Followup to hamfest activity

Today was a good Father's day.

I got a new wallet and a tool belt from my girls. They knew I needed a new wallet, and the little one just knew that I needed a toolbelt to keep my tools organized.

We launched UX-24 yesterday. That's #24 in UTARC's balloon flight series. Nothing fancy, just a 10 meter transmitter on 28.215 LSB and a 350 gram latex balloon.

We lost GPS lock after about 27000 meters (nearly 89,000 feet) due to the limitations of the GPS onboard. We knew it burst when the balloon started warbling during a transmission soon thereafter. We pretty sure it made 90k feet.

We obtained lock after it dropped below its design limit, and the last transmission was near Newport, TN. Carl and I separately drove up to the area some 10 hours later and we never heard it. My friend Jason and I got to within .21 miles of the payload and got nothing.

Who knows, perhaps someone in the area will come across it and call. We may never see it again, but we didn't lose a lot with this one.

I got an antenna and mount like I wanted. But still not sure where I'm going to mount it or where I am going to put everything, and I'm still not sure if I'm going to put in my tribander, 742 Kenwood, but I have the antenna in case I ever decide to install it.

This wasn't a 100% perfect weekend, as TWIAR's mail server is wreaking havoc. It's sending upwards of 8-12 messages of the same thing. The medianews mailing list sent one of George Antunes' emails some 8 times. What I tried to do was to remove and then restart the mailing list. After I deleted it, I come to find I can't create a new mailing list!

It's doing the same for mail forwarding. I re-created everyone's mail forward and sent them all email asking how many msgs of the same email they got, if all the info is right, etc.

The reason for all this is that our host apparently had a tornado hit some equipment where the mail server was housed. He's taking care of his paid users first, so I'm not going to complain. There's things more important right now.

Dale, TWIAR's "file guy" had some damage to his internet connections and has some good connections and was able to get some connectivity to upload all the files. I can only do 256k max for upload (2meg down). He has upwards of 10 megs UP!!! I don't know how he pulls off such luck, but if I were to upload, it would take me 4-5 hours, and I'm on HIGH speed!!! Dale gets it done in less than 30 minutes! Domino's can't even deliver a pizza that fast anymore...

I need to get some sleep before I put in for a tough week at work. Until next time...