2025-06-24, 14:49
I ran station 3174 outside on a light iron lawn chair, in the cardboard box that it came in, without antennae for about 24 hours. There are no LED ports in my Blue mini case, so for a while the board has to run naked until I know how it works. It's the dry time of year here, not even dew until fall when old Fall starts to give way to wet and windy winter. I've already been asked by the Partner where the it's going to live: the subtext is "because it's sure not going to get to grow roots where it is right now".
I wound some 38 cm, 20 turn loops from jacketed copper wire using a big cooking pot for a form, bound them with glass fiber tape, and hung them at right angles on one arm and the back of the chair so that the flat planes of the loops are oriented N-S and E-W. I hooked them up to the preamp, turned off the board, and plugged in the preamp cable.
It was getting on dusk when I re-powered it, and I was excited to hear it tick almost immediately, like a Geiger counter detecting background radiation, with a little yellow flash with each click. I came in to look at the live lightning maps and saw it participate almost immediately in a lightning strike triangulation, a new green square on the map that for sure had not been there before.
This is a good stopping place for my story in this thread, about a Blue mini from the time I bought it to the time that it is a participant in the network.
D
I wound some 38 cm, 20 turn loops from jacketed copper wire using a big cooking pot for a form, bound them with glass fiber tape, and hung them at right angles on one arm and the back of the chair so that the flat planes of the loops are oriented N-S and E-W. I hooked them up to the preamp, turned off the board, and plugged in the preamp cable.
It was getting on dusk when I re-powered it, and I was excited to hear it tick almost immediately, like a Geiger counter detecting background radiation, with a little yellow flash with each click. I came in to look at the live lightning maps and saw it participate almost immediately in a lightning strike triangulation, a new green square on the map that for sure had not been there before.
This is a good stopping place for my story in this thread, about a Blue mini from the time I bought it to the time that it is a participant in the network.
D