Robert Strand's Blog

December 6, 2008

I passed my SD journeyman electrician exam about 3 weeks ago in Sioux Falls. After the exam was done at noon, I took my mom to see Falls Park after lunch. I have been to Sioux Falls several times in the last 25 years, but had never been to the waterfall that gave its name to the city.

A week before the exam, western SD was hammered by a blizzard that left some areas without power for several weeks. Here in Black Hawk, a few small areas around town were in the dark for about a day, but the main inconvenience here was the blocked roads for a couple of days.

October 12, 2008

Just recently enjoyed a singles retreat hosted by Saturday Night Alive Singles at beautiful Kamp Kinship halfway between Deadwood & Rapid City, SD off Highway 385 about 2.5 miles. Fall color was at its prime in this area. I had traveled up Spearfish Canyon about 2 weeks ago and made a video of Roughlock Falls which you can see by clicking the highlighted Roughlock Falls. At the retreat a week ago, I enjoyed the teachings of Dale Bartscher of the South Dakota Family Policy Council, Marci Maddux of Christian Life Ministries, and Roy Roberts, activities director of a local Christian high school in Rapid City.

September 8,2008

Well, another month has passed on and days are a little shorter now. The wifi project at Little Jons has been modified to a solar powered project. This has necessitated making some changes to the electronics at the site to make them more efficient as solar power tends to be a more limited energy source if done on a shoestring as I have tended to do with most of my projects.

In about a month, I will be attending a retreat for singles at Kamp Kinship, near Deadwood, SD. The local singles group Saturday Night Alive is sponsoring it again this year. I rode out there yesterday with some friends from SNA to scout out the place. The place has nice amenities such as WiFi and several large group cabins capable of housing 24 or 34 as well as a number of smaller cabins that will house six at a time. The larger cabins have cooking, and refrigeration available, along with TV.

Feel free to send remarks back to me. Click here to open your email program and email me. I may not be able to post every reply as I have to manually translate the emails to HTML to post them here, but I will enjoy any replies I do receive and will post what I can.

August 10,2008

This is my first foray into web logging, more commonly known as blogging. I am an electrician with D&D Electric of Sturgis, SD (yeah, it is that town better known for the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in August). I have been with that company a couple years now after a nearly 20 year stint working for a two-way radio shop known as Mayer Radio in Rapid City, SD.

My hobbies include ham radio(inactive these days), wireless Internet, webpage writing, and volunteer work for my church.

In April, 2008, I launched a wireless Internet project from my home in the west side of Black Hawk,SD to extend high speed Internet to Black Hawk Community Church, about 1.1 miles ESE of my residence. Using a commonly available Linksys wireless router and a 21 dBi yagi antenna bought from WiFi Link, I beamed the 60 milliwatt output of the router from a 20 foot pole on my roof toward the church. Originally, I had planned on using a wireless equipped desktop computer at the church to convert the wi-fi signal back to Ethernet and wire the church, until I found out about Tranzeo customer premise receiving units on Ebay. I had been working with these same radios as part of my electrician job, since my employer was starting up a wireless internet operation near Sturgis and had started out with these same radios. Anyhow, I decided to use one of these Tranzeo radios at the church, since they do the conversion from RF to Ethernet in one box instead of introducing coax cable line losses like my earlier plan with the computer would have done. Inside the church, I set up another Linksys wireless router to take the Ethernet and rebroadcast wireless Internet in the church on a different channel. The router also provides a firewall to make it more difficult to hack back into my home network. As of yet, nearly 3 months later, it has been up over 97 percent of the time, and I have yet to hack back into my home system. This has been a vast improvement for the church's internet access, as previous ministers have only had dial-up Internet to use, and that wasn't working up to its full rating, since the phone line there has been chronically noisy.

The same system providing the access to the church has proven to have quite more than sufficient range to reach the church. Recent tests have shown the signal to reach about 2 miles beyond the church and still be usable at a local campground, Little Jon's Memorial Park. I am currently in process of setting up another repeater-style wi-fi site to rebroadcast Internet at that location.

My volunteer activities include driving the Sunday bus for Black Hawk Community Church, and maintaining the vehicle. I have also helped church members with their moves from one residence to another.

Other interests of mine include a Christian singles group called Saturday Night Alive, and the local amateur radio group, Black Hills Amateur Radio Club.