Robert Strand's Blog
November 6, 2010
My travels this weekend took me to a Christian
mens' retreat at Kamp Kinship again. This was a leadership retreat sponsored by
First Christian Church of Rapid City, North
Point Christian Church of Spearfish, and
Black Hawk Community Church. The main point
of this retreat was empowering men to take
a more active role in reaching out to their
communities and making their churches more
relevant to the lives of the unchurched in
their areas.
Tonight brought me to the Alternative Fuel coffeehouse in Rapid City to attend a talent
show sponsored by Saturday Night Alive Singles. I am just here to see what the talent show
has to offer and to take photographs.
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October 26,2010
This the first time I have made any entry
in this blog in over a year. It has been
a busy year for my main job as an electrician
and as for my hobby as a wireless internet
operator. This posting is being done via
Remote Desktop from the world-famous Knuckle Saloon in Sturgis, SD. I decided to stop here for
supper and use their internet to make this
posting. I have been modifying my wireless
network to allow website editing from the
church I have been supplying internet to,
as well as experimenting with Remote desktop
to expand the capabilities of editing from
anywhere my travels take me to.
September 6, 2009
Spring and most of summer has gone by without
any entry here. The past six months has seen
many changes and much activity here in Black
Hawk and in my job. The project at Belle
Fourche ended for me in late March as I moved
on to a school gymnasium project in Hill
City, SD. It has been a challenging time
for me doing conduit work in cinder block
walls for about 5 months, keeping up with
bricklayers.
The wireless internet project at Little Jon's
Campground was converted over to MikroTik
wifi gear in late July after a failure in
the Tranzeo link receiver forced a rapid
changeover to provide service in time for
the Sturgis motorcycle rally customers. According
to the campground owners, Al & Jean Howe,
their customers really enjoyed having wifi
service equal to the much bigger Rally campgrounds
nearer to Sturgis. There are some small things
to be done with the site before winter, like
getting permanent power to the equipment,
as the solar project was not feasible with
the small panels I used.
Upcoming things for me this fall include
the annual fall retreat hosted by Saturday
Night Alive Singles at Camp Kinship again
this fall.
March 1, 2009
This last several months were rather busy
on the job and in my personal life. D&D
Electric was busy with the wiring of a new
city hall building in Belle Fourche, SD.
I have also been experimenting with the website
that this blog is a sub-page of. I have been
trying video and audio products to make the
Black Hawk Community Church website a resource
for those who want to catch up with happenings
when they have been unable to attend weekly
services. For the past month, I have been
posting MP3 recordings from the church's
sound mixer board on a special page of the
website.
Another project getting underway this spring
is an upgrade to the wireless Internet gear
at Little Jon's Campground, east of I-90
Exit 52 east of Black Hawk,SD. This project
has been on hold since last fall.
The project involves the installation of
more power-efficient Mikrotik wifi receiving
& transmitting gear along with solar
power equipment to run it.
Another change came to our area in early
February with the opening of the new Exit
52. After nine months of long range detouring
to get across our valley, it was nice to
be able to just buzz across in 5 minutes
instead of twenty minutes each way.
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.