Overlanding / Camping / 4x4 / Adventuring / Outdoors-a-thread

[brien]

This past weekend I finally got around to making use of the GoPro i've had collecting dust for the last three or four years. I took some basic footage of last weekend's Jeep club outing up into the Santa Catalina Mountains in search of snow. It was a fun challenge, i'm going to try and make more of these things. Tomorrow I'm taking along two cameras so I can vary the angles a bit. This was my first time using Final Cut Pro X so it kinda took me way longer than it probably will in the future. I had to stop a few times and go hunt on YouTube for how to videos.

Anyway, enjoy, and now lets talk about overlanding and camping and stuff

[brien]

Just posted the second vlog. A friend told me about a FCPX transition called "Sound Only" that dissolves the audio between clips to automatically get rid of the damn click that can happen between some cuts. Sure made it a lot faster than the first video I edited, although this one still took me ages to edit.

If you are into this kinda thing please give it a watch. If you know somebody who's into this sorta thing, please give it a share if you don't mind helping us get the word out as we get this thing rolling.

[Macheath]

Are you still using a GoPro? The footage looks really good.

[brien]

Yeah, still just using an ancient GoPro Hero3 at the moment. I really wish I had something better, but we're in the middle of getting the jeep prepped and modified for pulling our forthcoming expedition trailer so all the money is going towards that right now.

[brien]

The more I edit these early videos, the more I hate filming with the GoPro. I can't see exactly what's in frame or not, so more often than not I end up cutting my kid's heads off. I just the third video, here it is if you are interested in this sorta thing:

[brien]

I can't find the thread where we were talking about amateur radio crap, so I'll just post it here since it's at least tangentially related:

I participate in this weird little niche of amateur radio called Summits on the Air (SOTA). It's one of the "Radiosports" of amateur operating. The basic gist is that all summits around the world are assigned an identifier and a point value. The point value is determined by the summit's prominence. There are two types of "players": Activators and Chasers. The Activators hike up to summits to "Activate" them which is to say: they set up a field radio up there and make at least four contacts. The Chasers chase the Activators - typically from the comfort of their home - and try to make contact with them. When a contact is made, both the Activator and the Chaser get awarded whatever points the summit is worth. There's a special thing that can happen called a "Summit to Summit" where two Activators can contact each other to get mega bonus points. There's a bunch of nitty gritty details, but that gives you the general idea.

Ok, so anyway, historically, I have activated by talking into a mic that is connected to my radio, this mode is called Single Side Band (SSB). While this is very easy, the SSB signal on a low power field radio doesn't really reach farther than about one or two states away. A vast majority of the SOTA guys use the CW mode, which is using some paddles to send morse code. CW signals on these same low power field radios can go incredibly far, like around the world far. I was determined to learn CW this year, and I even attended a sort of morse-code online boarding school for a couple months.
This morning I went up to a local 10pt summit (the maximum points) and did an activation where I only used CW (morse code). I'm so stoked! I was super nervous about it and even had trouble sleeping last night, lol. I filmed a bunch of footage for a future vlog that i'll create about it, but here's a clip of just one of my contacts. NOTE: I've added some captions to translate the morse code for you plebs, turn on [CC] to see them.
In the end i made a whopping 43 contacts, 4 of which were the super mega bonus points "Summit to Summit" contacts

[Macheath]

In the end i made a whopping 43 contacts, 4 of which were the super mega bonus points "Summit to Summit" contacts

How far away? Do you get more points for distance, or is the point of using CW just to widen the radius and find more contacts in one go?

[brien]

How far away? Do you get more points for distance, or is the point of using CW just to widen the radius and find more contacts in one go?

Yeah, exactly, the main benefit of CW vs SSB is that it's basically casting a much much wider net. So waaay more chasers can hear me, and in-turn, i can hear way more of them. My longest contacts today were from AR, NJ, VT, and NH. Other states I worked were CA, CO, AZ, IL, OR, NM. I had my antenna oriented in a way that would give me the most coverage of the US. There's a very well known chaser in NZ that I was hoping to hear from, but either he was asleep, my antenna wasn't reaching him, or the radio wave propagation just wasn't good enough to make it all the way there this morning.

To answer the question about points - nope, there's no extra points for more contacts, but since I was on a 10 pointer, it's definitely mega karma points to try to make as many contacts as possible so that lots of chasers can score. Although I only made a few dozen points (I haven't calculated how many yet with the S2S bonuses), I was able to dish out over 400 points total to chasers.

[brien]

So, for anybody interested in making things and working with metal and wood and crap like that, my past two YouTube videos have covered some of the work we're doing to build a new off-road camper trailer for my friend Waka. If that sounds interesting to you, check 'em out

[Macheath]

Oh, jeez, I see that kind of project on YouTube from time to time, and it always looks like A) a ton of fun, B) way too much work.