and clumsy, and are expensive to inspect & maintain.

That I know the people who refurbish the 60ft lift, have the unit’s complete service history, learned that it was never a rental unit, and that I have great respect the work team whole took care of it throughout its first ownership.  All of the information helps a lot, especially when the actual lift looks so good.

Suddenly rather excited about every chore that requires a lift!

73

Steve
K9ZW

When the Power Goes Out – Short Outage Realities

Beginning of April 2024 Wisconsin was hit by a late in season Winter Storm.  Wet Heavy snow with lots of wind.

At the home QTH power was out briefly, but the new Kohler Genset kicked in, and we barely noticed with the smooth automatic switch over to Genset and later back to mains power.

Our Washington Island QTH was hit much harder by the storm, as on the Island wires came down in over 60 places, multiple poles snapped and the power to the island was cut because of heavy damage in the main Door peninsula.

Ours was mostly worry, and sudden lack of connectivity to our monitoring systems.  The home is left ticking-over at a lowered temperature, set to 55F (13c) as that temperature avoids setting off the alert systems and gives a couple day buffer if the power is out.

After two days the power did come back on, and here is what my sensor screen showed:

Sensor Screen after two day without power

We heat with a hot water boiler with backup electric baseboard heaters.

As the outside temperatures were around freezing, I was pleased that our temperature drop was fairly minimal.

When we come up during the winter it is a simple adjust the thermostats to normal, and put in a wood fire to bring this place up to temperatures.  (I have bought commercial grade IoT controllable thermostats but have yet to install them.)

When the power is out we lose the Canary monitoring system, as it would be impractical to battery backup each sensor unit.  We have a main Emerson House Minder setup that provides less data, but much better alerting capabilities including having a basement water-on-the-floor sensor.  The House Minder calls out when an alert condition occurs, so often it is the first notification we receive since Canary reneged on the originally included alert features.

The cameras still work:

Camera View

The stuff we worry about:

• Temperature Drops – as if the home ends up below freezing long enough to freeze water pipes and/hot water heater parts, that could be very messy & costly.  Mitigation is we had the heating system filled with a glycol based solution that resists this issue as well as reduces corrosion inside the system.  If we were there the woodburner can easily heat the place.  As a local monitoring backup a large outdoor thermometer is visible from outside, being mounted on a stand I built so friends/authorities can check the temperature without going inside.
• Freezers & Fridges thawing out is not a worry as we empty these and turn them off, when not in residence during the cold season.  If we were there and the power went out, it is several days before Fridges & Freezers warm up too much, and we’ve used the ice chest outside.
• Water In & Out – this one is a problem when the power is out, as the well pump and the septic lift-pump simply require power.  The upside is that they don’t need to be powered up continuously.  The well pressure tank helps, as well as finding other water for non-potable uses like flushing toilets.  The lift-pump comes on when the separation chambers fill up enough, so we would have some considerable time with that pump off.
• Sump Pump – here is a troublesome concern, as our home has a full basement, which is not universal on the island because of the high bedrock situation.  So we monitor for pump failure with the House Minder water on the basement floor sensor, and a couple seasons back changed our rather new sump pump for a double-pump/one-hole setup where the lower (first to run) pump is 110vac and the slightly higher pump is a 12vdc version running from a deep cell marine type battery kept on a managed charger.  The nearly new pump that was pulled out is there ready to drop in as a pump replacement and I have a “trash pump” with enough hose to provide another backup option.  Anything water-sensitive is either up on blocks or was swapped out for outdoor rated materials, up to about a 12 inch (30cm) from the basement floor, reducing the risk of losses.
• Radios – while the home QTH is setup to transition over to Genset power, the island QTH is power dependent if it is left on.  For the most part I never leave it on when we are off island, as the present internet sucks.  Eventually we will get the new fiber and at that stage I will need to power-harden the station to allow for remote operations.

Some action items are additional battery backups at the home QTH, completion of installation of the remote thermostats at the island, changing the island sump pump battery this autumn based on battery age, and consideration of a limited amount of battery backup at the island.

