Back to the boat

We returned to the boat late Friday evening, accompanied by Dar's good friend Monica (actually, Monica drove :-)).  Monica stayed for a two day visit, leaving at lunch time today.  Later this afternoon Dar had a visit from Donna, a friend that she knew from high school.


While we had a nice visit with everyone while we were in Ottawa, our primary reason for the trip was to do the interview for our Nexus cards.  This went well, and we should be receiving our cards within the next two weeks.  Just as a point of information for anyone else contemplating joining the Nexus program, I did the applications for Dar and I back in May.  We received tentative approval last month, and last Thursday was the earliest we could schedule an interview.  If you're going to join, give yourself a lot of lead time.  As it is, we'll just squeak in with getting the cards before our departure.

While Dar was having some nice time with her friends, I spent the last two days puttering away on the boat, taking care of some more of the projects on the list.

The first thing I did was fit a nice new toilet seat to our newly built composting toilet.  To make it look better I removed the exposed parts of the urine diverter with my Dremel.

Another project I put some time in on was getting our wifi amplifier installed.  We went with the Island Time PC wifi amp system.  I haven't got a wireless router installed yet, but I have two Linksys WRT54GL routers (one will be a spare) to use, and flashed with dd-wrt.  I did a quick test with the notebook directly attached.  The notebook alone sees four hotspots, but with the wifi amp I see somewhere around 20.  Only one was open, belonging to the Frankford Library, but unfortunately it was just a little out of range.

I finished up some wiring tasks that I had pending, including wiring the flybridge stereo to the same 12V breaker as the salon stereo.  I also cleaned up some old wiring that had been left over from some gear that I had removed earlier in the summer.

Here's the last project item that I worked on today.

I picked up an Icom IC-7000 ham radio transceiver, as well as an LDG IT-100 automatic antenna tuner.  I still have to do a high current capacity 12V connection for the radio, but I've got it temporarily powered via one of the 12V accessory sockets.  This gives me enough current to use the receiver, and probably enough for transmitting if I keep the output power turned down to QRP (low power) levels. 

I ended up with a surplus marine VHF antenna when I did the VHF upgrade project, and moved from two marine VHF radios to one, so I'm using that currently as an antenna.  It's an 8 foot long vertical, and the IT-100 is able to provide a match for it on any of the ham bands.  So far it has proved surprisingly functional, and while not ideal, it's good enough for now.  The only thing I still have to do is work up some kind of a counterpoise system for it.

We're going to be heading back down the river tomorrow, stopping in at the Fraser Park marina to get some fuel.  After that I'm not sure where we'll end up.  The last time after leaving here we anchored in Sandy Cove, so perhaps we'll do that again.  We're going to head to Picton in the next couple days where we'll be visiting with some friends there.  After that we'll likely head back to the Thousand Islands, probably returning to the Admiralty Islands near Gananoque.  We'll putter about in that area, perhaps visiting a couple other of the islands in the Thousand Islands National Park, until it's time to head back to Ottawa for our daughter's wedding.