Howdy and welcome back! I spent the day at Rooster Rock, a clothing-optional beach on the banks of the Sandy River in Oregon. Since I burn easily I got a cheap tent from Target to get very sandy and to keep me and my gear safe from the sun! As a bonus this specific tent actually has a pass through for cables in the front corner to the left of the door which is pretty great for running solar panel connectors and feed line. I didn’t have any successful contacts, but that’s not surprising given the difficulties I had tuning the Superantenna. I couldn’t manage to get a decent SWR on the QRP radio. The real point of the post is about portable shelter options that can keep you out an entire day even when you’re literally naked. This was able to keep me and the gear cool enough to keep going. Folding a corner of the tent up allowed the interior mesh to breathe away from the sun. In the picture below you can see through the door that the rain fly has been lifted.
We weren’t able to get the best spot but at least we got something out of the way on a path and had enough space to set the tent up. I had enough clear space to keep the solar panels going all day as well. They kept the battery kept everything charged and running. I tried to see if I could make any UHF/VHF contacts but I was in a gorge so I had very limited luck. I’m sure you’re just as shocked as I am. I then tuned the Superantenna as best I could for 20m and tried to make some contacts but I wasn’t getting out. I heard a bunch of stations on the east coast and in the midwest including participating in a New England radio event or QSO party for the 4th of July weekend. I wasn’t able to get out to anyone though. In addition to those stations I could also hear but not reach Paolo IK5SRF in Tuscany, Italy. Paolo had quite the pileup going.
A view of the radio setup, the table, and chair. This three-legged chair is actually pretty comfortable.
My conspicuously-empty log book with only notes and the radio.
At the end of the day breaking the tent down was pretty easy. We were able to tear down the entire site and radio station in about an hour, have it loaded into the beach wagon and off we were. Much of that time was as usual rolling feed line so it’s not a pain to unroll later.
Hello all, while this isn’t actually a post about amateur radio I wanted to post about how we (my partner and I) decided to deal with the June 2021 heatwave in the Pacific Northwest. While this isn’t directly related to ham radio I think it’s worth discussing as the temperatures in this region don’t typically reach the levels they were at and most homes and people aren’t prepared to cope with those temperatures. Some folks will probably laugh at this post and the situation in its entirety, but you have to remember that homes, businesses, animals, and people in what is typically a fairly temperate climate aren’t used to these sorts of temperature spikes. Some of us will mostly be uncomfortable and maybe inconvenienced but for others this is a deadly situation. There are large numbers of unhoused folks sleeping rough and stuck outdoors during this time. It is easy to die of exposure in situations like this even in a city. In nature you might be better or worse off depending on where you are. When operating in the field it’s important to keep yourself and your equipment cool, and I don’t think this is the last time we will have unseasonably hot weather. Next time it could be during another disaster or trigger secondary problems like power outages. This post is mostly about optimizing a solution for a problem with cheap and easily available materials to decrease misery and help alleviate a situation that could lead to an emergency.
One obvious issue with the house we live in during this specific situation is that it has a very large single-paned south-facing window, which definitely heats the house up during the summer. We were fortunate enough to have a single window-mounted AC unit for the whole house but it was only able to keep the house in the high 80s to low 90s which is definitely better than 110+ degrees, but I wasn’t sure if the power grid would hold up under additional load and the heat itself. My partner and I decided we’d take some steps to cool the house further for our comfort and our dog’s safety. The most obvious thing we could do to limit solar gain would be to cover windows that we could with blankets, etc. which helped, but we didn’t have a big enough blanket to cover the window. I wanted to actually keep the heat outside rather than heating a blanket that was already on the inside of the house and having it radiate that heat into the living space. A cheap reflective shield with an air gap between the shield and the house would be a possible solution to the problem.
Problems to solve:
Keeping as much heat out of the house as possible
Shielding a large area
Keeping it simple
Passive cooling (a plus)
Temporary mounting
Not wanting to put tape on paint
Keeping it cheap
Hastily constructed mylar “heat shield”
A quick trip to the grocery store yielded the following materials: a roll of duct tape, 50′ of paracord, and 4 mylar blankets (we only needed 3 it turns out). The entire solution cost less than $20, some moderate burns, and sweat. We taped the edges of the mylar blankets on both sides to hold them together and taped across the gap intentionally leaving holes that would be left to ensure the wind loading was lower since this was in part just held up by tape. Our first attempt at the solution was to run paracord from the fence to the gutter, but it required too much paracord and the angle the mylar blanket would be at would be less-than-optimal so I ran the paracord from the ground and weighed the ground ends and center point down with rocks. The end of the paracord attached to the gutter was run between the gutter nails and didn’t require tying or taping. I did, however, end up taping the corner of the mylar blanket to the inside of the rain gutter because there wasn’t a suitable anchor point for paracord near the corner of the house that I wanted to cover. We weighed down one corner with some rocks and were back inside within 35 minutes. Ouch note: ladders get hot in intense sun and gloves are a good idea.
The photos I’m including were taken after day 2. We had to go back out and shore parts of the heat shield up because some of the spots I taped to the paracord slid down. To combat that I just did extra-long wraps of duct tape around the paracord and attached it to the edges of the mylar blankets. I also taped the inside of the shield to the paracord at the bottom to prevent the heat shield from riding up the paracord. The end of the mylar blanket that was weighed down by rocks also tore in the wind/breeze so we coated the corner we stuck the rocks in with duct tape as a protective pad for the mylar. All the photos are this setup are shown below. The air gap between the window and mylar also served as a nice passive cooler. As the breeze and wind blew between the mylar and window it carried some of the heat away. After installing the mylar heat shield the temperature in the house dropped by 10-15 degrees over the next 30 minutes!
View of the back of the heat shield through the window.Duct taped corner two days after installation. This is the weakest part of the installation.Rocks anchoring the center point of the paracord running from the ground to the gutter. Both ends of the paracord were held down by rocks as well.The duct tape re-enforced corner of the mylar blanket is held down with broken concrete.
Pros:
Cheap materials that are readily available
Relatively fast to set up on the fly
Minimal tooling required to put it up
Removable
No tape used where it could remove paint
Effective at reducing temperature and quickly
Cons:
One-time use
Will require cutting to get it down
Required some maintenance after a day of being up
Needs a ladder to set up
Required two people to be outside in the heat on the south face of the house for 35 minutes
Kinda ugly
Dealing with duct tape on top of a ladder in wind wearing gloves is a PITA
Lessons learned
I burned myself on the ladder before getting gloves. Don’t get burned.
I got sunburned, but when I sweat it dissolves sunscreen so that was expected.
I should build something prettier ahead of time that’s easy to take up and down but also cheap to build.
Putting a ladder in the middle of a garden bed without absolutely destroying the (very thorny) plants is hard but doable.
The mylar blankets in this configuration worked very well!
