Sugar wash distilling under way.

small ram pump.

Mesh core growth in Florence SC in the past 6 months.

I've been RTFM for meshcore protocol. No wonder it is scaleable! A quick recap. when you send a message to a specific person on MC, it initally ping pongs out thru every repeater that hears it (Flood routing). Once a path is discovered all messages travel a directed path and do not flood the whole network. This frees up repeaters in nearby areas to handle additionally messages for other people. All group chatroom traffic is flood routed all the time.

But wait there's more... when a repeater receives a packet it waits a random amount of time before repeating it so that another repeater that heard the same packet won't transmit at the same time. So as it turns out, the repeater software is smart enough to know if a packet is a flood type or a directed message type. We can program flood packets to move more slowly thru the network and move direct message type packets along in the queue faster. Even if it means jumping ahead in line around the flood types.

Imagine trains running on one track and the bulk freight trains get put on a siding to allow the passenger trains to pass. The freight train eventually gets there, but it's a lower priority.

I'm going to increase the txdelay factor from 0.5 to 1.3 on my repeaters and leave the direct.txdelay factor at 0.2.

Our house is ICF construction and was covered in vinyl siding when we built it. Time has rocked on and the sun has made some of the pieces brittle and cracking particularly on the south side of the house. Wife has decided we are going to replace the siding with metal barn roofing so it matches my workshop. I priced 70 sheets of 10'2" yesterday and 1200 color matched screws at Builder's Discount Center in Lumberton NC at around $2700. Same from my local Lowes store was $4500 even with my "friends and family" discount.

We are going to put 4 courses of 1"x1/8" aluminum flat bar around the house attached to the vertical plastic ribs in the ICF blocks to give us something to attach the metal panels to.

I'll post pictures as this progresses. The heat has broken and it's time to get the outdoor projects done.

More fun details. The girl at Lowes who quoted me does not know that 26ga is thicker than 29ga. When I told her this was not structural, I wanted the lighter gauge, she quoted me for 26gauge. They really need to hire people who know things.

*For those not in the USA, in addition to using an inch based on the length of a barley corn, we also invert numbers when using "gauge". Higher numbers are smaller items. 29 gauge is thinner than 26. 12gauge shot shells are larger than 20gauge. AWG10 wire is larger than AWG14 wire.

Also, you guys use GSM for the weight of paper, we use ream size. How much is a ream? Depends if it is writing paper or board or other type. There are about 10 ream sizes across the industry. There is ONE GSM.

And farmers use bushels for volume.... how much is a bushel? Depends if it is soy beans or corn or wheat. Oh and there's two pecks in a bushel.

What an amazing time to be alive.....

The network is popping this morning.

**not shown in this video, but that 2nd dot up on the eastern pennisula of Maryland was heard directly by my home station. That's a moon shot for 0.16w transmitter. 330miles ~520km

FWIW, if you ever install or replace a water pump the biggest pump on the shelf may not be a smart upgrade for you. If your well has a 1/2hp pump and you install a 1.5hp pump, you'll find that it starts harder and runs shorter. Ideally you want a pump that runs and never shuts off as long as you are using water. You want a pressure tank to let the pump run about 60 seconds when it needs to touch up the pressure.

bigger is NOT always better.

If you in the market for a wellpump, you get what you pay for. I cannot recommend grundfoss enough.

1)soft start, all electronics are in the pump and cooled by water.
2)no pump seals. The motor is in a stainless tube and the magenet coils are on the other side of it. There is no seal since there is no need for a hole in the housing. Magnets do the work.
3)stainless steel impellers. 99% of other well pumps have plastic.
4)integrated low water switch.

SQ series runs on 120vac -240vac and soft starts.
SQ-flex series runs on 30vdc - 277vac. Got 3 solar panels? Good to go.

Buy once cry once.

One of the locals just texted me... his son shot a deer yesterday and while they were dressing it, they realized that one of their heiffers wasn't pregnant any more. They had to walk the property in the dark looking for a calf. Found him in a ditch. Mother and baby have been reunited. Freezer is topped up. Life is good.

I think sometimes we forget how useful some of these older, basic skills can be.

Grinding your own grain into flour is a good example. It's not something most of us need to do every day, but knowing how to do it gives us one more way to rely a little less on the systems around us.

Every skill we learn makes us a little more prepared and a little more self-reliant. And that can make a difference not only for ourselves, but for our families and even our communities.

I thought this was a skill worth sharing. I hope you find it useful.

https://preppingcommunities.com/grinding-grain-into-flour-turning-stored-grain-into-food/

Another nice thing with going with the metal siding is if you were wanting to have it colored you could do rhino spray on coloring that will last supposedly a very very long time.

Old water wheel mill from the 19th century

Hiking in Missouri seeing a old mill house

Part of the Chesapeake Ohio canal transporting coal, timber, grain until 1924

With mesh we need to be good stewards of the network. It is likely in the next 6 months the repeater owners will have to implement region scoping. This will stop all traffic that you guys send that is not earmarked for a specific region.

Consider that the red circle is South Carolina and outside is USA. Green area is Columbia region and red is Florence region. A,Band C repeaters will want to scope "us" "us-sc" and "cae". G H and I will want to scope "us" "us-sc" and "flo". D will only want "us" "us-sc" and E and F will want "us" "us-sc" "cae" and "flo".

Repeaters setup like this will not relay traffic for areas they don't support. So while packets from "flo" may reach the "cae" area, repeaters in the cae area will not relay them.

Packets earmarked for "us" will go everywhere. try not to use this day to day.

(continued).

For the users, you can specify a region for each individual chat. Any messages sent to this chat group will be earmarked as "flo" and only routed by repeaters that are programmed to relay flo area packets. In the example shown here, take note of the region:flo in the title bar.

You could have a chat that was for florence area, and other chat for the whole state. or the whole country.

The idea here is that these chats are encrypted and since non-users can't read them anywya, why allow them to escape our area? this will reduce network utilization going forward.

It is probably best to do this now and then when the repeater owners make the switch you'll be ahead of the game.