So after a year of being a General I have repaired my g5rv. It is now working very well on 20-40 and 80. The only band I could work with it was 17 and now that I have fixed it 17 is gone. I guess it’s time for another wire.
I have joined OMISS “Old mans Internationale sideband society” and I’m going to work on “worked all states” on 20 metre. This seems to be the right group of people to do this with. They seem to be a great bunch of operators.
A little while back I attended the Joplin Amateur Radio Club’s hamfest. I went to watch a demo on satellite communications and was very interested. So I shopped around and decided to buy an antenna from Elk Antennas. So I set up my new antenna on an old tripod hooked up the old dual bander.
My first attempt was on SO-67 which I quickly learned was not on the air due to a power issue. I waited and tried to work AO27 with no luck. The next pass was AO51. AO51 has a power issue also but is still in service but I was not able to make a contact there either. So AO27 comes back around and on this pass I got lucky K8YSE returned my call and I now have my first grid square EM91. I need to buy some QSL cards now for sure. So I just have to say thanks to K8YSE for my first contact on a satellite.
Well I have had to do two battery pulls lately and have noticed the cr-48 is slowing down alot. But on the other hand I have downloaded about every app I could get my hands on. Thinking about removing some of them and going from there.
Well I had to break down and turn on my desktop. I am finding a few things I needed. I needed a document and had to log in to place it in my box account. This presented another problem. No Open Office support. So I had to go back and email it to myself. This was a preparation problem on my part.
I guess I need to learn more about Google documents. Although I dont really think the CR-48 was supposed to be a productivity tool
Several weeks ago I signed up for the Google ChromeOS pilot program and to my suprise I was selected. I recived a CR-48 notebook and 100 mb monthly of Verizon wireless data for two years.
So now what? Living in the Cloud, thats what. The way I look at it is Google was good enough to send me the CR-48 so I’m going to use it as it was intended. For the next 30 days I’m going to give up using my Linux desktop and use the CR-48 exclusively. Well ok I’m still going to use my Android powered phone but it’s pretty much the same idea and really part of the cloud computing experience in my opinion.
I going to start this off with my first reaction upon returning home from work to my wife asking “what have you ordered now!!?” pointing to the package on the dinning room table. Keep in mind the last thing I received for free was a baseball glove at a Father Son dinner at St. Frances church sometime in the late 60’s. From what I’m told by my daughter Helen I almost smacked my wife in the face when I victory danced after opening the box. I dont remember it that way but thats what they tell me.
The CR-48 is somewhere in between a netbook and a laptop. Really a nice size for everyday use in my opinion. From what I can see the battery life which is advertised to be eight hours is just that. The keyboard is not full size but very easy to use. The touch pad is one big button. This is an interesting take by Google on the touch pad, but as with all touch pads sucks in my opinion. Just to be fair I have to say I dont like any touch pad and I was fast to purchase a cordless mouse. This thing is quiet. So quiet that I’m not sure its working at all. The CR-48 has no optical drive. There is a headphone jack, USB port and an SDcard slot. From what I read they are not active yet but are going to be used in later release of the ChromeOS.
