Most of the day was cloudy and spitting rain. That was good for me because I had a ton of work to do around the farm. From trimming trees to bush hogging our road it was a busy day on machines of various types.
We also sold our ping-pong table to someone who would provide it a good home. I hope his kids have fun playing on the board. The best part of the sale of this is that it’s taking up space in his garage now, not mine.
Tonight I was cooking a steak and out of nowhere a wasp landed and stung me on my nose. I used to think that getting stung on the temple was a bitch but now I think the nose is the worst. It’s been over an hour and my nose is still throbbing. I get stung a couple times a year so I’m becoming an expert on where being stung hurts the worst.
The day was pretty hazy and humid. I wear loose cotton clothes that cover all my skin. That makes working in the summer hot. When I got home I was soaked from head to toe with sweat. It was nice to take a shower and relax in the cool of the evening. It was 75º as the sun set tonight.
Speaking of sunset … here’s what it looked like:
Sunset July 15, 2018
At about the same time I turned the camera away from the sun to get the valley between the hills where we live. Looking to the left of the photo is Harpers Ferry where the gap in the mountain lets the Potomac river come through on it’s way to the ocean.
Looking towards Brunswick, Maryland.
There are lots of pastel colors this time of the day.
The moon and Venus are very close to each other today and tomorrow. I was too lazy/tired to go get my camera and take a picture of that. Hopefully they will be reasonably close tomorrow evening and I’ll get the photo then.
This year’s “Field Day” was held Friday through Sunday, June 22, 23 and 24, 2018. The planning for the event was started in 2017 and continued right up to the days before.
We moved the event from where we’ve been having it in years past to Franklin Park, Purcellville, Virginia. This is a very public location inside the park grounds where anyone from anywhere could come and join us for the event.
… if it weren’t for the rain. Honestly, I don’t know when it started and when it stopped or even how much we got but it was a lot of rain. We set up the towers on Friday in torrential downpours which continued through the days. It did manage to clear up some on Saturday but it rained every day this year.
And when we were cleaning up a small storm came through with wind and more rain! Here’s what that looked like on radar:
Thunderstorm. Field Day 2018.
Man, did it rain. I sought refuge in my van but others didn’t make it out of the path in time. Some of the tents had to be held down manually and some did not make it from what I understand which exposed a lot of gear to the elements. Last report is that all electronic gear made it out OK with some drying effort.
Speaking of van. I don’t know how I was able to get all this gear from my home to the park and back but managed to do just that. It took a lot of help from others.
Van full of gear. Field Day 2018
The preliminary report has been published and from that information it looks like we did a fine job. It wasn’t a year where we blew out the numbers but we all did a good job making as many contacts as possible. That is what it is really all about.
One thing I set out to do this year was to learn more about satellite operations. Steve, KS1G was kind enough to walk me through some of what he was doing there. I took this short time lapse of his antennae at work:
When things are moving that fast you have to deal with all kinds of physics (like Doppler effect). It’s a little like patting your head and rubbing your belly while saying your ABCs backwards. I still have a lot to learn.
I didn’t take that many photos and the photos I did take I did so with my mobile phone. So the pictures are what they are. Being sleep deprived most of the weekend I don’t remember much of the detail I just remember that I needed to take some photos every once in a while. So this is what I got. For those photos go here.
If you want to know more about Field Day for our club or our club in general go here.
All the gear is back in it’s place, my station is back to normal at home. Another Field Day is behind me. Next up for the club, a 100+ mile bike ride. Stay tuned.
It seems like I just posted a blog on a snow storm!
The last couple of days has been preparing for another n’easter to come in to the mid-atlantic area as two low pressure systems collide near my home. With the crazy weather brings some interesting photo opportunities; especially for black and white high contrast photography which I enjoy so much.
Doukénie Winery
The Doukénie’s are nice people. I got to know the owners of this winery with my previous work. I’ve since lost track of them but drive by their place all the time as it’s on a road less traveled.
Random corn farm
This corn field is on my regular running/walking route. I give them shit because they use harsh chemical to treat their land. You can’t see any of that under the blanket of snow today.
Fence line of trees in the snow.
