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Road trip!

From Tucson to St. Louis to Pensacola and back with Uncle Bob and Bro Mike. Saw Sister Barbara…

and My father-in-law Charlie with his wife Rose! Charlie is doing well after heart valve replacement surgery!!!


Next will hopefully be pictures of fish!!!

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Communications in remote locations

We are going to start building the F250 into an Overland vehicle. What is overlanding? Why not use the Rubicon? That would be a great post for some other day – for now – google it or head over to overlandbound.com (we are member #5770) or get Overland Journal. Awsome magazine… anyway I digress.

I enjoy researching over-landing “stuff” in general but also technology related to over-landing. Given we are hopefully going to do more overland trips in the future (whoop!) with the F250 build but also possibly a fifth wheel, we may need some safety gear for those times when the good old cell phone is out of range. If your relaxing correctly, your out of range IMO. Lets look into that then shant we?

So, as usual, it depends on the requirements. Requirements are good. They keep you focused. They make you think before you purchase. They are great talking points when defending the more expensive purchases to your wife. Nuff said.

My requirements would be, in priority order:

  • Ability to summon help when feces has really hits the fart fan.
  • Update people with your location so they don’t worry.
  • Two way communication when needed and out of cell tower range.
  • Not require HAM radio ( I have one and license, but don’t want it to be the only safety comms I have).
  • Have some additional features that make the device useful when it isn’t saving your life, like GPS and mapping and updating your web site with location.

Here are some options:

goTenna – a mesh network for your iPhone. Interesting but wont help if you are all alone someplace. Might be helpful for localized emergencies or large crowds.

Spot – now that’s much better – works anywhere, and have used the older models. Does not “do” much else tho.

inReach Explorer+ – Now were talking… and it’s a GPS as well AND would sync with the iPhone and iPad pro (which will look nice mounted on the dash someday – yet another post). Going to add this to my Amazon gift list. Yeah I have one, leave me alone.

Know of others? Comment and let me know!

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Scorpions are a way of life…

We chose to live in the desert and therefore we choose to live with the consequences. One of those consequences are scorpions.

We get surprised once in a while like this morning – most of the time they are dead and other times they are only mostly dead.

We have been pretty lucky so far and we have the house sprayed monthly with some really good stuff (thank you Robert!)

It’s really not a big deal. I would suspect that most areas of the country have special issues they deal with based on where they live!

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// hello world

About time I started a blog. I need to get in the habit both personally and professionally.

I don’t do Facebook. I haven’t now for over year and overall really don’t miss it. Linda keeps me up-to-date with what’s going on in our extended circle of friends and we both keep in touch with my family and close friends personally.

One thing I do miss about Facebook is being able to go back and look at what I have done in the past as reminders for me. Also I plan to use this as a sort of personal Wikipedia of things I need to reference. So personal and professional project related stuff here mostly. I shall see.

Some of it may be boring to you, some not. This will be an experiment for me and may disappear at any time – I will see what happens and adjust. Fail fast, One Life Life It!