A different kind of routing table

My day job is in IT, so the routers I normally deal with don't usually produce sawdust.

However, I'm currently working on finishing the baseboards in my kitchen so I can move on to building my portable radio shack, and that meant it was time to dig out my old router and find a way to make it work for me.

I bought the thing many years ago to trim counter top laminate, used it for one job, and then put it away. It's such a huge bulky thing that I've never bothered to dig it out. I even have a router table, which I've never used. (My router doesn't fit, and I've never gotten around to modifying the table to suit. I also don't have space in my garage for another table.)

However, the router is the perfect tool for cutting the baseboards to fit around the stairs, specifically the little relief cuts so the trim will fit around the metal bullnose on the front of each step. And so began the project to find a way to make the router useful. And by useful I mean it can be set up in a minute, stashed out of the way quickly when not in use, and doesn't take up a lot of space when stored.

The result is what you see below. The router table is composed of a sheet of 3/4" plywood, that has a couple braces on the bottom so that it can sit on the rails that extend from the side of the table saw table. The table saw fences can be used in some situations, and I can clamp the vacuum near the bit to collect the sawdust.

The portable router table. It's being used, even while jammed in a corner.

Using this rig, with the flush trim bit, I can easily whip off a dozen identical pieces of trim for wrapping the stairs. When I'm done, the router simply lifts out of the saw table, and I can throw it on a shelf.

A Portable Ham Shack for DXing on 2m

The title of this post sucks, but it's what I've got for now.

Ham radio is a multi-faceted hobby. There are just so many things you can do with a radio set and some math.

One of the things ham operators like to do is try to make contact with other stations that are far away, something known as "DXing" (in radio jargon, "DX" means "distant station"). The farther away a contact is, the better.

The weapon of choice for hunting distant contacts is usually an HF radio. This is because the HF bands (between 3 and 30MHz) will reach around the world thanks to the fact that the radio waves will skip off the ionosphere. This allows an operator to effectively bend his or her signal around the curve of the Earth.

My problem is that I don't have an HF set, and there's currently no room in my budget to buy one. So while my wife is pleased that she won't have to put up with a radio shack in the basement and the backyard suddenly sprouting a forest of antennas, I'm not going to be DXing over HF anytime soon.

However, there is another possibility. Many operators are talking to distant stations on VHF radios, in the 2m band. While the range is not as great (VHF signals punch right through the ionosphere, so they won't reach the other side of the planet,) operators are reporting contacts as far away as 1000km thanks to other atmospheric effects like tropospheric ducting.

I already have a pretty good VHF set, which I was thinking of installing in my RV trailer. However, that's going to limit me in terms of when and where I can use it (for example, I won't be using it in the winter and if we're camping, I can't get out of everyone's way to go play with my radio.) Ideally, I'd like something a little more portable so I can lug it up to a nearby mountaintop when I'm out camping. And since I'm not using HF, I don't need a huge antenna, so a portable radio shack is not out of the question.

Most portable VHF radios find themselves mounted in a vehicle. For various reasons, that won't work for me, so I'm thinking of building a portable radio shack. Basically, a box that can be lifted into or out of the back of a pickup truck by one or two people. It would house a radio (or eventually two), battery, and have space to store a portable antenna. A place to put a 20W solar panel would also come in handy and would make the rig ideal for emergency situations.

As for the antenna, my early research is pointing me in the direction of a Yagi-Uda. Something that I can easily disassemble to store inside the box. Same for the mast; I want some height, but it also needs to be portable (ideally, stowed in the box beside the antenna.) This means flimsy; hopefully I can come up with something that can be attached to the side of a vehicle for stability.

HAM N00b

Last week, I became a ham radio operator.

Some people may ask, "why the heck would you wanna do that?" Well, there are a few reasons.

For starters, I'm a geek. I'd gone pretty much as far as I wanted to go with photography, and I needed another hobby that would give me reason to read books and absorb information. In comparison to other hobbies, (like say, restoring a car,) amateur radio has some real benefits. It takes up less space. At least, for now. It can (mostly) be done indoors, which is very helpful during the cold winter months. There's less of a chance I'll find myself laying under a car in the mud trying to force stubborn pieces to fit together. And overall, it doesn't cost as much. Again, for now.

Secondly, I like math. And while there's bucketloads of math in everything we do, a lot of it seems to have concentrated itself around radio. And it's the special kind of math, made of imaginary numbers and black magic that makes your head want to turn itself inside out. All of that math boils down to how long to make a certain piece of wire and where to put it so that you can talk to another geek on the other side of the planet. That may sound condescending, but it's not. Geeks are awesome. Without geeks, we wouldn't have cell phones. Or the internet. Which means we wouldn't have Angry Birds or Candy Crush, but it also means we wouldn't have a man-made object drilling holes in a comet.

