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voodoo or black magic antenna experiment results Saturday, July 16 2022
location: 800 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
After our usual Saturday morning routine (Spelling Bee & coffee), Gretchen and I went down to the lake together. The thinking was that if we went together, the dogs would consider it an important enough outing to join. This time, though, they stayed back at the cabin.
Today at the dock I branched out a little bit more to do other necessary tasks, such as the assembly of a steel-frame ground-based hammock Gretchen's father had given us on one of our recent visits to the Watergate. I also used Gorilla Glue to repair a few spots of larch decking on the dock that were in danger of stabbing someone with a splinter. One other thing was to further clean up the woods near the dock to make it a more pleasant place to walk around barefoot. This entailed cutting the dead lower limbs off hemlock trees and removing every loose branch that I could from the ground (since they like to leap up and stab you when you're moving quickly). I also cleared an old stump from the spot of swampy shoreline just north of the tree dock, as this is the only place suitable for towing ashore the floating dock segments to store in the winter. (I hadn't known before I started building the dock that it's advisable not to leave floating dock segments in a lake that is likely to freeze. So now I have to retroactively come up with a plan for winterizing the dock.)
I left the dock earlier than Gretchen and had some nice alone-time back in the cabin. It bears mentioning that on this cabin-based weekend, Gretchen and I have mostly been eating independently of each other, perparing our own food separately at separate times. I, of course, get by mostly on sandwiches containing kimchi.
This evening after Gretchen returned from the lake she and I (and the dogs) walked over to Ibrahim's A-frame cabin, which is being bolted together from a kit. In the past two days, progress has been made building out the rafters all the way up to where the roof's ridge will run. The rafter pieces are made of thick plywood featuring numerous layers, but it's all being assembled without the use of a crane. (There is makeshift scaffolding, however, some of which you would never see me put my weight on.)
Back at the cabin, Gretchen and I gathered together an enormous amount of cardboard (from all the things that have been shipped to us) in a place in out nascent "yard" where there weren't too many pioneering plants and had ourself a brief, hot bonfire.
In addition to little dock-related projects, I've been doing more experiments to determine the best permanent arrangement for the Moxee cellular router. As you know, I've found that by placing it in the focus of a parabolic dish, I get excellent bandwidth. But this evening further experiments outside showed I only got such great bandwidth through a sliding glass door edged with aluminum. Evidently something about the placement of those pieces of aluminum were greatly amplifying the cellular signal (both for upload and download). As with anything antenna-related, the whole thing feels like voodoo or black magic.
Gretchen with our bonfire this evening.
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