Our island power came back on about 60 hours after going out and the temperature drop from no heat was about 5 to 8F (3 to 4c) which was within my predicted loss expectations.

73

Steve
K9ZW

Imposed EUA – Do you actually own your IoT Hardware?

Sonos Speaker Examples

Sonos forced EUA (End User Agreement) update 09NOV22 presumed that as an established Sonos owner I could be forced to renegotiate the terms & conditions of my purchase & usage of their IoT Speaker/Stereo system.

No way to use the gear without agreeing to whatever they mandated. Quick counting I have 22 active Sonos speakers between our home, my radio room/workshop, my work office, and our Island home.

If I set out to replace everything at current Amazon level pricing we have a $7700 investment in Sonos.  That is not counting the $1400 worth of gear that Sonos orphaned by declaring them at EOL (End of Life) and removing them from hardware supported by the Sonos software.

A significant investment but given the number of rooms the setup covers – roughly 12 rooms/areas in four distinct buildings – not all that bad per room/area for fairly decent music capabilities.

Have no idea what is in the forced agreement, as at 10:30 pm at night ready to put on a few songs played from my central server, I had neither the patience or discernment to deal with a “stick you hands up” level of interaction.  So I clicked through.  Of course I cannot find now a way to actually review the changes forced upon me.

Big resentment was their claim that I had no right to use my purchased Sonos Hardware and the Sonos Software under previous EUAs.

This touches on the blended situation of dedicated hardware, proprietary software and mothership server/cloud interactions being sold and then unilaterally terms & conditions being forced through a change.

Went through this with Canary.io security cameras – read: https://k9zw.wordpress.com/2022/07/15/when-a-technology-product-walks-back-their-products-purchase-commitments/

Canary.io Camera Examples

And of course have a stable and agreeable situation in my Ham Shacks with the FlexRadio and FlexRadio/4o3a gear.

FlexRadio Flex-67600

One of my technology purchases that bit the dust with an undeclared EOL and unresolved incompatibilities with current Operating Systems were my Drobo units.  Junk now.  https://k9zw.wordpress.com/2022/09/13/another-one-bites-the-dust-drobo-reaches-eol/

drobo NAS

—

So where does this put IoT equipment owners?

Do these owners really “own” their purchases when the company unilaterally demands actions be taken to use the equipment?

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The K9ZW take on IoT ownership is IoT devices range from temporary possessions to fairly solid possessions that you can consider that you own, to the reverse situation of ephemeral/transitory possession of the moment.

None of these three classes are as solid as true “you own it, lock, stock and barrel” grade possessions.

The Ephemeral/Transitory are the highest risk, you can expect they will become untenable rather quickly, and accordingly your investment should be very modest.  Some Ephemeral/Transitory IoT devices are enough of liability and risk, that even if obtained free they would be a bad value.  Some indicators that an IoT device is likely in this category are:  Public Complaints, Periods of Downtime, Single Owner/Engineer shops, recent Venture Capital buyout, noise that fees will be added soon.

Solid Possessions are certainly not 100% truly “yours,” rather you are co-owners with rational sane people/organizations.  In this category there often is a prominent public commitment that no matter what you will be able to run your IoT with the software you possess.

Temporary Possessions are in  the stuff in-between the other two categories, and basically includes most IoT where you really do not know how secure your forward operation is, but you also have no indicators of elevated risk.

—

The Benefit vs Risk ratio has to more solidly favor Benefits to even consider Ephemeral/Transitory at all.  Any investment in money and time needs real benefits within the “likely to run window” or you are wasting your time.

Temporary Possessions open up the time window to recover your investment.

One could argue that Solid Possessions could be treated as wholly owned property, as in most cases the characteristics are not distinguishable.  I prefer to consider them separately as the differences matter in the provision of backups, as it suggests that any backup to a Solid Possession IoT would not duplicate the same product or IoT provider.

73

Steve
K9ZW

 

[Photos of example IoT items added at Dale N6JSX’s suggestion]

Elgato Stream Deck XL – Usage Details

Speaking of my Eglato Stream Deck XL in an earlier post ( https://k9zw.wordpress.com/2022/09/14/controlling-the-ham-computer-elgato-stream-deck-xl/ ) several comments, emails and a phone call came in asking for more detail on what I am doing with the unit.

