grouchyfarmer

Let’s Talk Antennas: PreciseRF HGR QRO-A Magloop Antenna

Hams will immediately recognize this thing up there but the rest of you are wondering WTF I have perched in the air outside of the house. Read on if you want to know more.

If you’ve been following this blog for a while you know that I’m an amateur radio operator. And one thing all amateur radio operators (Or hams, as they call us.) need to deal with is antennas. And the one up there in that photo just went up here at grouchyfarmer.com’s headquarters and is what I want to talk about.

(Sidenote: Why do they call amateur radio operators hams? No one seems to know for sure. My personal theory is that the founder of the ARRL, Hiram Percy Maxim, was using his neighbor’s fence as a makeshift antenna back in 1912 when he was experimenting with an early spark gap transmitter and crossed up his wires somehow and accidentally electrocuted his neighbor’s entire herd of pigs, and since he had to pay off the neighbor for the pigs, he started up a side gig selling pork products.)

For a lot of people, including, unfortunately, a lot of amateur radio operators, antennas are a strange and arcane mixture of magic, sorcery, science and blind luck. That’s not true, of course. How antennas work is hard science. We’ve been using antennas for well over a hundred years and how they work is well established. But because the effectiveness of antennas is affected by a wide variety of external factors and operating practices, the experiences of individual hams with exactly the same antenna can vary wildly. This, along with a lack of understanding of exactly how antennas work and a strong aversion to mathematics has resulted in a lot of… I hate to use the term nonsense, but that’s an accurate way of describing a lot of what I see turning up on Youtube and various amateur radio oriented forums.

And of all the antennas out there that hams commonly use, the one that is surrounded with the most nonsense is probably the magnetic loop antenna. According to the self appointed experts, magloop antennas are either the best things ever and deliver absolutely magical results, mediocre at best, or they don’t work at all and you’re better off wiring the rain gutter on your house to your radio. I’ve been playing with magloop antennas for years, both commercially made ones and ones I’ve cobbled together myself. I reviewed one back in 2019 if you want to click the link there and go back and look at the one I own that I use for portable operations. And I’ve had good results with both the Alpha I bought and my home brew copies.

Ultimately it isn’t a matter of which is the best antenna. There is no such thing as a perfect antenna. it’s a matter of which one will do what you need in the situation you are in. The big advantage of magloop antennas is that they are small, relatively unobtrusive and work pretty well, even indoors in some circumstances. This makes them attractive for people who don’t have the space to put up something like my 135 ft long OCFD or a huge beam antenna, or who live in an area where local zoning ordinances or home owners associations restrict the size and placement of antennas or even prohibit them entirely. Something like a magloop antenna may be the only option some people have.

How do they work? I’m not going to launch into a pages long lecture on that. There are very good resources out there available for free on the internet so I’ll leave it to you to do your own research. I’m going to restrict my comments to the HGR-QRO-A MLA .

And before I start in I should point out that I have no relationship with PreciseRF except as a customer. I receive no compensation from them in any way whatsoever. The antenna was purchased through their website and was paid for out of my own pocket. I don’t get free stuff or make any money off these reviews. And considering the conclusions I come to at the end of this review, PreciseRF is never, ever, going to send me free anything. This antenna… It works very, very well as an antenna but there are some serious issues with it that are very troubling. But I’ll come to that later.

If you read CQ magazine or QST, you’ve probably seen this ad:

This is what I’m talking about, the HG series of MLAs from PreciseRF. Specifically the one of the far right. The HGR QRO-A MLA antenna. And yes, this thing really costs $3,000. Let me repeat that. Three. Thousand. Dollars. For an antenna. And yeah, I bought one.

Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time…..

So why is this antenna worth three grand? It’s because of that “QRO” bit they stuck on the name. QRO is one of the “Q-codes” that amateur radio operators used as abbreviations back in the days when morse code was pretty much the only way you could send information long distances. Originally it was one ham telling another to increase the power of their transmitter so they could hear them better. But it has also come to mean someone operating a transmitter at full legal power allowed by the FCC, up to 1,500 watts. That’s why this thing is so expensive, the full power bit.

It is hard to make a magloop antenna that can handle more than a few watts of transmitter power. My Alpha MLA can handle up to 100W using SSB or CW on some bands, but I use digital modes and it can only handle up to about 20W using digital. The reason why, well, it’s complicated. MLA antennas can generate some pretty serious voltages internally when they are in operation, and the commonly available variable capacitors used in the less expensive ones can’t handle those kinds of voltages without arcing and causing damage. If you want to use higher transmitter power to reach out farther with your signal, you need to resort to using electronics, circuits and a vacuum variable capacitor that can handle those voltages. And that takes money. A lot of money.

The HGR QRO can handle up to 1,500 watts SSB or CW, and up to around 400 watts with digital modes. I know of only two MLA antennas that can handle that kind of power, this one and one that’s even more expensive than the HGR.

