W0LED-10 The Return Thereof To The Ether
Man! That was the longest 48 hours I've ever experienced. But W0LED-10 is back on the air.
After tearing down the laptop to the display level there appears to be an intermittent wire break in the motherboard to display cable. It's right at the point where maximum stress occurs every time the display is opened or closed. I think it's probably a wire leading to the inverter because when the screen goes blank it's dead black. So the bits and pieces of that laptop are secured for the time when I can get back to the repair.
In the mean time I'm using an Intel NUC with SSD (which had been my plan for the past several months). It was a fairly quick install because it was already pretty much configured for Packet Winlink -- I just had to get the time.
Aside from the NUC, the rest of the gateway station remains the same: Yaesu FT-1500M, KPC-3+, APC UPS backup for the NUC, and a solar/AC line charged battery backup for the radio and TNC. That is the real significant upgrade to the station, consisting of an old war horse Tripp Lite 35 Amp power supply, 140 Amp-Hr AGM battery, the new West Mountain Radio Epic PWRgate, and a Goal Zero 100 Watt solar panel.
I got the GZ solar panel during a recent 'open box' sale. I also got a roof mount kit so that the module can be installed on the garage roof and hard-wired to the Epic PWRgate which incorporates a solar power input followed by a charge controller. If adequate solar input comes into the PWRgate the charge controller output charges the battery rather than the line-powered supply.
Well, enough of that. The supplementary heaters are put away until next winter and the cooling fans are now in place to mitigate the heat of summer.
73!
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