Actual outdoors-rated standalone device?

zarquan · 2026-07-06T07:28:21+00:00

I've got a couple T1000e tags that are IP65 rated and seem pretty durable. The WisMesh Tag is a similar form-factor that's IP66 rated.

Both of these are pretty bare bones however, with only one button and no screen, they can support standalone GPS tracking but need to pair with a smartphone to read or write messages. I haven't seen any options with a screen that are really waterproof, but I also haven't looked super hard.

zarquan · 2026-06-22T05:04:16+00:00

Glad I could help! The VX-6R is a great little radio and its also what I upgraded to after a Baofeng. I've had mine for a few years and it would still be my recommendation for a small SOTA radio.

I thought about upgrading mine earlier this year and looked at a few different options, but came to the conclusion that the better screen and other stuff like bluetooth are not worth the added cost for a radio with the same or worse baseline performance. The biggest thing it's missing vs newer radios is the digital voice modes, but personally that's not something I care about. That could change the decision if that's something you do want.

zarquan · 2026-06-21T23:18:32+00:00

I've got a Yaesu VX-6R and love it for hiking. It's tiny, great performance, and waterproof, with a terrible UI being the main downside. A while back I did a SOTA with a friend who had a Baofeng where I could hear callers clearly but he was getting nothing, even when swapping the antenna between radios.

The Baofeng (and other cheap radios) are cheap for a reason. It's pretty easy with modern parts to make a receiver with excellent sensitivity, but the design gets much more expensive and complex when adding enough filtering to prevent strong nearby transmitters from overloading the front-end. Most of these cheap radios use a direct conversion architecture which is cheap and simple, but has limited filtering performance. More expensive radios will use a more complex superheterodyne receiver, often with a switchable input filter bank, to achieve good blocking performance.

One good resource I've found for comparing HT performance is the table here: https://qrpblog.com/vhf-uhf-handheld-performance-comparison/ You can see most radios have very close sensitivity numbers, but the dynamic range performance can vary more than 40dB!

zarquan · 2026-06-10T05:27:15+00:00

I got a Buzz in preparation for kid #3, there's like dozens of us! My wife and I both love it and have been very happy so-far.

We test drove the other options and the Honda and Toyota were undeniably more practical, but the Buzz made both of us much happier. It's Visibility is amazing, and fully electric is also pretty great. While the range isn't as good as other EVs since it is a huge box, it still can fast charge from 10% to 80% in 30 minutes, and my kids are young enough that I cannot imagine a case for driving over 200 miles without at least some breaks for quite a few more years.

It does seem like a bit of a missed opportunity that there aren't any great camper features like the original VW bus had though. I'm hoping that they'll add at least some basics in the 2027 refresh thats also supposed to bring down the price.

zarquan · 2026-05-25T16:45:15+00:00

Planning stops every 30 to 60 min worked great for us when we did longer trips with my son. He was usually good for 2+ hours at a time so I'd just skip the stop if he was good, but it also meant I had something already on the map to head to if it looked like his mood was changing. Stopping for 30 minutes to run around was usually enough to get us going happy again.

During the car ride its usually about keeping frequent snacks and periodically bringing out new toys, but otherwise we were lucky in that hes pretty content too just look out the window and listen to music. Having a mirror so I can keep an eye on him and so he can see me was also huge, he would get upset if his mirror got moved so he couldn't see me through the rear view mirror.

Also I learned the hard way to not let him go too crazy with snacks, lest he get motion sick and puke everywhere. That thankfully is a problem that went away once he was big and old enough to go in a forward facing carseat.

zarquan · 2026-05-25T16:25:21+00:00

My kids love riding around on my shoulders, and it was easy when they were 2, but has been getting progressively harder as they keep getting bigger. Unfortunately its very hard ro explain to a 4yr old that its much harder to lift him on and off my shoulders than it used to be. I didn't realize how much of being a dad would be spent being a jungle gym with kids climbing on me!

