Life is Good... Because it hasn't gotten worst YET!

I was bearing down on trying to get 10 LVB Trackers before Christmas.   Martha from the AMSAT office reminded me the office would be closed for the holidays and that shipped trackers would just sit till after the holidays.  So I backed off.  Momentum lost!  The holidays are a little buzy and I worked for the extra cash.

The New Year brought an interest in MotoTRBO and I acquired a couple radios at reasonable expense from eBay.  These are commercial radios that require programming via a PC... No keypad programming allowed.  MotoTRBO is a digital mode not as popular as DStar but there is a growing worldwide following.  A local repeater group shut down their DStar machine and now I hear TRBO data NOISE on their analog 440 repeater channel.   So instead of building trackers when the new year started I was intensely trying to learn about TRBO and CPS programs.   There is no one place where you can learn everything needed so I ended up googling the net reading everything available and trying to figure MotoTRBO out.  I'm not quite there yet.  But because of the Tracker build I need to put the TRBO experience ON HOLD!

So yesterday after domestic chores were done I forced myself to the workbench.  Installed the PICS, shorting clips and heat sinks.  The boards are ready for flashing.  Well that induced a string of roadblocks I have yet to clear.  Starting with the 12 year old PC that I used to flash and test that WOULD NOT BOOT!  LVB Trackers require a legacy COM port for flashing so most modern desktops and laptops don't count.  The problem was a missing file in the SYSTEM folder.   Thought I would use an old Dell laptop, couldn't find the power supply... Later found one but without the special power cord.  Resurrected another SFF desktop finally finding its power supply only to see it boot into Ubuntu.  The young geek neighbor was over for the evening and between the two of us we couldn't fix the snowballing problems my original PC had.   It's the one I really wanted to use cause I didn't want to rebuild all the little things I've been using.   

Tonight after work (I work Sun-Thursday) I elected to spent the evening with Sue unloading the dozens of TV shows recorded while I was downstairs building trackers or other ham radio projects and I'm juggling 3 at the moment..........

I did go flying Saturday afternoon.  A New Years resolution to try to fly more.  It's good for both myself and the plane.  I will fly more this year!

Apologies to everyone waiting on trackers.  I just don't have the time to do everything I need to do and the tracker builds take a big chunk of time.  

73

Mike, WB8CXO