I often hear debate about solar power. Its always from some unenlightened idiot claiming its the death of ham radio and that no one should get it, because his guy on fox news says coal is the way to go. While there are some installs out there that are disasters, it does not have to be that way. Now this picture was taken early in the morning and we were not making much power, but even at half and full power the spec-an reads the same. The actual RF the inverter puts out is lower than -110dB which is the noise floor of my spec-an.

Now on 40m I cant hear shit all from the inverter on the IC-7410 which can hear a signal down to something like -130dB, the actual radiated RF from the inverter in the form of switching noise is rather low indeed. Even using a noise collector like the 1/4 wave vertical antenna I use on 40m, if there is no storm static I can turn on the pre-amps to help with chasing those weak parks signals.

My whole house is energy efficient, LED lighting, inverter fridge, freezer, washing machine, 3 air cons and not a single thing adds significantly to the background noise here. I will admit, I am in the middle of bum fuck nowhere and I do not have to worry about what crap electrics my neighbors use, but it does go to show that done right, things do not have to make noise.

When your power bill is essentially $0 each month and a solar system costs $5,000 to install, you really have to be bonkers not to have it.

 

Peace out

I was so unprepared for this, last minute I was rushing around trying to work out how to use my camera on manual mode. I for there in the end and got 2 shots of the partial eclipse that were ok.

Been busy trying to get things done on my radio room. Windows now have fly screens, the security door and main door are in, the main door is being varnished, cables have been pulled though the floor, temporarily. So much yet to do, but making progress. The plan is to get the trim finished this week and get it to undercoat and have the flooring down. Need to move some stuff out here so the wife can setup her xmas tree inside. If I push hard for the next 2 weeks I could be at the point of building the desk for the starship enterprise.

The view to the south east from our house. Looks like a storm is brewing.

Since moving to the boonies I have had to think about our internet situation quite a bit. We have gone from a reasonable NBN connection in the city to fixed wireless in the bush. While our general download speeds are ok, for some reason some of our traffic is either being limited or its just being routed poorly.

Same ISP but different internet technology and downloading server backups has gone from 5 Meg/s to 1/2 a Meg/s, try downloading 7Gig of data at that slow speed HAHAHA.

So anyway, its meant trying to find a better server host with a better pipeline into Australia or a host based in Australia. And after spending the morning speed testing a bunch of different hosts, i found one that is slightly better than the one I had.

So here we are, everything has been migrated over and the site is backup and running again and everyone is none the wiser.

HAHAHA.

I am going to sit right here and get all toasty. Thanks for the warm fire Hooman.

So i found out yesterday day that commenting was not working. Kind of wondered why I had not seen any comments, not even spam comments in a very long time. Turns out one of the addons i use changed things to make people login with fakebook or twitheads.

Anyway, i crushed the rebellion and now commenting should return back to normal and the spammers will be sending me links to medications to make my penis 2 inches longer, grow more hair or have longer lasting erections. Nothing like a bunch of dick jokes for early on christmas morning.

Well that has been a bit of an ordeal. Turns out the server hard driver was on the fritz and I had to get tech support to run some diagnostics and replace it. That was the easy part, because the host I use is great and fix things really fast. That was all done within an hour.

Next came the reinstall everything. That is the not fun part. Reinstall the OS, update it, upload my backups which are 7GB currently and growing run through the restore backups and then fix all the little things that just do not work right afterwards.

You would think that this would be an easy thing, but no, there is always something that does not work. Like changing passwords and reinstalling the SSL certificate. Well lets hope nothing breaks now for a while, i am done with doing server stuff for a long time 🙂

We are back baby!

A friend of mine Simon, who is also a ham, send me this image he has taken today of the sun, clearly showing 2 sun spots. Pretty damn cool if you ask me that a home gamer can take these kinds of imaged with a telescope in his back yard in suburbia.