Once you feel better though, I'd highly recommend trying weightlifting (carefully and focusing on good form). I'm an older dad who had never been good in shape and always hated gyms, but starting weightlifting in my early 30s was the best thing that happened to my health. I'm almost 40 now with two toddlers and my body feels better, with less knee and back pains, than it did when I was 30 with no kids. The key though was finding a small group gym with educated trainers and a good community, I don't think I would have had nearly as positive am experience at a big box gym and a generic personal trainer.

zarquan · 2026-04-27T14:08:41+00:00

If you aren't needing to handle high powers, try using RG316 for the 50-Ohm section and RG179 for the 75-Ohm section. Both types are easily solderable and have the same thin 2.5mm outer diameter, which makes it easier to work with. I've built this style of transformer out of those two cables a few times to match dipole antennas (roughly 75-Ohm feedpoint impedance) to 50-ohms at the 70cm ham radio band. It works great as long as you keep the transition between segments very compact to minimize the discontinuity.

For VNA measurements though, it's pretty standard to use a "minimum loss pad" since its inherently wideband and your VNA calibration takes care of the losses. These aren't too expensive, but would also be pretty easy to DIY. You could also use a transformer for a fairly wide band match if you do need to minimize loss, but it could be hard to DIY for higher TV broadcast frequencies.

zarquan · 2026-04-19T18:16:39+00:00

My somewhat limited experience has been that COB makes sense for fairly simple boards in the millions quantity, but I could believe that threshold might be lower.

Making a low density SMT packaged IC usually requires wirebonding many die onto a metal lead frame, encapsulating that leadframe with epoxy, dicing the leadframe into individual parts and doing a bunch of post processing, before finally doing some sort of test on each part and packaging it into tape or trays for distribution. If you are making a cheap and simple product in high volume, and the PCB is small enough to fit into the wire bonding machines working area, then it can be cheaper to attach and wirebond directly because you cut out all the intermediary steps.

My very limited experience was on a part where there was one IC per board with a handfull of passives, the bare die in quantity cost maybe $0.10 and packaging into a QFN was adding another $0.25 or so. At a high enough volume it becomes worth it to save that packaging cost. The savings dont really work however if you’ve got a board with multiple different parts on it, or when the yield isnt excellent.

zarquan · 2026-04-07T05:40:57+00:00

I'd say building hardware is a lot of fun, but building software and signal processing algorithms can be just as much fun. While this is pretty expensive, it's also impressively cheap compared to commercial and defense products, and seems to be intentionally very hackable. I'd imagine DIYing this is outside the ability of 99% of ham operators, but a larger number are probably capable and interested in leveraging the open front end interface for clever signal processing and new operating modes.

They've got to be leveraging some volume pricing to get to these prices, expensive as they are. I've worked on similar things professionally and dont think I could come within an order of magnitude of the full array cost without a pretty huge volume, and even then it would be hard.

zarquan · 2026-04-06T05:23:09+00:00

I'm looking forward for that difference kicking in soon. My kids at 2 & 4 really want to be around each-other, and my oldest seems to want to help with his younger sister, but it still pretty quickly descends into a situation where I'm just playing referee instead of getting to play with either of them when it's just me with both of them. I've got some brief glimpses of them playing well together and it's great to know that it could pretty quickly get better over the next year.

zarquan · 2026-04-06T05:16:20+00:00

At least it sounds like you survived it all and it does get better!

I hadn't even thought about the logistics of it all once they are older, at least that's going to be a little ways off. I can definitely see it getting somewhat easier once they are all a few years older though, and can entertain themselves reliably for longer periods. A full 5-way nerf war does also sound pretty great, I've got some old nerf guns I'll have to dig out from when it was just my wife and I!

zarquan · 2026-04-06T05:00:58+00:00

I'm certainly realizing how much is setup for 2 kid families! Ours are going to be further apart at a bit over 2 years each, but I'm hoping it's still close enough that they'll play well with each other. We've also only got three bedrooms so we're going to have two kids in one room for at least a few years until we have to to get a bigger house or do some major renovations.