But let’s get back to this specific antenna. I don’t do “unboxing” or assembly reviews, especially for something as easy to put together as the HGR is. Took me all of twenty minutes to assemble it. There is a collapsable ‘twist ‘n lock’ mast that everything clips or bolts to, a cable that goes from the copper loop to the big gray “box o’ gubbins” which contains the vacuum capacitor, stepper motor that adjusts it and the electronics that controls the system, which also bolts to the mast, and then the DB9 control cable and your coax hooks to the bottom of the box with standard connectors. And that’s it for assembling the antenna itself. I stuck it up on top of a cheap RCA rotator, and all of that is bolted to a 4×4 pressure treated post set in concrete and about 6 ft tall.

There is also the control box. That goes next to your transceiver. The DB9 cable from the antenna connects to the controller. The coax from the antenna goes into the control box, and a short jumper connects from the box to your transceiver. Oh, and you need a 12V power supply to operate the control box. Putting the whole thing together only takes a few minutes. Running the cables and mounting it is going to take longer than assembly does.

Oh, and you’re going to need an SWR meter because the one in the HGR QRO’s control box isn’t even close to accurate, something PreciseRF warns you about in the owner’s manual. And it can only handle about 5 watts of transmitter power. It’s useful only for the auto-tune function. I use the one built into my Kenwood TS-990S transceiver in normal usage.

The control box is what controls the tuning of the antenna. Unlike my Alpha that requires me to be right next to the antenna so I can adjust the variable capacitor by hand whenever I change frequency, the HGR has remote tuning controlled by that box there in the photo on the right up there. And it is very, very nice to be able to sit in my comfy chair in the basement and re-tune the antenna by just pushing a couple of buttons or turning that knob.

The first thing necessary when turning on the antenna is something called indexing. The stepper motor in that big box o’ gubbins out there on the mast starts to sort of recalibrate itself, turning the variable capacitor from its minimum to maximum to recalibrate itself so it doesn’t end up trying to crank the capacitor past its max and minimum range. And it takes a while to do this so be patient. Once it’s done that you generally don’t need to do it again and just bypass the indexing option when turning it on.

MLAs have a very narrow bandwidth so the antenna needs to be re-tuned whenever you change frequency. That’s easily done with the buttons on the front panel. When changing bands it will automatically re-tune the variable capacitor out there on the antenna to something reasonably close to where it needs to be for that band. After that you transmit a carrier at less than 10 watts, watch your SWR levels on your meter, and tune for the lowest SWR. Doing this manually can be a bit fiddly and time consuming.

This version of the HGR has auto-tune, though, and a built in SWR meter. So just press the AUTO button. It will prompt you to transmit a 5 watt carrier. Press OK and transmit, and the controller will re-tune the antenna relatively quickly. It works pretty well too. After some experimenting I never bothered to try to tune it manually. The auto-tune function almost always resulted in the lowest SWR readings all by itself.

I need to tell you right up front that this antenna doesn’t like the lower bands, at least on the digital portions of the band where I operate. On 17, 15, 12 and 10 meters it will easily tune down to an SWR of about 1.1 to 1.4. But on 20 meters the best I could get is 1.8, and on 40 the best was around 2.0. On 20 and 40 meters, after I tune the antenna for the best match, I switch on the transceiver’s internal antenna tuner. And before you start to complain about that yes, it works just fine and even PreciseRF’s documentation tells you to do that if you can’t get a good match and you feel it’s necessary.

Once the antenna is tuned, that’s all you need to do. Just operate as you normally would. All things considered, it’s as easy to use as it was to assemble.

The ultimate test is how well the thing works as an antenna, and my results there have exceeded my expectations.

The first thing I noticed was the background noise level. There is a lot of background noise out there in the radio spectrum. Most of it is caused by electronic devices in our homes and neighborhoods, and the background noise level can be so high sometimes that it makes receiving weak and even moderately strong radio signals almost impossible. Here my noise level is pretty high, usually running around S5 to S7 or even higher.

When I first hooked up the HGR and turned on my transceiver on 40 meters my S meter read zero. No noise at all. None. WTF? I thought the coax cable was bad or a connector was bad. But then I changed frequency to the FT8 part of the band and instantly the radio started chirping with that annoying FT8 chorus and the display on the radio lighted up full of signals. But still no background noise? None? Yeah, none. Between FT8 transmissions the noise level was zero.

This is what my display showed on 40M with my OCFD antenna.

Those yellow and orange lines are FT8 transmissions. The gray fuzzy stuff is the random background noise I normally see.

This picture below is the display when I switched over to the HGR antenna a few minutes later, on the same frequency.

The signals are a full 2 S units stronger. I’m seeing many more actual radio signals than I did using the dipole. And all that annoying hiss from the background noise? There was almost none. Stronger signals, no noise. Wow… I mean seriously, wow. How does it even do that? i am impressed.

Reception results weren’t always this good of course, but generally speaking the HGR was eliminating almost all of the background noise that I picked up on both my dipole and vertical antenna. And actual radio signals were coming through much stronger than on the other two antennas.