Drone photography has really changed the way I look at the earth. The first time I saw my first photograph from the drone I knew it was going to be something that would take the world by storm.
Back then I had the DJI Phantom 1 which did not have a camera mounted to it. Instead, I mounted a then unknown camera to the bottom of the drone … my GoPro (the original).
I remember being in my living room seeing the picture for the first time and saying something like, “Oh My!” which got my entire family’s attention. They wanted to know what I was looking at. It was something like you see here.
Producing the photograph is skill. The equipment is pure science.
The lonely tree
My “new” drone is the DJI 2. Even the DJI 2 didn’t have a camera so I bought a third party gimbal, wired it into the GPS of the DJI as well as into an OSD module.
The OSD, short for On Screen Display, superimposes all of the flight data into the video transmitter which I also procured and wired into the drone. All of this runs on 5 volts of dc power that I get from the drone itself.
Then I put my “new” GoPro 4 in the gimbal and tie that into the entire system.
When I fly the drone I have my FPV, or First Person View, goggles on my eyes and it is as if I am hanging from the bottom of the drone. It is literally like flying an airplane. I have the exact same instrumentation as an aircraft all displayed in front of me.
I control the drone with 2.4ghz DSS. The video downlink is 5ghz analog. It’s worth noting that the use of 5ghz downlink video is not something normally approved without a license. But I do possess the FCC license to do this.
The “wet land” experiment
This camera system that I created is not as fancy as the stuff you can buy today. Since that stuff wasn’t available when I built this I did what I could. It takes a photograph every 5 seconds as well as shooting 1080p 30fps video at the same time. So I get a little of both vs one or the other. But I do have to stay on my target for 5-20 seconds to get the photo I want. That is if I want it in high resolution and not from the video grab.
The video is not the latest 4k with all the latest technology. But for what I am doing with it I don’t need that either. For me and this system anyway, that is just a camera change. Not a drone system change. I just haven’t gotten around to swapping out the camera mainly because I don’t prefer GoPro cameras any longer as they are too expensive compared to all the other technology out there that can do just as well for 25% of the cost.
This is me behind my “camera” this afternoon
I’ve thought about buying a new drone over the past several years and, so far, I haven’t seen anything I’d prefer. There are smaller ones that fit in your pocket but don’t take better video or photos.
I think the next drone I have will be much more sophisticated in the use of aerodynamics. Like quieter props. These are not quiet machines. But they take awesome photos!
Yesterday I was up early and out he door for a meeting in DC. When I bounced out of the garage I looked up and saw this:
Sunrise October 17, 2017
That part of a sunrise is appealing. The getting up part … not so much.
Click on the picture and look a the moon. I posted a similar picture I took with my iPhone but you could not make out the moon after the dumb down the image so it fits in their ecosystem.
It was a quiet but very full day. I spent most of the day on the phone on work related projects that I needed to complete today. I don’t normally talk about work but that’s what I do during the week from the time I wake until the time I sleep. I may play in between but I think about work all the time.
Speaking of playing, I was able to fly both my drone and RC plane today. It was one of those super harsh sunny days where there is no clouds in the sky. On these days it’s super hard to take a good picture that is not all washed out. It’s hard to look up at what you are controlling from the ground and for the same to look down and take a decent photo.
Of all the photos I took during the day this the one I liked the most.
Sunny day in Virginia, September 19, 2017
I post in Facebook as well but Facebook will down sample the image and make it look like junk. If you touch the one here you’ll get a full photo that you can fill your screen with and really see what it looks like. Even this one is downsampled a bit. It’s only a JPEG image out of a GOPRO 3 camera. It’s amazing what that little camera will do. When it’s hung under a drone and lifted into the air I just think it changes everything about photography.
I’ll never forget the first time I saw a picture from the bottom of a drone. It was way, way before it was the cool thing to do. I was mesmerized. I mentioned to Gloria that this is going to be a big thing when it catches on. And it did catch on. People like Casey Neistat became quite famous flying drones and publishing videos.
One of the things I did today was work on my weather station. The Raspberry Pi computer had a disk failure and won’t boot. A year ago I bought some “cheap” microSD cards to use as disks. They have all failed so that didn’t pay off. Name brands for me from now on. I’ll pay a little extra for those things now. None of the SanDisk brands have failed even after years of use. They are not hard to fix but it takes too much time. I’ll have my weather station back working again tomorrow.
