LVB Tracker

Hey guess what it's Saturday, April 4th and at midnight tonight I will become essentially unemployed. The contract between at&t and the CWA expires today and it doesn't look good. It never does but this time it looks worse. You know folks don't have as many wired phones. The second line has been replaced by cell phones and broadband internet. The young folks don't need a wired phone when they move into their own place cause they have a cell phone. The older folks are getting rid of their wired phones to save money. But consider this... when there is some kind of crisis, bad storm, power failure or terrorist attack the cell phone network will choke cause that's were everyone will be trying to get thru. This happened during the massive east coast power failure in August 2003. The wired phone network was there with dialtone, ready to connect you anywhere (except to cell phones, I couldn't call my wife who was on her way home from work). Also consider that the phone company powers the wired phones with batteries in the central office and those batteries are backed up by a diesel or turbine powered generators. Not all cellular systems have that much back-up power (could you imagine batteries and generators at every cell sits?). So if you can afford a home wired phone, get one!

at&t is using the diminished landline business as a one reason to want substantial change in what they pay their non-management employees. The other is health care costs. They also don't want to offer pensions to new hires! They are laying off 12,000 of them this year and made 12.9 billion in 2008. 12.9 billion... It's ok to pay Apple $575 for every iPhone 3G they sell but they would love to drive down the employee payroll. It's ok to pay large bonus's to corporate management and dividends to stockholders but they want to beat down the people who work hard to get them there. I've worked for the phone company for 40 years this June. I have never worked harder. Zero overtime this year and perhaps 3 hours last year so there is no way to make extra money there anymore. We can only hope for the best.

So during that down time what am I gonna do besides walk the picket line? BUILD LVBTrackers!

This (Saturday) morning at 5:30 Mork woke me up wanting to go out. So I took Mork and Mindy out for a few minutes in the 35 degree temps. At 6:30 Rufus wanted his walk!

By 7am I was in the basement cutting wire. I had just sent 3 trackers to AMSAT and hope that will keep them afloat while I work on the next BIG batch. The wires I'm cutting are for the LCD cable assemblies.Here's the work table are where LVBTrackers are built. This morning we cut about 200 ft of white wire (remember all important wires are white) in an attempt to build 90 (NINETY) lcd cable assemblies. That's the most I've built at one time and I hope it's the last time this year we'll need to do that. We are gearing up for the Dayton Hamvention build. Last year we sold 32 trackers at Hamvention and we should have at least that many for this year! Back to the build... ran out of wire so we're gonna order at least 300ft of wire to cover the rest of the display cables and the button assembly cables.
The finished product, LCD Cable. Were're gonna make 90 of these. Toughest part is cutting, stripping and crimping 1080 little white wires... that's 2160 crimps. And I just realized I just have a little over 2000 crimp terminals... So we need to order more of them in addition to wire and grommets. It never ends. Back to work! 2:23 pm.


4:43pm
Stripped and crimpt about 200 little white wires. Lots of wrist action. Probably best to pace myself with this part of the project. Will probably start loading the last 20 pcb's as that part of the project effects only my back.

10:04pm
Well were gonna try to get back to cutting and stripping.
Here's the 450 wires that need stripped and crimped. 900 strips and 900 crimps... OMG!!!