So that’s on the reception side of things. What about transmitting? I tuned up to the FT8 area on 15 meters, turned the transmitter up to 50 watts of power and started calling CQ and in about 5 minutes I’d worked Iceland, Japan, the Netherlands, France, Spain and a half dozen different US stations scattered all around the country. Well here’s a screen shot from PSK Reporter down below showing all of the amateur radio stations that were hearing me at that time down below. I was lighting up the entire continental US, Canada, Alaska, Japan, the EU, using 50 watts and a three foot loop antenna sitting about 6 feet off the ground?

As I said before, wow.

Overall my results using FT8 and JS8Call at 50 watts of power or less have been astonishing when compared to what I get with my OCFD or the GAP Titan vertical. And I’ve gotten similar results on all the bands from 40M up to 10M.

Of course as I pointed out at the beginning the results you see from a specific antenna are highly variable and depend on your local conditions, the weather, solar conditions and a lot of other factors.

So the antenna is small, easy to put together, easy to operate, and gives excellent results. Looked at only from the point of view of the results I’ve been getting the HGR-QRO is, frankly, amazing.

So you’re all waiting for the “But…” aren’t you? You know there’s one coming. In fact there are several.

Some of the “buts” are due to the nature of the beast and I knew they were going to be there. Magloop antennas are fiddly. They have very narrow bandwidth so that means if you change your operating frequency even slightly you’re probably going to have to retune the antenna. Also the SWR changes during the course of the day. I suspect that’s being caused by heating and cooling and the main antenna element, the LMR 600 loop, expanding and contracting as it heats up from the sun and then cools down in the evening. That means you have to check the SWR from time to time and may need to periodically retune the antenna.

No, the real problem with the HGR has nothing to do with how it works as an antenna. The biggest and most serious problem is that while the electronics in the box hanging under the antenna seem to be of high quality, the rest of the antenna isn’t. I’m sorry, but it just isn’t. Everything else uses the cheapest parts they could get away with.

The mast that supports the loops and the box with the vacuum capacitor? It is, frankly, a piece of junk. it’s a thin walled aluminum and plastic “twist n lock” adjustable pole that looks like it came off a bargain basement camera tripod from Amazon. Will it survive the Wisconsin weather for long? I highly doubt it and I’m already scouting around for something to replace it with.

The BNC cable that connects the copper loop to the top of the box? It’s a cheap piece of junk too with ill fitting connectors that don’t even properly lock into place. I had to tape them in place or they would have fallen off all by themselves. That’s going to get replaced ASAP.

The 50 foot RS-232 communications cable? Same as above. Cheap, cheap, cheap… Nasty connectors that were almost impossible to fit into the sockets. The screws that are supposed to hold the connectors in place had bad threads on them so they wouldn’t screw in. After trying to test fit them, I tossed it in the trash and bought a decent 75 ft cable.

Then we come to the control box. The controller works reasonably well and isn’t difficult to use but… The controller is housed in what looks like a cheap, off the shelf project box straight out of a 1980s era Radio Shack. The 4 line monochrome LCD display is like something right out of the 1980s as well, crude looking, difficult to read unless looking at it from the right angle and it’s just, well, nasty.

Am I being too critical? I don’t think so. Remember, this is a $3,000 antenna. Three. Thousand Dollars! Considering I can get a state of the art transceiver, even a decent amplifier for that kind of money, this thing should be top of the line all the way around. For that kind of money you’d think they could afford to give you a mast that wasn’t a repurposed selfie stick and a controller that didn’t look like an antique project that some ham threw together back in 1985. You can get a full color 5 inch touch screen for less than $50 these days for pete’s sake. There’s no excuse for a display like that on a $3K piece of equipment.

And if they cut corners that much on the basic quality there, I find myself wondering what other corners they may have cut when it comes to the electronics in that “big box o’ gubbins” hanging under the antenna out there in the weather.

I’m definitely going to keep using it. There’s no doubt at all that it performs very well indeed as an antenna. But I have serious questions about how long this thing is going to hold up. If they cut corners by providing the cheapest mounting hardware they could find, the cheapest cables they could find, the cheapest everything they could find, how can I be sure that they didn’t cut corners elsewhere in places where it really counts, like the vacuum capacitor, stepper motor and its driver circuits, the electronics inside the controller, etc.?

PreciseRF claims that box mounted up on that mast is weather proof, and while it seems reasonably well made, when I look at how poorly made other components are, i have to wonder about that too.

What it boils down to is that nothing about this antenna instills confidence in its ability to survive in real world conditions. Nothing about it says “Yes, this is a $3,000 antenna and it’s damn well worth it”. It might work very, very well as an antenna, but I have no real confidence that this thing will hold up long. So I simply cannot recommend it. At this price, it should be much, much better than this.

The Electric Tractors Are Coming

CaseIH has joined New Holland and Monarch in introducing an electric tractor. We all knew that was coming. The only thing that surprises me is that it’s taken this long. Both the New Holland and CaseIH are more or less traditional looking and traditional functioning tractors. They’re considered “utility” tractors, horsepower ranges from about 75 – 80 HP, and both have run times of 4 hours+ depending on how hard you work them.