Please remember that a Stream Deck is configurable on many axis. So what I have done is at best a tip of the iceberg in terms of what you can do with your own Stream Deck after a bit of scripting.

On your desktop the Stream Deck App looks like this:

Stream Deck App (Win10) showing the graphics side of my default configuration

 

Which ends up looking like this on your unit:

 

My Stream Deck then displays a really creditable representation of the configuration

 

I have this particular configuration setup to somewhat mimic the Icons used to:

• Start My Radio/Amp/Tuner
• Select Loggers/Digital Mode Programs
• Setup my Remote Work Process
• Setup Remote Access on this Machine
• Kick Off my Programing Environment
• Testing a Keyer/Macro Experiment (the one with the big “T” in the Icon behind K9ZW 73) which works but needs polishing
• Do some Audio Programs
• Do some Basic PC-level Tasks

I’d experimented with controlling the radio, working in NodeRed, and some advanced Audio Functions in additional configuration files.  Some worked fine and some I didn’t quite get sorted out.

Tom K0TTC is working on GIF-based Icons for some of the common FlexRadio Flex-6000 functions.  I’ve not taken the time to animate any of mine.

The empty four lower buttons often are configured to start the latest test version of SmartSDR or other FlexRadio software.  Version number that show on the regular buttons have been obscured, basically because I lost track if the version displayed is General Release or just a stable test version from my Alpha-Team participation.

To date I have not gotten much joy out of cascading profiles, mostly because remembering where command sets are – much less the separate commands – would require a lot more time in front of the Stream Deck equipped PC.  I can see where a operator is solidly using the same PC how the cascade and context aware configuration sets would really work out.  Because I work my station remotely so much from several other devices, including iOS devices, I’m only experimenting with the deeper features.

For some program/application calls it is possible to include Stream Deck set parameters, which can be useful.  Some programs/apps ignore what your have scripted in though.

There is a lot more one could do with a Stream Deck than what I have done, for sure!

73

Steve
K9ZW

RiserBond 1270 Repair and Calibration

An example plot (right of cursor 2 is the electrical effect of the antenna)

My RiserBond 1270 TDR came back from DigiTrace repaired and freshly calibrated. (DigiTrace is at http://www.digitrace.com/ )

Great people to work with and excellent turn-around.

I put the returned TDR to work right away at both my island QTH and Tom K0TTC’s island home station.

A great device to have available, though not certain I could recommend every ham have one. With three stations and lots of ham friends who have opportunities to explore with a TDR, I’ve found having one useful.  If I had one feedline to inspect it would be silly to have this gear around.

In one recent inspection it found a pulled coax that didn’t test very well. I am thinking that one of the ends needs rework. Swapping to feedline pull #2 was the short term solution and put the station effectiveness back to norms.

I do not believe my RiserBond 1270a was “officially” calibrated for a very long time, even when I acquired it in 2006.

So it is wonderful to put any worries about being out of spec aside as well as the return-to-duty service that was absolutely needed.

As the repairs and calibration process use several hours of bench time, the costs reflect that service investment.

73

Steve
K9ZW

Controlling the Ham Computer – Elgato Stream Deck XL

Upper Left Hand Corner is the Stream Deck

It wasn’t until a friend told me that he just bought an Elgato Stream Deck, asking me what did I think about them? That I realized I bought the larger one three years ago and have been using it in my hamshack, but hadn’t mentioned it much here.

Firs the link: https://www.elgato.com/en/stream-deck-xl

So what we have is 32 key keypad, with each key’s led face fully customizable to match the resulting key action you assigned.

I have mine set up to do normal station chores, and if left long enough to default to a multikey display of my callsign.

The minor scripting is simple and the results are fabulous.

There are 6-key, 15-key and 32-ley versions of the Stream Deck (Sept 2022 street prices were $80, $120 and $210 respectively.)

73

Steve
K9ZW