Posted September 1, 2006
Many of you have been in touch; visiting, calling, even sending postcards, asking what happened to the up-to-the-minute weather reports from Rhonda on Oat mountain. I hope this lack of weather reporting hasn't caused anyone to carry an umbrella unecessaraly. I'm pleased to report that Rhonda has completed Beta testing with a perfect performance. 24/7 updates were recieved at the i-gate and displayed on the web every three minutes. The only hiccup came when she was sidewiped by a hit and run lawnmower, but that was fixed with a field modification to the power cable.
I've been talked into repackaging Rhonda to be better suited to mounting at the top of a tree, so I'll be working on that next. Meanwhile Rhonda is vacationing in my garage.
Posted June 11, 2006
I know many of you were alarmed and concerned that Rhonda stopped talking Wednesday evening. We checked her out yesterday and today and it seems that we got her talking again. The first issue was the antenna wire: I didn't have a strain relief inside the box, and it appears that something caught the wire and pulled it from the top of the radio. I had a second cable adapter, and swapped out Tom's radio for my flying radio and she worked for three whole transmissions before the battery died. Today we pulled the battery and charged it from the Suburban. One of the connectors was loose, and the solar panel was covered with bird droppings. Between the two, and the marine layer, I think that was the cause of the dead battery. Also in the box was swarm?, nest? covey? of earwigs, in everything. So the next two things I need to do is plug the holes to keep the bugs out, and build a nice, welcoming, landing strip for the birds.
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