The Monarch on the other hand… Yeah, I just don’t know. First of all it’s built in partnership with Foxconn. After the way that company screwed over the state of Wisconsin I wouldn’t trust them to clean my cat’s litter box much less build a tractor that actually works. But the Monarch itself isn’t any kind of tractor that we’d find all that useful here in Wisconsin in the first place. It’s small, narrow, has tiny little tires and is frankly strange looking, loaded with radar and sensors and I don’t know what all else. Supposedly it can follow you around like a dog and, well, I’m sorry, I don’t want a tractor following me around without a driver. It might be useful for orchards or vegetable farms, but for the average farm around here? This thing is pretty much useless for someone who has to get 1,000 acres of corn into the ground or harvest 500 acres of beans. And considering all of the fragile electronics and software packed into the thing it is going to break. A lot. It looks like that aside from small vegetable and specialty crop growers this thing is aimed at wealthy hobby farmers.

How successful will these things be? Will farmers adopt them? Well, maybe? I can see these being useful. But ultimately it’s going to come down to value for money. Farmers operate on razor thin profit margins, and they are very, very cautious about adopting new technology until it’s proven itself to be economically viable. E-tractors have a lot going for them besides just not pumping out huge amounts of toxic exhaust. No more engine oil changes, no more engine filter changes, less maintenance necessary, less noise.

It’s going to come down to how reliable these things are. Are they going to be able to stand up to the day to day use and abuse the average tractor experiences during its lifetime?

It’s Autumn. Time for a Fall Catch Up.

On the bike trail between Hilbert and Forest Junction. This trail and most of the others around here follow old railroad lines that ran between small towns before they were abandoned.

The calendar may say this is the first day of autumn but it hasn’t felt like it for the last few days. Daytime highs have been pushing 80 and it’s been remarkably pleasant out there. I’ve been out on the bike rather a lot enjoying the nice weather while it’s here.

But it’s dry. Very, very dry. This is what the river north of town usually looks like.

Below is what it looks like now.

I’ve lived in this area since the late 1980s and I’ve never seen the river like this before.

Yeah, completely dry. So dry I could walk across it without getting my shoes muddy.

MrsGF and I have been working on cleaning up some of the gardens. The squash, wax beans and pole beans are all done and we have those all cleaned out and have been working on bringing in some fresh compost.

The beans did not do very well this year. Both the pole and wax beans didn’t seem to thrive. Lots of vegetation and blossoms, but not many beans. I’m not sure why. I think partly that was because of a lack of bees. I saw a lot of bumble bees out there this year but I didn’t see a single honey bee all summer long. And the bumbles seemed to avoid the bean blossoms. Or it could have been the hot, dry weather. We watered the gardens almost every day this summer but it still might have been too dry for the beans.

The squash were fantastic this year, big, beautiful butternut squash, and a lot of them. We ended up with the entire wagon full of them. Excellent quality as well.

We ended up with a lot more than we needed so we gave a lot away to friends and family or traded them for things we didn’t have like pears.

We tried a different variety of tomato this year, something called Amish Gold Slicers, a yellow variety. They had excellent flavor but I was disappointed by the yield. At the moment the plants are still going, still have lots of green fruit, but the fruit seems to have stopped maturing. We’ve had almost no ripe ones at all over the last week or so. No idea what’s going on there. I’m hoping that will change, but the way things are now we aren’t going to get much more off of them. They also had a thick, tough skin making them hard to cut unless we used a freshly sharpened knife. Overall they were a bit disappointing and I don’t think we’ll be using that variety again.

We put in sweet bell peppers, jalapenos and banana peppers this year and they all did well. Are still doing well, especially the jalapenos. They’re producing like crazy still, loaded with young fruit and blossoms.

But even the peppers have been a bit odd this year. The jalapenos heat levels have been strange. One will be so sweet and have so little heat I could eat them like candy, and the one right next to it, from the same plant, would be so hot my eyes would water and I ran to the fridge for some milk to try to quench the fire.

The bell peppers were excellent but we let some ripen to turn red and when we cut them open the entire seed cavity was full of mold. Very strange. I’d never seen that before.

The brussel sprouts are looking excellent. I still think they’re one of the goofiest plants I’ve ever seen, but they’re doing well and we’ve had some of the sprouts for dinner a week or so ago and damn, they taste good!

That being said I’m not sure we’re going to plant them again. They take up a lot of space and don’t really produce enough sprouts to justify the amount of garden space they use. So while they were a success, we aren’t sure if they’re worth the effort.

Of course me being me I can’t do one of these without putting up a picture of a flower, so here you go…

There, I got that out of the way. So let’s move on with this.