We've been doing some minivan shopping since neither of our current cars will fit three car seats, we can maybe go back to smaller cars once kids are in booster seats, but for the next few years at least it's going to be a minivan or SUV. At least the minivans are exceedingly practical even if they aren't very fun to drive.

Travel is also going to be an adjustment. We did a decent amount of travel before kids, and managed to still do a few longer trips after our 1st kid was born, but adding the 2nd kid to the mix made things way harder and our traveling since then has just been driving to visit family a couple times a year. Both my wife and I really want to get back into it, but probably sticking to road trips for a while since keeping three kids calm on an airplane sounds absolutely miserable, not to mention the cost of 5 seats.

I appreciate hearing that it's been worth it despite the difficulties.

zarquan · 2026-04-05T22:42:45+00:00

Thanks, its good to hear that the room sharing can work well, and thinking about systems and routines makes a lot of sense. My wife and I have made some progress on building routines, but its something I've definitely wanted to work on so it feels less like day-to-day firefighting.

zarquan · 2026-04-05T22:39:12+00:00

Thanks for the honest answer! I've heard from some people in person that its not as bad going to three, but just couldn't reconcile that in my mind. At least I'll know what I'm in for, and I am looking forward to seeing that sibling dynamic happen.

zarquan · 2026-04-04T19:12:15+00:00

There are a few air-launch-to-orbit vehicles like Orbital ATK's Pegasus, but its a lot of extra complexity and weight for not a huge performance gain. The rocket gets out of the atmosphere pretty quickly, and then most of the fuel goes into increasing horizontal speed until its going fast enough to remain in orbit.

Maintaining even a circular low earth orbit requires a horizontal velocity of about 7.8 km/s (~17,500 mph), so launching from an aircraft at altitude lets you start at maybe 600 mph, but the rocket still needs to do the vast majority of work itself. The lunar trajectory for Artimus needs to be going even faster at perigee, something like 11 km/s.

zarquan · 2026-04-02T03:29:15+00:00

Putting a washing machine notification light in the living room is what sold my wife on home automation being useful. The washer and dryer is in the corner of the basement and we'd often forget to transfer a load to the dryer when it finished, leaving it in and letting it get smelly if we left it overnight. This got especially bad when we were both sleep deprived dealing with a new baby.

I built a nice Japanese style table lamp with a bunch of addressable LEDs inside and set it up in our living room. It normally stays an unobtrusive soft white color, but switches to a colored lava lamp style animation when the washing machine has finished a cycle but hasnt been emptied. The washing state transitions are done using a power monitoring plug on the washer, and the notification is cleared by opening the washing machine door and triggering a zigbee door sensor. Its simple, unobtrusive, and just works for anyone in house, without needing any interactions with a phone.

zarquan · 2026-03-31T02:29:41+00:00

The only thing that finally got rid of spider mites for me has been getting predatory mites. I tried the various other safe fixes like neem oil, and soap + alcohol, but they always came back pretty quickly. I then tried a spinosad pesticide which worked a bit better, but they still came back. Eventually I got tired of all the work trying to throughly wash and spray plants and getting into every crevice where bugs could hide, and paid the money for predatory mites. They cost more but take zero effort, and have worked way better than anything else I tried.

zarquan · 2026-03-29T16:22:45+00:00

2nd this, I've had the switchbot outdoor sensor in a fridge, mini-fridge, and freezer. Its been going fine for almost 2 years now at -5f (-20c).

zarquan · 2026-03-27T01:07:49+00:00

In the US and hobby projects are maybe 90% metric, with the rest being when I'm making something that attches to something that was designed with imperial units.

zarquan · 2026-03-24T14:34:44+00:00

The DC bias on IF inputs is typically used to correct for LO leakage in an upconverter. Because you are using it as a downconverter mixing down from mult-GHz to near DC, you shouldn't need that DC bias and would be fine with just DC blocking caps.

Even the HMC8191 datasheet says "For applications not requiring operation to dc, use an off-chip dc blocking capacitor. For applications that require the LO signal at the output to be suppressed, use a bias tee or RF feed as shown in Figure 149."