Mongrel and I didn’t go for our normal walk today. Instead we played in the grass. Well, he played in the grass while I troubleshot my weather station some during one of my breaks from work. Watch it to the end if you want to see what it looks like for a cat to run through grass like a deer … but he’s only a cat.
We won’t tell him he’s any different.
It’s quiet here. Everyone is sleeping. Tomorrow is on the horizon and should be similar to today.
I hope you’ve had a nice day today. If not, I hope you have a better day tomorrow.
This weekend was about goofing off. Goofing off as much as possible. It all started like this:
… sunrise September 17, 2017
Officially I had to do some volunteer work for my radio club but that was over before 10am Saturday which left the rest of the day to do something I’ve had in my calendar for a while now: The Flying Circus.
We didn’t stay long but we made a day of getting there and back like we tend to do now and again. Typical trip down I-81 where you have to be crazy to be with crazy. But it was OK with both of us in the car together to stay distracted. Although I think my driving drives Gloria crazy. She has to listen to me postulate about statistics of queuing and crowding; the mathematical advantage of being in a small car in a big car world. 210 horse power helps but not as much as being small.
The venue for the RC event is atop a hill south of Covington, VA where people are flying all kinds of different aircraft from fixed wing to drones and even some cars and the like. But it’s mostly about flying something. It’s put on by Jeremiah at Stone Blue Airlines. Jeremiah owns the place there in Lynchburg two hours away from Covington. He’s helped me outfit some of my RC gear here that I fly. It’s cool that he’s made a living out of his passion. It’s really hard to tell when he is working and when he is playing. Which is I think the point to life.
After looking through my FPV goggles at other people flying we took back off for home in hopes of getting back at a decent hour. We lumbered along the back way home up SR220 through some really pretty West Virginia and Virginia back roads. After a dinner at the Fireside Cafe it was slabbing it back home as fast as we could once the sun went down and both of us grew tired.
Gloria had a big morning on Sunday and presentation in the afternoon so we needed to get her back and rested. She had a good, productive presentation on how to make Kombucha. She makes really good Kombucha!
Not me. I took the day (Sunday) mostly off. Besides a 5 mile run at sundown I really didn’t do much but goof off with electronics, some photography, RC flying of various types, radio. Some people have said that my goofing off looks a lot like work. I resemble those remarks.
Oh, radio. I chatted with a “DXpedition” station from the Czech Republic operating in Mauritania using call sign 5T5OK. I was parked on a 14 mhz frequency when I noticed the activity on the spectrum scope. Turns out these guys were testing their station and I was able to snag them in a “pile up” on the first call once I figured out how they were set up on the split frequency. We really didn’t chat long and they went on to making more contacts. It’s about 4,200 miles from here to there. I’m always amazed that I can just “key up” and talk to a totally different country on the planet. Makes the world seem really small. I was on and off the radios all day today which was particularly fun.
I’m working on an adjustable square wave generator circuit with a 555 timer chip. I’m not terribly good with electronics so this is half learning and half doing. I want to create a string of LEDs that use a transistor to switch between on and off at a rate that I can control with the timer chip. The circuit is gonna look something like this:
555 timer circuit
I got my bench power supply back from the shop so I can start building stuff again. Or breaking stuff, depending on how badly I mis-calculate things like voltage, current and the like. My method is less “Ohms Law” and more “Poke-n-Prod” until the blue smoke comes out. When I see blue smoke it’s generally back to the drawing board. It’s a good way to learn but leads to a lot of dead parts.
I’m sure I could buy the circuit from China for a buck but what’s the fun in that? I have this idea on making an LED string look like it’s pumping electricity like water through a tube. I want to vary the alternating lights at a rate and amplitude I can control. Yea, boring.
Mongrel and I got to walk together some today. When we weren’t moving he was chasing his tail. I can’t tell if he is goofing off like cats can do or if he’s frustrated that he can’t control it. One thing’s for sure is that he is very transparent because of that tail which exposes his current mood. The little biting flies were bugging the crap out of us both too.
