On The Market For A Repeater

I found a UHF repeater up for bid from the state. It’s ancient, but might still be useful. I’m hoping it can be modified for amateur radio use (most radios can – we amateurs are crafty!) My plans for it have it either going up on the Wake County tower near my home for purely selfish reasons. Or, better yet, being set up on a tower in Garner.

Now you may wonder why I want a repeater in Garner, since I don’t live there anymore. The reason is that I decided it would be neat for the area’s growing Hispanic community to have their own repeater. I’d love to have a repeater in the area that’s primarily Spanish-speaking. It would provide another tool to help this community connect with others. It could help English-speakers learn some Spanish, and vice versa. And it might spur these new residents to become hams.

I might get out to see the repeater this week. If it’s a piece of junk, all plans are off. But if it isn’t, it could turn into a wonderful experiment in community-building.

Broader Band

I called Time Warner Cable yesterday to find out the costs of Roadrunner Business Class service (motto: Same unreliability as normal Roadrunner, now for twice the cost!) I want to get service that I could use to host my home business websites. Turns out that some new packages will be debuting August 2nd. The most exciting one offers 768/768Kb and one static IP for $180/month.

Then again, what’s to stop me from ordering another residential cable modem and aggregating the two together? I already get 3 Mb/s down and 384 Kb/s up. If I bridged two cable modems together, that would give me an effective 6 Mb/s down and 768 Kb/s up for the cost of the low-end business service ($80). I’d have to do some tricker Dynamic DNS stuff to use two dynamic IPs, but I think it could be done.

Windsor Forest Website

I’ve started work on the Windsor Forest website. It’s using the latest Drupal, version 4.4.2, which looks really nice. I’ve done virtually no customization yet, so it’s ugly, but it’s a start.

Busy Weekend

It’s been a busy week. Last Wednesday night, I spent an hour or more under the house, assessing the leaks in our air conditioning ducts. Thursday night I spent in the attic, putting down insulation where there was none. Friday night we hosted my parents for a fun-filled dinner.

Yesterday morning, I was back under the house, replacing a duct splice that didn’t meet code. There were other ducts that needed work: some of them sitting on the junction boxes without being taped. It was leaky as hell. But after three hours of “thinking small” while I worked in the hot dark crawlspace, the bodies were all hid. Er, I mean, the ducts were in great shape.

I also took some time to pull some CAT5 cable from my garage to the den. Now I have to finish the connectors in my den and it’ll be ready to go.

Oh, and did I mention I cut the grass in our huge yard, too? And then went to Bram’s birthday party at Tanner‘s house?

Today, we took a walk after breakfast. Then Kelly cleaned up her car while I emptied six or more boxes worth of books onto my bookshelf. The scary part of that job is that it doesn’t look like I even put a dent in the pile of boxes full of books left to be shelved.

Hallie is now snoozing and I think I’ll catch a nap, too. Even Superman takes a nap every now and then.

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Whoopsie

I was wondering why my email traffic was light this morning.I let siteseers.net expire this week and didn’t find out about it until today.

If you need to email me while siteseers.net works its way back into the Internet, you can try me at siteseers.com instead.