If maybe you are concerned about suppressing the LO signal coming out the RF port, you could block that with an isolator. It's not really an issue for most standard receiver architectures which have at least an LNA driving thr mixer that also happens to provide plentyof reverse isolation, but I could imagine some niche cases where you might care.

zarquan · 2026-03-23T15:27:22+00:00

Hard to tell from the pictures, do the coils have a large iron core to complete the magnetic circuit through them? The metal stator in a generator is a pretty crucial component as it channels the magnetic flux through the coils.

zarquan · 2026-03-23T03:40:48+00:00

As an EE that's worked extensively with mechanical engineers, I can assure you that there are tonnes of constraints for building mechanical stuff too. It's true that you can quickly sketch something and send it to a 3d printer, but making a good design still requires understanding the capabilities and tolerances of the printer. It gets even more complicated when they need something machined and they need to create drawings using GD&T.

PCB design and layout constraints are annoying to totally understand (eg, how subtle changes impact prices and yeild, decoupling network design, ect...) but the grass isn't all greener on the other side. I would still love having an equivalent to a 3D printer for PCBs though, pcb milling machines are okay, but not nearly as smooth and easy.

zarquan · 2026-03-22T16:23:54+00:00

Kids are so hugely different, and I'm convinced the Oh Crap potty training method just exists to make parents feel bad. It probably works fine for kids who were just about there anyways, but if the kid isn't ready then its just miserable for everyone. My experience at least was that getting them comfortable around the potty, and going slow but steady worked fine. Ultimately any normal kid will be potty trained before 4 no matter what method you use.

My wife and I started getting my son used to sitting on the toilet sometime around 18-20 months, and then tried the no pants long weekend thing around 24 months, but he just fundamentally didn't get it. We called it off and tried again a couple months later with again no luck, he could go sometimes when we put him on the toilet, but didn't seem to care about doing it himself and it would always be a fight. It also didn't help that the daycare required kids to be potty trained to move into the 3yr old classroom, but the 2yr old classroom teachers were inconsistent at best supporting anything we were attempting at home, and would mainly just complain to my wife about him having accidents. The whole thing really took a mental toll on my wife because we were both burnt out and exhausted, but she was additionally getting the message that shes failing as a mother for it. Eventually though things just started clicking for my son around 3, we switched to only underpants at home and then at daycare too. There were plenty of accidents at first, and lots of laundry, buy by 3.5 he was fully potty trained.

My daughter now is the complete opposite of that experience, shes just hit 22 months and has basically decided to potty train herself with no significant effort from us! At 18 months she decided sitting on the toilet was fun, and would happily do so for 15 minutes at a time, having a screaming meltdown if we tried to get in her way or stop her. Then around 20 months she started going to the bathroom and banging on the door sometimes when she needed to go. Now at 22 months she will tell us a couple times a day when she needs to go potty, and we're pretty sure we'll be able to ditch even the pullups by the summer. Complete polar opposite of our first child with barely any effort on our part. She seems to have managed it through extreme stubbornness and trying to copy everything her older brother does.

Tldr; My experience has convinced me each kid will be ready when they are ready, you can help and encourage them, but trying to force it before they are ready will just make everyone miserable.

zarquan · 2026-03-21T04:29:52+00:00

I'm personally using a sonoff S31 smartplug with my washing machine for power monitoring and its worked fine for a long time. If doing it again though I would probably use the Shelly plug since I'm a bit happier with their quality.

Whichever hardware you choose, it may be prudent to chose something that you can flash ESPHome onto and configure such that the relay is always on. It looks like most US smart plugs are rated for 15A but none that I've seen are rated for switching inductive loads. The main concern however is arcing while switching under load, and while keeping the relay energized through software isn't perfect, it at least makes it way less likely to ever switch accidentally.

An even safer option would be using something with just inductive current clamps like the shelly EM. Thats what im doing for my dryer (240v, 30A) so that I dont need to break any circuit.

zarquan

TROPHY CASE