We were also still a lot today. It’s interesting to watch Mongrel. He generally sits facing opposite of me. If I were to lay down he sits on top of me. Must be some weird instinct thing going on there. Seems to watch out after me when we are together. Anything out of the ordinary while he is on watch will render a “growl”. Could be a dog ½ mile away or a person riding a horse. He just lets me know it’s out there.
Watching everything that is moving.
When all that is done and we are back in the quiet, cool of the house where his guard comes down he starts to slow down after some dinner. Quietly protesting that he doesn’t want to be inside he climbs in his box next to my desk. He starts off looking at me. Then falls asleep.
“In the safety of my box”
Soon he is on his back with his feet in the air. This cat can sleep like none other I’ve ever met. And will sleep like that all night long.
I hope you’ve had a day that was fun like ours. And that you are back in your safe place where ever that may be.
I’m done goofing off. Work tomorrow. Headed to my box.
Yesterday I was reading yet another article about what “mode” to keep one’s camera in so that it is always on the ready. The consensus is that no “pro” would shoot anything other than in full manual mode in raw format. The stories go something like, “5 reasons why you should alway keep your camera in full manual mode…” blah blah. It’s all BS.
In the last year I’ve learned that capturing the shot is the most important thing. Forget how the camera is set. Set the darned thing in a way that when you pick it up the next time you are ready to capture the shot when the shot happens so that you are not “fiddling” trying to figure it out … sometimes in complete darkness.
Tower #2 in the back yard with the Milky Way as a backdrop.
You just can’t predict where you’ll be and there is just no such thing as a perfect camera setting. And you don’t need a “pro” camera to take good pictures. You don’t need the latest technology. You need to get in the back yard and take the picture with the shit you got right now. That’s how this works.
So touch the picture above and look at the details. It’s not like standing in my back yard and feeling the dew on your face as it moves about in the cool breeze. But you’ll get the idea.
This is the sunrise out my office window this morning. You know the drill, I wasn’t up to see it personally but my Raspberry Pi was.
The sun is moving into the southern sky as fall approaches. There is a very pronounced Coriolis effect going on in the clouds while the fog moves around this very dewey morning.
I was up early working with an arborist to try to figure out if we could save three ash trees that are being consumed by ash borer bugs brought in from China. I learned this morning that 90% of all of the ash trees in Virginia are dead or dying.
One of our trees is gone. His suggesting for the others is to enjoy them while they are around and plant something else in their spot.
Attending a total solar eclipse was not anywhere on my bucket list a few months ago. A few months ago I decided to put it on my list and attend the solar eclipse that will happen on August 21, 2017.
We are going to be able to take in the solar eclipse on the line of totality in the small city of Andrews, North Carolina. We’ve been planning this trip for a very long time now and set off this morning to go “stare at the sun”.
We’ve planned for a “mini disaster”
We are going to view the eclipse right smack dab on the “totality line” which means for over two full minutes the sun will be completely GONE! That will happen at about 2:36pm on Monday, August 21.
NC Totality Map – Featuring Andrews
We’ll be camping on a ball field in Andrews where the totality line will pass through the outfield of the park. That is where we’ll be camping and viewing the event. I think the only thing we could do better is to be closer to the place on earth that totality will be the longest but that would only gain us about 2 seconds as seen from this map. That is just how close we are to the place that will have the longest totality experience.
Totality length map
The drive down to NC today was like nothing I’ve experience before. We took a route mostly down I-81 which was gridlock at times on this perfectly clear weather day. Tomorrow I hope to capture some of the maps as Google/Waze keeps the route updates with the latest traffic flow information. If today is any indication, tomorrow will be a serious travel headache for many who plan on coming down then. Monday? Forget it!
This is going to be a continuing document. As I write down my experience I’ll upload all of the details as I have access to the Internet. I’m told by many that where Internet was normally available it might not be available on Monday. Or to even make a phone call for that matter. That being the case, I have brought my radio equipment for both entertainment and in case an emergency really does happen I’ll be ready to figure it out. I also plan on doing some science with radio in the coming days.
