lumensoutdoors.org - Page 1

• Building a VHF Contest Rover, Insides - July 9, 2020

  Years ago, I promised some writeups on how I was going about building a VHF contest rover. I never got around to doing that, partially because I am not any good at keeping my website up to date. In this post, I’m going to try to start taking care of that by talking about what’s on the inside of the rover. In particular, I’m going to cover the radios and radio related boxes.

• New domain name - July 24, 2018

  As you may have seen from the redirects, I’ve moved to a new domain name. The old one was based on a dumb inside joke from reading the bash man page way back in 1999, but now just seems weird. I’ve set up redirects for all the web stuff so it should keep working, and I’ve set up redirects so my old email address keeps working but uses the new domain by default. I’ll probably keep the old domain for years to come and let the forwards continue to do their work.

  You may still see a reference on the site somewhere, so if you see something, say something. It will definitely still show up in email headers, but unless you’re the kind of person that gets delight from reading those, you shouldn’t see them.

• Operating from Bermuda - March 22, 2018

  From March 9 through March 14, Sarah and I were on vacation in Bermuda. This was originally supposed to be a group trip, but the crazy storms in New England forced it to be just the two of us and screwed up all our flights. The basic plan was a quick vacation to an island where I could also operate the radio as a DX station for a change.

• Building a VHF Contest Rover, Intro - March 1, 2018

  For the past couple years, Sean (WA1TE) and I have been operating as a rover in the January and September VHF contests under the callsign K1SIG/R. While the radios and antennas we’ve used have been a combination of all our stuff, we’ve been using his car for the actual roving itself. Sean’s going to be busy later this year, so I have started thinking about building my own rover. This is the first in an occassional series of posts to explain roving and how I’m going to build mine.

• Long Trail Day 6 - Roundtop to VT 15 - August 11, 2017

  Our last day on the Long Trail was a short one, just 3.5 miles from the Roundtop shelter to the big road crossing at VT 15. The weather started off nice but turned into rain on drive. The hiking was easy today and we had plenty of time for checking things out on the way home.

• Long Trail Day 5 - Corliss Camp to Roundtop - August 10, 2017

  Our fifth day on the trail was probably my favorite one. We had nice weather, great footing, and some good views. The hiking was easy and even the couple climbs went by without any real difficulty. Plus, we got into the shelter early so we had lots of time to sit around and relax.

• Long Trail Day 4 - VT 118 to Corliss Camp - August 9, 2017

  The fourth day involved a very late start after a fun night in town, some very long climbs, missed radio activations, and generally very easy trail conditions.

• Long Trail Day 3 - Hazen's Notch to VT 118 - August 8, 2017

  The third day of our Long Trail backpacking trip marked the halfway point. Sarah picked us up at the end of the day for resupply and spending the night in Stowe. We were originally supposed to have spent four days out before the resupply but it rained so much on Saturday we didn’t even hike. This ended up being the toughest day of the hike.

• Long Trail Day 2 - Laura Woodward to Hazen's Notch - August 7, 2017

  On the second day of our Long Trail backpack, we hiked from the Laura Woodward shelter to the Hazen’s Notch shelter. We hiked over Jay Peak which was the tallest summit of our trip and one of the highlights. I had another busted SOTA activation. It was a pretty busy day.

• Long Trail Day 1 - Canada to Laura Woodward - August 6, 2017

  It’s been about a month since I got back from the Long Trail and I haven’t made any updates since then. It was more or less a success. We didn’t cover as much as I wanted, but we had to skip a day at the beginning and several at the end due to weather. Over the next several days I’m going to make posts about each day spent on the trail. Reading about hiking is kind of boring so I’m going to keep them brief and include lots of pictures. At the end I will do a quick recap of what worked and what didn’t.