A few days ago the girl came home with a subminiature PC case. It had a mobo in it, but was toast, so I decided to repurpose the case into something useful. I took my 13.8V power supply, a backup battery, my ham radio, and I stuffed them all in there. I think it turned out pretty well.
You can see that under the radio is an open bay that I’ve left open so that the cooling fan can easily pull cool air in for the power supply. You can see the indicator light with the three switches. The light means that it’s on. (NO WAY!!) As for the switches, from left to right they turn on the main power supply, the backup battery, and the cooling fan. You can also see the mic mentioned in the last post, and the SWR bridge I talked about quite a while ago.
I’ve also gotten a used trunking scanner off of ebay so I can listen to the local metro, police, and fire departments.
The Seattle area uses a large trunking system for all sorts of local radio communications. You can just listen to the frequencies, but the trunking system’s computer moves the conversations around between frequencies all the time to most efficiently use air space, so it was essentially impossible to hear whole conversations with my normal radio. The trunking scanner listens to the control computer, and changes frequencies automatically to follow conversations. So far, I’ve found the most interesting things to listen to have been the fire dispatches, as well as the metro system. The police are there, but most of what they’re doing are vehicle registration lookups, and the rest is in codes I don’t know.
Last for this post is an admission of guilt. I’ve gone to the dark side. I got an iPhone. However, I make myself feel better about it by reminding myself that I didn’t get it new, I didn’t have to do the two year contract, and it’s not a recent model. In fact it’s the first model of iPhone. The girly had it, and then just two days ago upgraded to the new one. My original plan was to use it as an iPod Touch, however, I got sucked in and am now using it as my phone. I’d also like to think that I haven’t been as horribly addicted to it as some people are when they first get their iPhones. Perhaps it’s because I’m used to using one and having one around, seeing as the girl’s had one for a few years now. Anyway, so far it seems to be working pretty well for me. For you picture whores, here’s an unremarkable shot of it on my desk.
