Category: Outdoors

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Recent Outages Highlight Need for Ham Radio, Multiple Emergency Communications.

Earlier this month, both AT&T and Verizon had a texting and calling cell phone outage – even the FCC noted that this was happening in multiple states! Similar issues have happened in February and at other times. In the recent New Mexico, 29 out of 113 cell towers were down and this is a common issue among areas with natural disasters. This highlights the need for other channels of communication, even when you are in town and normally have a working cell phone:

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Analysis of the Robinsons’ “Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide”

If you live in Oregon you may have seen one of these research papers mailed to you along with a short letter promoting Noah Robinson for Oregon senate. Since this report is claimed on the campaign website to be “the most widely read scientific review article on “climate change,” which shows that human use of hydrocarbon fuels like gasoline is not changing the earth’s climate“, and the data in the charts ends at about the year 2000 for many charts as of its publishing, I decided to get some more recent data to research the most recent trends:

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Thanksgiving/Christmas/End-of-year travel – Charge ahead?

With the recent massive increase in electric vehicle sales, combined with free fast charging included with particular new car models this year, you may be wondering if the current charging systems can handle it?? This thanksgiving weekend had quite a line on specific stations like the one out of Arizona, as you may have seen in the news and forums! but what about major holidays in general such as Christmas? Let’s look at some of the recent busy days and see if it’s as bad as some have presumed…

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Where are the big roofs for Solar? A mathematical look at pulling data from OpenStreetMap

In recent years there has been a lot of talk about solar and more renewable energy. In USA the recent IRA has provisions for extending solar and renewable energy, and the Florida governor last year supported Solar benefits which turn out to be helpful in many natural disasters, making an energy grid more easily self-sustainable after hurricanes that are common to that state. What if we could go over a map and see what buildings are the best candidates for solar generation? OpenStreetMap has not just street maps, but many other features, including building coordinates, which can give us polygons that can calculate areas for potential solar!

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