Wood Stove

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I rebuilt a wood stove I had in storage. The only textual items on the stove is "Made in West Germany". After puzzling about how to repair the broken leg (everything from welding with tungston rod to fabricating a splice), I found a similar replacement foot. It was similar, so I ended up buying two in order to make it look and set right. It was a fun "little" project. It cost me about $150 in materials and probably took me about 8 hours. I am looking forward to getting it fired up at some point. Since it is going back into storage I am wrapping it up with as much rust inhibitor as I can. I bought some VCI paper for the effort.
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Radio Path Study in Antarctica

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My mission went well yesterday. We went to White Island and an area near Williams Cliff to check for decent radio paths for some of our problematic links. We had some promising results. I will be going to pole tomorrow. I still have to check the times and bag-drag. I will be getting on 20 meters on 14.243 at about 000 hrs UTC over the next week. I am hearing that they are getting a signal into the United States. Although I may have to climb a tower at Pole to fix the 6 element beam. We will see. My email and blogging will be out of schedule a bit. The South Pole has only 11 hours of satellite visibility for our Internet and phone connection. They have a great ham radio station and from what I hear it can be very different from McMurdo. It will be a great thrill to see the dome and the new station. I will be posting a time I will appear in front of the webcam after I get down there. The temps at pole are fairly warm at -20 or -30 F.

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