E-bike update: I bought the Vado e-bike in mid-July of last year so I’ve had it for 14 months now so let’s take a look at how that’s worked out. In that time I’ve put about 1,300 miles on it and it’s worked flawlessly. I’ve had absolutely no problems at all with it. Mechanically and electronically it’s worked exactly as advertised. I love the thing. Range for a bike this heavy is excellent. Cruising at around 12 – 14 mph in Eco mode it does about 1 mile for a bit more than 1% battery capacity. I did 20 miles the other day and the battery was still at around 75%. It handles well, the hydraulic disc brakes are excellent, the lighting is good. This thing was expensive but IMO it was worth it. If I want to get somewhere fast I can kick it up into “turbo” mode and pedal along at about 20 mph. Generally I’m in no hurry so I just toodle along about 10 enjoying the scenery. And because it has an actual real shifter, not one of those stupid belt drives, it even works as a standard bike with the motor shut off so I don’t have to worry about getting stranded somewhere if something does go wrong.

The solar power system update: It is still working well. As noted before it’s knocked more than a third off my electric bill since I put it in. There have been no glitches or nasty surprises.

Sidenote: Just about all of the electric utility companies in the state are asking for significant increases in rates, one company wants to increase rates by 14% over the next two years. And they’ll probably get it, too. Plus there is talk that they’re going to force everyone to accept rate plans that will drastically increase their rates during peak times of the day. They haven’t put forward that plan yet, but there has been a lot of talk about it behind the scenes. That scheme would double what I pay per kilowatt hour during peak periods, pushing it up to somewhere between 32 cents to 40 cents per kWh.

And that’s about it for now!

Coming up: I’ll probably be babbling about amateur radio again in the near future. I have a new antenna on order that should be here soon so I’ll be talking about that.

I want to do a brief look at the Klein thermal imaging camera I picked up a while back. That’s turned out to be quite handy and a lot of fun to just play with too. I’m sure there will be other things tossed in as well.

Quick Solar Update

So people have been wondering what’s going on with the solar power system. We’ve been keeping track of our energy usage, of course, so we just got the bill for August and here’s the results.

Last year it was pretty hot and we used the AC a lot so our electric usage in August last year was 1,971 kWh.

This August, which was even hotter, our electric usage was 1,074 kWh.

So we cut our electric usage almost in half, during a month that was even hotter than 2022 was. And that’s only running the system part time. I’m pretty darn pleased with that.

Garden Catch Up

Egads, I haven’t written anything here in a long time so let’s get this started with catching up with what’s been going on in the gardens.

As you probably know by now we had what looks like the hottest summer of all time here in Wisconsin with average temperatures above normal all season long. On top of that we’ve been under drought conditions almost all summer as well. We just went through yet another multi-day heat wave, with high temperatures pushing 95F here. And now we’re finally going to be getting down to more seasonable temps. It’s currently about 55 here at 7 AM and won’t get much above 60 they tell me. We were supposed to get some badly needed rain as the cold front came through, but nope, except for some spotty showers we got pretty much zip.

But let’s look at some butternut squash…

Oops, wait a minute, that’s not a squash, that’s Solar Cat, isn’t it?

Ah, here we go, that’s the squash up there piled up in the old coaster wagon. And yes, they’re massive this year. We were watering those suckers almost every evening all summer long and now we’re finally getting our reward. They’re beautiful. MrsGF and I both love squash (she makes a squash soup that would probably make Gordon Ramsey jealous). But we sure as heck can’t handle all of those. We’ll end up giving a lot of them away to friends or anyone else who can use them. That’s part of the fun of gardening, giving stuff away to friends who don’t have the space to have a garden themselves or swapping our stuff for stuff other people grew that we didn’t have room for. In fact MrsGF just swapped one of those for a big bag of pears from one of our neighbors.

We tried a new variety of tomato this year, something called Amish Golden Slicers. We got the seed from Jung and they’ve been well above average. Tomatoes can come in a wide variety of colors ranging from gold to orange to red to purple to even green. What matters most is not color but flavor and texture. Some tomatoes are best for eating fresh, some are better for making sauces, some are in between. These are probably best for eating fresh. They have an amazingly lush, slightly tart flavor that I absolutely love, although MrsGF isn’t all that thrilled with them for some reason. We only put in 3 plants this year but that’s still more than we can eat fresh, so we’ve been making sauces and soups with them.

We put in lots of peppers of various types, bell, banana and jalapeno, and they’ve all been doing amazingly well this year for some reason. The bell peppers especially. They’re freaking huge this year. We’ve had to stake up some of the plants because the weight of the fruit has been making them fall over. Again way more than we can use ourselves so we’ve been giving those away too.

And of course there’s the jalapenos. We have 5 of those, two in pots on the front stairs and three in the raised beds. The two in pots didn’t do well but the ones in the raised bed have been producing way more than normal just like the bells have been.

MrsGF put in a couple of banana peppers just for some variety. We’ve always had good luck with banana peppers and this year is no exception. Lots of very nice fruits, good flavor.

Wax beans were just sad this year even though we watered them just about every day. I think it was just too hot for them.

Alas the wax beans did not do very well this year. I suspect that the heat didn’t help them any. The pole beans we put in weren’t the best either but with them it was because little four footed critters were nibbling them off almost as soon as they started to grow.

Then our son brought over this weird houseplant…

Oh, wait, that’s another cat, isn’t it? We catsat our youngest son’s kitty while he was gone on a three day weekend. That’s Kai the Wondercat. I love her. She hates me. Go figure.