And then, there's the Zombie Apocalypse. Or ice storms. Or aliens. Or anything else you can think of that can cause a large-scale disruption of the infrastructure that makes civilization work. One of the reasons the government sets aside portions of the radio spectrum for the use of amateur operators is that, given time and geeks being what they are, eventually a communications network springs up that is completely independent of any commercial venture. This comes in handy when those commercial networks fail, such as when a car crash on the highway knocks out a fiber optic cable. Or an ice storm brings down power lines and leaves whole communities without electricity for weeks at a time.

It also comes in handy when someone is lost out in the bush, where there's no cell service and the mountains are too close together to get a signal to a satellite phone. These are places where industry has no need to build a communications network because normally there isn't anyone out there to use it.

For all these reasons, and more, I wrote my test and got my ham license.

Now it's time to start learning.

Nothing is simple

The other day, my coworker complained that nothing is simple. It sent me in search if a career that is simple.

I thought of my brother in law, who used to drive a logging truck and operate an excavator until he was injured. Most people think driving a truck is fairly simple; truck drivers are often looked down upon as unskilled labour.

But driving truck isn't simple, and neither is operating an excavator. The men and women doing it only make it look that way.

Let's start with driving a truck. It sounds simple at first: move this cargo from point A to point B. Except that the cargo weighs fifty tons. And it's spread over two trailers. Your route takes you down a hill, through a city center, and up another hill. In the winter. When you get where you're going, you have to reverse those two trailers into position so they can be unloaded.

Not so simple anymore. I don't know that many people who can tow a trailer forward very well. I can count on one hand the number of people I know who can reverse a single trailer well. When that trailer weighs more than the tow vehicle, the number gets even smaller.

Speaking of that disparity in weight, since you're hauling the weight of a fully-loaded 737 down the road, most of the axles on your truck and trailer have brakes. Which is fine at first, until you think about slippery road conditions and corners. How do all those brakes work together? I have a heavy (1700kg) trailer at home, and I don't want to haul it around in the winter. Why? Because I don't know what I would do if I were rounding a corner on the highway and the trailer suddenly decided it wanted to be in the ditch. Steering into the skid doesn't work as well when you have a four thousand pound anchor pulling sideways on your rear end. Now, think of the truck, that has seven axles instead of two, and two points of articulation.

The more I think about it, the more I marvel that as many trucks make it to their destination as they do.

Then there's the excavator. Just recently, over thanksgiving weekend, I had the opportunity to watch the same brother-in-law dig a well using a mini-excavator (a CAT 303.5E, to be precise). Now, the well is deeper than the arm of the excavator can reach, so he built himself a series of benches - steps - so he could get the machine within reach of the water. The downside of this is that instead of moving the dirt once - from the hole into a pile, he had to move the dirt several times, repositioning the machine each time, so that he could move the dirt out of the way.

Watching this happen, I couldn't believe that the man-machine interface was something as clumsy as a collection of levers and buttons. The movements of the machine were as coordinated as my own arm if I were digging the hole with my bare hands; something I couldn't fully appreciate until I jumped into another machine - a small wheeled loader - in order to move some dirt out of the way.

At one point, he was moving the excavator to a new position, and the machine, deep in the trench, slipped a track. My first though was, "we're screwed." But my brother-in-law, he sends me to fetch a couple prybars. Between those and the winch on the quad, we were able to get the track nearly back into place. And that's when the side of the trench gave way.

Fortunately, it wasn't a complete cave-in. But enough sand sloughed in to bury the track we were trying to wrestle into place. Thoughts of large cranes are going through my head as we head off to the neighbour's to borrow a tow rope.

As I'm rounding up some random bits of chain, my brother-in-law uses the loader to build a shelf that will get the loader close enough to the disabled excavator while keeping it on a firm footing. Then we attach the rope between the two machines. I started the pull on the rope with the loader, which didn't do much.

Until the excavator, using one good track and its only good arm, started crawling out of the pit. I had the image in my head of a wounded soldier crawling out of a trench. The arm would push against the side of the trench, lifting the disabled track off the ground. Then the other track would crawl forward, until the arm reached its limit, and the process would repeat.

Once the machine was on level ground, we attacked the track again with prybars and a small winch. Within ten minutes we had the track back in place and the machine was ready to work again.

That's what years of experience gives does: it takes you from, "All is lost," to "well, shoot, this is gonna set me back a couple hours."

Turns out my coworker was right: nothing is simple.

One last hurrah: digging the RV out of hibernation

Well, it looks like I jumped the gun on winterizing our new trailer.
By "new", of course, I mean, "New to us". In truth, the trailer is almost as old as I am. However, that doesn't change the fact that it suits our camping needs perfectly, and I couldn't argue with the price.
Where was I? Oh yeah, I got excited about the whole, "I've got a new thing, let's make procedures about it!" thing (is that a thing?) and went ahead and winterized it as soon as I thought we were done camping for the season. Because I take care of my stuff.
Well, turns out that was a less than optimal idea. See, this weekend is Thanksgiving here in Canada, and we're going out of town to visit family. Out of town means securing sleeping arrangements, and with all the other family coming into town, our options are limited.
However, since the snow hasn't flown yet in this neck of the woods, taking the trailer is one of them.
I guess that means I get to try out the dewinterizing procedure!