Categories
Ham Radio running travel

Houston for an ultra

[Friday:  3 miles on treadmill; Sunday: 3 miles on treadmill; Today: 3.4 on the road]

We made a 6-day weekend and traveled to the Houston, TX area late last week for an ultra at the Brazo’s Bend state park.  Mrs. H ran the 50 miles in a bit over 15 hours, finishing slightly before the first of the 100-milers came through.  I went back on Sunday morning to take down our awning and fold up a tarp, and it was getting toward the end of the allotted time and 100-milers were steadily coming in.  They looked very tired.

Also toward the end of last week there was an interesting set of posts on the time-nuts mailing list.  They had been discussing WWVB and a new chip that is out which would replace the chip currently used in many “atomic clock” devices with better signal capturing capabilities.  Anyway, one guy posted links to a file of sample WWVB data he captured over the air.  Another guy then posted a short python script to transform that data into time, amplitude and phase figures.

I downloaded those on to my laptop and spent some good hotel-time working up a short perl script to decode the phase data, deriving the encoded “minute” contained therein.

Today I kind of fell off the edge of my success when I tried to capture my own data.  I may give it another try tomorrow.

But I also need to get back into the groove at work tomorrow and wade through the accumulated emails.