If you’ve been following any of my previous posts you are probably aware of my last trip to Coronation which was, shall we say, less then a total success. As a quick recap, I found myself left with a satellite tuner server that was inaccessible and a backup Internet connection that reset itself every 3 hours. The situation was less then ideal, and I knew that if I left the status quo it would bother me endlessly until my next trip. So…. I looked at my travel budget for the year and determined I had just enough leftover to squeeze Continue Reading
Adventures
Any of my Urban Exploration adventures will be filed here. I’ll also publish any travelling I do here.
Delays, Overshoots and Misfortune – Another trip to Coronation
I should have known the trip would have problems when right from the start a foggy day delayed our flight, but when travel is booked and boxes are shipped, what can you do but press forward and try to make the best out of a rough situation. It was a Tuesday morning and I found myself sitting in the lounge at Victoria’s airport with two of my good friends tracking what should have been our plane as it did loops over Hope, BC. It was a foggy morning in Victoria and our plane wasn’t able to land until the fog Continue Reading
Of Antennas, Trees and Cranes – Just Another Tuesday
Being heavily involved in the local amateur radio community has resulted in some interesting adventures, but one for the memory books took place on an otherwise unassuming Tuesday in September. For the past few years I’ve been tangentially involved with the University of Victoria’s amateur radio club – helping out with projects and the administration of the lab’s network. I’ve become a reasonably well known fixture in the lab and so it was not a huge surprise when I was invited to help out with an antenna install on the director’s property on Sidney Island. Sidney Island is an 8.6 Continue Reading
A Trip to Coronation
As I sit on a plane to Vancouver, over 24 hours after my original scheduled departure, with at least four more hours of buses and ferries ahead of me, I find myself contemplating the past 6 days of ridiculousness and how I managed to get here. But, before we get to the day of travel hell, let’s start at the beginning – with a small town of just under 900 people named Coronation. I found myself the owner of a small, 2800 sq ft plot of land in Eastern Alberta. My plan for the property was to set it up Continue Reading
Do I Own this? The Property Purchase from Hell
It all started as an impulse buy. My buddy and business partner Blair had overheard me fantasizing with another buddy about buying a rural property and setting up a sick-ass remote HAM radio site. Blair then took it upon himself to search for some suitable properties, I guess it was a slow day at the office. After a few hours and what seemed like a thousand descriptions of basically the same thing my ears perked up when I heard “this one already comes with Satellite Dishes.” I wandered over to his desk – my curiosity was piqued. Sure enough the Continue Reading
Guns, Grub and a Satellite Ground Station – My trip to Alberta
I am sitting in a restaurant surrounded by co-workers. A server comes comes by with a skewer of beef and looks at me; As I ponder whether I trying to fit more delicious meat into my already full stomach was a good idea, one of my co-workers nodes ‘yup’ and another slice is loaded onto my plate. This was my first evening of a week in Calgary. Things had been a bit challenging of late at work. The company was growing from a small operation to a medium-sized business and was experiencing all the associated growing pains that go along Continue Reading
A Chaotic Trip Around the World
It was a Thursday morning and I found myself eating breakfast on a ferry while enjoying some of the best scenery of BC’s West Coast. It was leg one of what would be a many leg journey around Western Canada and across Western Europe, all in the space of just over a week. The whole thing started on a Saturday afternoon when my buddy Sean (you may remember him from such quality stories as “adventures with servers in the middle of the night”) messaged me trying to convince me to join him on an upcoming trip to Toronto. As it Continue Reading
The mystery box of Swan Lake
It was a slow, lazy summer afternoon in the Summer of 2022. I was shooting the shit with a couple buddies as we tried to decide what to do with the rest of our afternoon when one of them proposed an expedition to an elusive mystery box in Swan Lake. Without a better idea we agreed, and our journey to the longstanding mystery began! So, what is a “mystery box?” First, a bit of background on the area itself. Swan Lake is a 23 acre urban lake in the heart of the District of Saanich. The lake makes up part Continue Reading
Two dishes, one scrap yard and no pole
It all started with a Reddit post. A buddy of mine sent me a message linking to a thread where someone was looking for a 1+ meter satellite dish to build what sounded like a laser cannon. While I’m not into death rays, I do enjoy vacuuming up satellite signals, and I was in the market for a new dish to replace my aging mesh dish which had seen better days. And so it was that on a Tuesday afternoon I found myself exchanging messages with two C-Band dish owners eager to part ways with their possession. I know from Continue Reading
My Brief Time with a Pet Millipede
It was during a hike on the trails of Mt Newton near Victoria, BC when I found it. I had wandered off the official trail, exploring the fence line of a doppler radar station when I happened to look down and spotted something black and shiny crawling over the rocks. I bent over to take a look, and was surprised to see a strange creature – 2 inches long, 62 tiny legs, 32 orange spots and 2 antennae flailing around – a small millipede: Harpaphe haydeniana Embracing my inner child, I coaxed the little guy onto my hand and watched with Continue Reading