It’s Sunday, August 20 now. We left Bryson City around 9am this morning and headed on to Andrews, NC where we’ll be setting up our tent for the night so we don’t have to travel tomorrow to the location where we will be viewing the eclipse.
Part of what I did today was volunteer some time to help the science teacher of the middle school in Andrews explain some radio science that NASA provided to the school. They did hourly presentations on “radio JOVE” which is what I have been helping with.
As I get more information, photos and the like I’ll keep this updated. Right now I’ve completely run out of juice and have to got to bed.
Update: It’s 11:45 and we just got home about 30 minutes ago, unpacked and ready for the day tomorrow. We were on the road today for 14-15 hours trying to get back home in gridlocked traffic jams all the way up to DC. That was after going 74 miles in 3-4 hours yesterday right after the eclipse. I don’t have the energy to stay up all night and then work all day tomorrow so I’ll get with my photography tomorrow.
C1 to C2 contacts points:
Just after C1.Eclipse through some clouds.Just prior to totalityTotal eclipse of the sun. Andrews, NC. 2:36pm August 21, 2017
More to come… I have to get up at 5:30 to go to work tomorrow.
It’s August 24, 2017, a little after midnight. I’ve been working on some of the time lapse photography today and think I have a sequence going after sorting through 10,000 photos. My computer was acting a bit strange as I worked to sew things together. I’ve finally got a first-cut sequence in the works. It’s taken over an hour so far for my computer to start the process which it’s about 80% through now. I’m going to try to stay up to get to the point of rendering a video and then head on to bed.
I’ve notice that my GoPro camera might be in the process of failing as some of the images didn’t come out perfectly. I think I’ll be able to take some of the images out that didn’t take properly. Some of them were corrected when I cropped the images. When you watch the video you will notice some pink images from time to time. That’s an error in the GoPro camera.
To process the images I use a tool called “LR Timelapse Version 4” I’ve used this program for years. The developer, Gunther Wegner, has kept this software updated and improved over the years. It works in conjunction with Adobe Lightroom to be able to edit the sequence the way you want. Essentially, Lightroom does the heavy lifting for editing enmasse and outputs to LRTimelapse for the sewing of the video. I don’t know how else you’d do something like this and you certainly could not do it easily by hand. 30 years ago, I don’t know how you’d put this together with a film camera either.
Lightroom has the ability to make massive edits to thousands of files for things like lens correction, which is important for a GoPro camera to correct aspect ratios, image quality, size, shape, color correction and similar settings. For example, I can crop the first image to a 16:9 aspect and have all of the other photographs have the exact same cropping.
16:9 aspect is very common. It’s the size and shape of most TV screens and computer monitors. Whereas a 1:1 aspect ratio is good for a photo or video posted on Instagram. I don’t know why Instagram likes square stuff, but ok, whatever. They like you to fit your round objects in their square sockets which is one big reason I don’t like using Instagram for stuff like this. Sometimes my stuff is portrait, sometimes landscape. Most often it’s larger then they allow on their servers. Sometimes it’s not worth the trouble to fit my stuff in their format so it doesn’t get posted there.
Facebook will let you post anything you want in the aspect ratio you prefer but what they won’t do is keep the image quality to it’s original for either a photo or a video.
Back on this video. When I finish the first cut I’ll have to work on the final cuts. For that I use Apple Final Cut Pro which allows me to edit video at scale and add anything I want to it like captions, music and the like. I haven’t figured out what I want to do in that regard yet.
After the first cuts I’ll have to figure out how annoying the bad images are going to be and then go through them one at a time and either edit or remove them. After I do that I’ll have to get a new first cut which will take another 2-3 hours of rendering. As I write this paragraph the process of rendering the first cut for the first time has started.
When this first cut is complete I’ll have to find a place to post it so you can download or view it. That will likely be YouTube because DropBox frowns on that kind of thing and don’t allow embedding like I plan on doing here.
While we wait on that, it’s a good time to mention the Eclipse of 2024. You will need to start planning this event now. Figure out where you want to be in the path of the eclipse. Tilt things in your favor by making sure you are in a place where the weather will cooperate traditionally for you in the area you want to go. For more information on that eclipse you can go to NASA’s web site here. We plan on going!
Helen and Gloria awaiting the eclipse arrival.
