Good Morning #radiofedi #fediverse !
Red sky in the morning, sailor take warning!
(and other blathering on of some significance).
We got that, today, looks like. There is storminess coming down out of the northwest, and while it is kind of petering out right now, the sun is coming up, and will certainly recharge all that convection that's in play when it hits the approximately water-saturated local air mass.
So while it might not rain in the next 15 minutes, I'm gonna get out on that proverbial limb and say that it's gonna rain sometime today, somewhere. 😆
On the home front, I got on up in the attic yesterday, as bc reasons, it wasn't 127 deg F up there. I took down my old antenna, the one with the giant homebrew un:un, and replaced it with the one I had recently in the tree. I made a quite significant discovery: the old one was too short. Each element by at least a meter. As a result, I ran out of room to stretch out the elements. So, I wrapped them around the back side of a rafter at each end, one off to the east (the southern-pointing element), and the other off to the west (the northern-pointing one).
This setup is using the 1:1 balun I bought off amazon; it's the worst sort of Chinese manufacture; I know because I have taken it apart and cleaned up the assembly.
It's working fairly well, I got spotted a couple times yesterday without trying too hard for too long.
While I was at the south end of all this business, I had to get a good grip on this upright board up in the attic; which, frankly, wiggles a little. Mounted on this upright board is an electrical junction box (I think with a light switch), which provides power to an attic light. When the board moved as I swung back around the back of it after securing the overage of the element down there, the damn attic light went off. I had to find my way back up to the south end of the house, where the stairs are, pretty much in the dark, yay.
As I was climbing down the ladder, it came back on. Now mind you, that junction box is effectively at the other end of a 20' dipole.
When I got the rest of the way down the attic stairs, I discovered that the attic light wasn't the only thing that was back on; all the circuits and lights that went out when the lightening struck last fall were on, all throughout the house.
So that box and attic light were added by the guy who flipped the house and sold it to us; as were the pot lights in the hall. They are all on the same loop, which is tied into a preexisting loop, which also stopped working after the lightening strike.
My guess is, there is a loose connection in that added circuitry, something acting effectively as a switch. When the lightening struck, there was incredible percussion; I know, I was sitting in front of an open window and an air blast/shock wave hit me that made me think of a bomb going off. I think it had enough force to knock that wire apart enough to switch off the circuit.
While I was up there, I 'switched' it back on.