And let’s wrap this up with some flowers because why not?

Random Stuff

Sorry, Ain’t Gonna Happen Department

The Zuck VS Musk Fight. Artist’s rendition.

I’m sure that you were just as excited as I was to learn that two of the richest and most hated men on the planet were going to beat the crap out of each other on live TV. Come on, admit it, you’d have even paid money to watch that.

Alas, it isn’t going to happen. After Zuckerberg accepted Musk’s ill advised challenge, Musk, who is in even worse physical shape than I am judging from some of the photos I’ve seen of him without a shirt on in the Daily Mail, must have realized that challenging someone who is actually physically fit, trained in martial arts and is reportedly very, very good at it, wasn’t such a good idea and suddenly came down with “neck problems” that would require surgery. After numerous jokes and comments about alleged cowardice on the part of the head Twit, he said he would livestream himself driving to Zuck’s house and fight him in Zuck’s backyard. When Zuckerberg wasn’t actually home, I should point out.

Sheesh. With Zuckerberg’s “metaverse” concept being pretty much a total failure so far, and Musk’s issues with Tesla’s that allegedly stop steering and allegedly lying about battery capacities, exploding spaceships and the collapse of the social media service formerly known as Twitter turning into another Myspace you’d think these guys would have something better to do.

Ooo, Brussel Sprouts!

We got Sprouts!

When MrsGF suggested we grow brussel sprouts I said sure, why not? We’d never grown them before. And they are one of the weirdest looking things we’ve ever had growing back there. They look like some kind of mutant cabbage plant that was grown too close to the Kewaunee nuke plant. But MrsGF assures me that this is indeed what they look like and I’ll take her word for it.

How About A Flower?

There you go.

What? You want another one? Oh, why not…

The New Solar Panels

As I said before I replaced the 8, HQST solar panels with 4 Newpowa 220W panels a week ago so I have 10 of them out there now. And well, damn, they work good. Whenever you see the power ratings of a solar panel you need to remember that those numbers are produced with the panels in laboratory conditions that you will rarely see out in the real world. Especially up here in Wisconsin. So if I get anything even remotely close to the rated output wattage out of a panel it’s doing pretty darned good. And these have been doing better than good. By about 9 AM with some of the panels still getting some shade they’re putting out about 400W. By 10 AM when they’re in full sun they’re putting out about 1,000W or more. And at midday, under near ideal conditions they’re pumping out close to a full 2 KW. Let me run down in the basement and check some numbers quick. Don’t go away, this will only take a minute…

Okay, yesterday the inverters tell me the PV system pulled in 8.1 kWh, and the panels were switched on for about 6 hours. So the average per hour would be 8,100 divided by 6 = 1,350 per hour over those six hours? Egads, that’s not bad at all.

Still More Smoke

Once again we’re under an air quality warning here in Wisconsin because of the out of control wildfires in Canada. I feel so sorry for those people up here. These fires have burned something like 34 million acres so far and it it doesn’t look like they’re going to end anytime soon.

DC Tries Again

Supposedly there is a new Superman movie in the works. Even though I’m a sucker for superhero movies because I’ve been a comic book fan since i was like 5 years old, I’m not exactly thrilled with the idea of them taking another run at a Superman flick. Let’s face it, DC hasn’t exactly hit a lot of home runs with its attempts to adapt their characters to the big screen. The Justice League movie wasn’t horrible but it wasn’t very good either. And Black Adam… Oh dear. I felt sorry for the Rock because he really wanted to make this work and he ended up with a script that was, frankly, pure crap. I haven’t seen The Flash yet. What it all amounts to is that nothing that’s come out of the DC franchise in decades has done anything to excite me. Marvel has put out its share of stinkers but at least it has also put out a few gems that have kept people excited. At best what DC has been putting out has been mediocre at best.

Supposedly the whole DC multiverse is being “rebooted” yet again. The Batgirl movie, already completed and ready to roll, has been flushed down the toilet and will never be seen. I have to wonder just how bad it was that the company didn’t dare to even release it. New people have been brought in and there is a whole new “vision” for the Superman movie.

Hmm, I distinctly remember writing a Black Adam review but I can’t find it in the archives here. Did WordPress flush it? Did I delete it and I don’t remember? Sheesh…

David and Goliath

How about some peppers?

The tiny red one is actually supposed to be a jalapeno. I don’t know what happened to it. The ones in pots up front are just funny looking. Taste good, though. I associate tiny, tiny red peppers with intense heat but that one up there was relatively mild, even sweet.

The bell peppers are doing crazy good this year for some reason. We’re getting massive bell peppers bigger than my hand. MrsGF had to stake some of them up because the weight of the fruit was making the plants fall over.

Anyway that’s about it for now. We’re bracing for heat right now. The latest weather reports are telling us that we’re going to be getting up to around 101F tomorrow, the hottest it’s been up here in ages. We are not looking forward to it.

