Got the latest beta of @ThinkU…
October 24th, 2010Got the latest beta of @ThinkUpApp installed and actually working this weekend. I’ll write up my experience in a blog post soon….
Got the latest beta of @ThinkUpApp installed and actually working this weekend. I’ll write up my experience in a blog post soon….
Our last day in Victoria, still no serious rain. It really blew last night though, glad I wasn’t on a boat in the harbor.
I’m very, very behind on blog updates. I have about four posts wrote in my head, but haven’t had a chance to actually put them into the text editor. So I’m going to start with the one I actually owe people, the hike report from the August Hike-a-Thon. (Yes, I said I was way behind)
So the back story. My wife loves to hike and has gotten mixed up with this crazy crowd from the Washington Trail Association. (WTA) The WTA actually does good stuff, but is generally full of people who would like nothing better then to run around every mountain in Washington. So several years ago Rosie starts doing their August Hike-a-Thon, where you pledge to hike X miles and people give the WTA money. She has managed to pull off ~100 miles for the last couple years. While attending last years awards night, I realized you didn’t have to hike 100 miles to take part, you could actually do say 5 miles. So I signed up this year and pledge to hike 5 miles, I even got Rosie to join my team. Team 5 Miles!
So where does the lazy radio geek want to go on his five mile hike? He wants to hike up to a radio site on top of a mountain! Last year we almost made it to the site on Squak mountain, but ended up going the wrong way and had to turn around when it got dark. This year Rosie scoped it out ahead of time and figured out where we went wrong and we had no problem making it up.
I won’t bore you with the actual hiking part, but we decided to hike to the top of Squak Mountain. Honestly, the hiking wasn’t the fun part with it being hot and sweaty and there was a complete lack of elevators. It is roughly 2.2 miles from the trail head to the top and you gain close to 2000 feet. (I think) That seems like a whole lot of up. We were under the gun as well, since we did the hike after work and needed to get to the top before the sun set.
So why did I want to go up there? Because I wanted to see the cool radio site. The Dept. of Energy and I think some other state groups have a large radio installation up there, with five of the super large towers and enough microwave dishes to feed a small army. I just love looking at this kind of stuff. I took lots of pictures at the top and being the geek I am, I also have a GPS map tracks of the whole thing.
So after we get up there and finish walking around taking pictures, I spot some chopped up tower pieces along side the road. These are small tower pieces, like the kind I use to in my tower at home. Two things are odd about them, they have been cut down to about 4 foot sections and they have been left outside the fence.
Then as I head back down the trail, I notice a old building back off the main site and about 15 feet into the woods. You wouldn’t notice it unless looking at it just right. So of course I pick up a stick and start bush whacking my way to check it out. I then get a couple of very big surprises. The first is that there is a Rohn25 tower back in the trees next to the building, it looks to be about 45 feet free standing with a couple sets of guys. I honestly can’t see the top, but there were three runs of hardline going up it at one point. (The top is high enough that between the trees and the now nearly dark sky, I can’t see much) The second weird thing is the building itself, the door is not locked and while the outside looks a little worst for wear, the inside is prefect. No nasty wet smell, it is totally clean inside.
This was obviously a radio site at one point, because you can see the built in wood ‘rack‘ they built and there was certainly a patch panel at one time on the wall. (I even found the power box where the meter was at one point installed) This totally feels like a ham radio repeater site installation, but nobody I’ve asked about it knows anything. The story has always been that the government doesn’t allow anybody to co-lo on the site. I wonder if someone had gotten a ‘under the table’ OK and recently got kicked out?
So that is my hiking report. I’ve now made the trek to the site on Squak Mountain and the one on Cougar Mountain. Next year I’ll have to make my way to one of the sites on Tiger. I heard there are actually two of them up there. :-)
@bernard_ben We are doing a family weekend trip, we love taking the Clipper over.
Back on dry land, in Rosie’s home land…
Service fading-bye unlimited internet…
I’m on a ferry – heading to the islands man. Vancouver island here we come!
@vareck Try going on a Saturday afternoon. You won’t be able to get in the door…
Catching up on the second half of The Guild season 4…
With help from Isaac, the garage is now much cleaner and the garden is officially ‘retired’ for the winter.(minus the pumpkins)