Helen and some of her friends came down to join us from college at Virginia Tech University. They set up their tents next to ours on Sunday night and were able to enjoy the eclipse with us.
Staying out of the sun for a while.Frisbee games in the hot NC sun.Serious eclipse card gamesFriends and family; and a sweet old dog.Who owns whom?
While we waited for the eclipse to arrive there was much tale telling under our shade tent. My only regret was not taking more actual video of people talking, especially during the eclipse, and more photos of just the normal happenings around me. Gloria picked up my professional camera and didn’t know the focus is “manually activated” so a lot of the photos she took were blurry. While they help tell the story I am not going to publish them here.
It’s no surprise to my family but I brought some of my radio gear with me to have while I observed the eclipse. There was a ton of chatter on all of the bands about what was about to happen. We were on a “grid square” of EM85 with a coordinate of 35.20490 -83.81650. I used this coordinate to calculate the exact time of all of the event contact points.
HF Radio, cameras and other stuff I brought with me to observe some science and astronomy.Dipole antenna system – 20 and 40 meter antennae.
The antenna is built out of common wire I bought at Lowes, constructed in my back yard and tuned to the frequencies I wanted to operate. It worked perfectly for what I was using it for. It’s not like my other station antennas that are very high off the ground for maximum effectiveness but it worked just fine. I made many contacts in the 0-3500 mile range just like I expected I would.
Here is the first cut of a time lapse from my GoPro:
The idea was that I would capture everything going on around us. There was a flurry of activity before, during and after the eclipse. During the eclipse everyone cheered, shot off fire works and otherwise celebrated the event. That was a ton of fun. As soon as totality was over people started packing up and heading out!
We were also able to capture the “Shadow Bands”. Shadow bands are thin, wavy lines of alternating light and dark that can be seen moving and undulating in parallel on plain-coloured surfaces immediately before and after a total solar eclipse. They are caused by the solar crescent thinning to a narrow slit, which increasingly collimates the light reaching Earth in the moments just before and after totality.
I think it’s fun that at some point the camera was thrown into the sheet, probably unconsciously, to watch everything going on around us.
We didn’t. We packed up slowly and planned to load up the car and head into Andrews for some dinner while the traffic bled off a bit. We could tell it was going slow on the road so we thought we’d let it loosen up. Little did we know that in the next 24 hours it will be very difficult to get back home.
After we has some dinner, packed up the car, motorcycle and trailer we took off from Andrews and headed out the only real road out of town towards Asheville. We thought the traffic would have thinned by the time we got on the road hours after the eclipse where all the eager types had blazed the trail in front of us. It was a good plan anyway.
But that plan didn’t work out. After 4 hours and being rerouted by Waze several times we were in Maggie Valley only 74 miles towards our destination in Northern Virginia. We decided to stay the night and let the traffic continue to bleed off. We thought that was a good plan.
But that plan didn’t work out either. Traffic was pretty good through Asheville and on to I-26 north but the second we got on I-81 our luck changed. The traffic was essentially gridlocked from the intersection of I-26 and I-81 all the way home although we wouldn’t learn the latter until well into the trip north.
Our plans just kept changing as we tried to make it all the way home. At Blacksburg Waze routed us again through the city of Roanoke which even I knew that plan was not a good one. So we got off the main path and headed west towards route 219. SR219 is a goat trail best driven by a motorcycle but we were in a car pulling a motorcycle so we made the best of it. There was very little traffic on the road between Blacksburg and I-64 where we headed east to SR220.
From there it was north towards WV SR48 where we got back on to I-81 into guess what? Yep, grid lock traffic. It was slow going until we got off to SR7. The rest of the trip was uneventful but we were beat tired.
I have to get up in the morning at 5:30am to attend meetings all day in Baltimore. 5:30 will come early.
And all of the logistical nightmare was worth the 2.5 minutes of totality. I’d do it all again tomorrow if there was an eclipse featuring solar totality. We have our sights set on 2024 for the next total solar eclipse.
A solar eclipse wasn’t on my bucket list. It should have been on the short list. I highly recommend you make it to one in your lifetime if you can.
See you in 2024 somewhere on the line that is totality!!