House Insanity

Okay, so the house just around the corner from our place just went up for sale. It’s small, about 1,200 sq ft, 3 bedrooms, 2 of which aren’t much bigger than my walk in closet, just extensively remodeled. Virtually no yard at all. And they’re asking $350K for the thing. $350,000 for what is, I’m sorry to say, a 100 year old polished turd.

That got me and MrsGF talking about how utterly insane house prices have become in the last few years and speculating about what our place might be worth. We paid $85K for it about 25 years ago. The town appraises it now at $180K for tax purposes. Our insurance company claims it’s worth $500K. And if we look at real estate ads for houses with similar amenities, size and size lot in a nice neighborhood we’re seeing prices pushing up over $750K.

WTF is wrong with people? Seriously.

Quick Solar Update: It Just Works. Solar Panel Issues. And a Frog.

Someone asked what it’s like actually living with this system. And since it’s been more than two months since it’s been running this is a good time to update what’s been going on.

As for what it’s like living with a system like this, it’s just like being on the grid. If you were in our house you wouldn’t be able to tell if we were running on grid power or on power provided by the EG4s and solar/battery power. Everything just works. We do avoid using 240V equipment like the clothes dryer and central air when we’re running off the EG4s because they are such huge energy hogs. But for everything else? We just use everything else as we normally would.

We’ve had no problems at all with any of the components of the system with the exception of the solar panels. More about that in a moment. The inverter/chargers and batteries have worked exactly up to their specifications. The only annoyance is that the fans on the EG4s can get pretty loud when we have a lot of solar power coming in from the panels. But since they’re down in the basement and not in our living space we don’t notice it.

The only real drawback to the system is that we don’t have enough solar power coming in to adequately keep the system fed, so to speak. We can’t, for example, run the house off batteries at night and then make enough solar during the day to both run the house and recharge the batteries by a significant percentage. If we’d draw down the batteries to, oh, about 70% or less, we wouldn’t be able to fully recharge them and run the house at the same time.

But that’s something we knew when we started this. We knew we weren’t going to have enough space to put in as many solar panels as we really needed without resorting to using the garage roof, and we can’t do that at this time because the roofs are scheduled to be replaced in the next year or two. So we decided to make do with as much solar as we could put in now and then put in the roof top solar after the work was done.

But the solar panel situation has changed this week so let’s take a look at that.

Those are the HQST 100W panels that originally fed the Bluetti and those, along with several 220W panels from Newpowa have been feeding the EG4s. And unfortunately I’ve been having some problems with them. Considering how cheap they are, about $75 each, they’ve been doing pretty good. In good weather conditions they’ll produce about 650W. Now I know that 650 out of 800 doesn’t sound very good but when you consider the conditions here in Wisconsin plus all of the smoke we’ve been getting from the Canadian forest fires, that’s actually pretty good.

Unfortunately that abruptly dropped to 450W or even less so something obviously is wrong. I checked all the wiring, connectors, etc and couldn’t find anything so one of the panels must have a problem. And now I have 10 of the Newpowa 220W panels up against the back of the garage for the time being. I’ll need to put in some kind of semi-permanent mounting system for them before winter comes but for the time being just leaning them up against the garage is working fine. I’m pleased with them so far. At midday under good conditions they put out a full 2 KW. Yesterday we had pretty dense cloud cover and just for the heck of it I hooked them into the system and even with the clouds they were putting out 345W.

First chance I get I’ll have to test all of the HQST panels individually to see what’s going on with them. The ones that test good are going to a business outside of Milwaukee that’s going to use them to run security lights.

And I promised you a frog so here he is:

Random Observations

Here We Go Again

Alleged typical director of one of Wisconsin’s monopoly elecric utility companies.

Wisconsin’s monopoly electric utilities are once again trying to do everything they can to make it as difficult and uneconomical as possible for us to put in solar power. They are required by law in the state to buy power from homeowners who have solar power systems but they try to do everything they can to make it as hard as possible for you to actually do it, they add in all kinds of junk fees to make it costly, and now they’re trying to cut the price they pay for that power to almost literally nothing.

One utility company in the state has already dropped the amount they pay to home solar owners to a whopping 4 cents per kilowatt hour, and two more have filed applications with the public service commission to do the same. And they will almost certainly be granted that new rate because the PSC will claim that it is “in the best interests of the consumer”.

Meanwhile the utility companies will gladly sell you all the power you want, at 16 to 28 cents per kwh depending on what company you’re dealing with and what plan you have. That means that if you have a solar power system and you’re selling power to the utility instead of using it yourself you’re losing anywhere from 12 to 24 cents per kwh for every kilowatt you sell them.

See why I don’t like grid tie systems?

Let’s Play Spot The Turtle!

Do you see him? Do you? I almost missed him when I was out on the bike and I stopped at the stone bridge to look at what’s left of the river. If he hadn’t moved his head I never would have spotted him.

This Sunflower. WTF? Seriously, WTF?

This is one sunflower plant. Just one. I counted 37 flowers on this thing. I’ve never seen anything like this before.

Personally I think its aliens.

Speaking Of Aliens…

Typical US Congressperson. Artist’s rendition.

Now I’m not a historian, but I suspect that our current Congress has to rank as the single worst and perhaps the stupidest Congress in the history of the country. In fact it probably ranks right up there with the top ten worst governing body in the history of the entire planet.

Why? California is on fire. Again. Wildfires are moving from Canada into the US. Large parts of the country are experiencing the most extreme heat ever recorded. Every other day there is another mass shooting somewhere in the country. Deaths from overdoses of illegal drugs have reached epidemic proportions.

And what is the U.S. Congress doing? That distinguished body is holding hearings on aliens. No, not the illegal kind. The space kind. They were actually sitting there, people who claim they are reasonably intelligent representatives of the American people, listening some “witness” claiming that “someone” told him that the US government has actual real alien spaceships, actual real alien bodies, and has been keeping it secret since the 1940s. And they’re taking it seriously. Did this witness have any actual, well, proof? No. No documents, no photos, no videos, no audio recordings, no first hand witnesses. Nothing. Just “A friend of a friend told me that someone he knows said that they overheard someone saying that the Army had a spaceship…”

Sigh… Like I’ve said before, the human race is going to be the first species in the history of the planet to stupid itself into extinction.

Catching Up

It’s been a while since I wrote anything here so let’s get caught up.

Haze from the Canadian wildfire smoke seems to be an almost permanent thing these days.

Smoke from the Canadian wildfires is still an issue here. I wish I’d kept track of the number of days we’ve been under air quality warnings because of it, but I haven’t bothered. I have respiratory allergies and this stuff hits me hard. For about four weeks straight I was on Claritin which did help, but I was still sniffling and sneezing and hacking until the air cleared up a bit.

The bell peppers are doing very well indeed this year. We’ve already started harvesting and eating these guys and some of the banana peppers.

The vegetable gardens are doing quite well despite the drought, but we’ve had to water everything pretty much every evening until just recently when we started to get a bit of rain. We’ve been harvesting wax beans every other day or so for about two weeks now. Some we eat fresh, most are blanched and bagged and frozen. The tomatoes are looking pretty good too with lots of young fruit on the vines.

MrsGF put in some jalapenos this year as well. We have a couple in pots in front of the house to make it easy to snag one to mince up to throw into an omelet or soup or something, and there are a couple out in one of the raised bed. Last year they didn’t do well at all for some reason but this year it looks like we’re going to get way more than we’ll need. I’m the only one who eats these things but I’m never going to be able to eat all of these so I’ll end up freezing a lot of them for use later.

We have a few “volunteer” sunflowers that popped up all on their own which happens sometimes. The birds and chipmunks drop the seeds from the bird feeder into the gardens. We generally leave them alone because, well, sunflowers are just fun.

First the smoke and then the extraordinarily hot weather we’ve had have been curtailing my biking. It’s hard to enjoy getting out on the bike when either the air is so think with smoke you can chew it or the temperatures are pushing up into the 90s. We had storms roll through last night that have brought a bit cooler temperatures and seem to have helped clear the air so maybe I can get out today and do a 10 or 15 mile ride. We’ll see.

Utility Companies Are Not Your Friends Department

For those of you in Wisconsin who might be thinking of setting up a solar power system and selling power back to your electric utility, don’t bother. It isn’t worth the time, effort or equipment costs. One of the big utilities has dropped the rate they pay to home solar owners down to a whopping 4 cents per kWh. Two more of the big utilities just applied for permission to drop the rate they pay down to 4 cents as well. Sigh…

Editorial: The End of Truth

That’s the headline that greeted me when I opened the latest copy of Der Spiegel this week. And that headline was not only right, it pointed out what our future is going to be like. A future where you can’t believe anything you see, read or hear.

The article featured photos on the cover that have no basis in reality and more inside like King Charles in a very unflattering suit drinking a cocktail, Elton John as a child, and a picture of a dejected looking Trump in a prison jumpsuit cleaning toilets in a jail bathroom. Every photo was, of course, a fake created some some kind of AI software. And every photo was so realistic looking that the average person who was unaware of the existence of this software would have believed they were real.

It is so ridiculously easy these days to make fake photos, fake videos, fake sound tracks, etc. that you can’t really trust anything any longer. That bowl of fruit there on the right? That doesn’t exist. It took all of maybe a minute for an AI to create that image from my written description. Adobe even has a beta version of Photoshop that I’ve been playing with which incorporates the same technology.

The AI “revolution” as I heard someone call it should, frankly, scare the hell out of you. We already have media outlets firing their staffs and replacing their writers with AI generated content. One of the reasons the actors strike is going on right now is because the movie studios and television production companies wanted to right to scan in images of actors to be able to use their physical appearance to use those images to create new content without the consent of the actors and without compensating them for using their images.

I guess maybe I’m sounding paranoid. There are scientists and others out there who claim that AI is the best thing ever and it’s going to improve our lives.

But think about this for a moment: How are we going to survive in a world where we can’t tell lies from the truth? Where every photo, every video we’re shown has to be considered suspect? They used to say that “a photo is worth a thousand words”. That statement is no longer true. These days a photo can be worth a thousand lies.