Not an Amateur Radio post in the strictest sense.
The weather has been the big topic in this area since last Friday. That's when we had a Nor'easter blow through that caused a lot of problems. For the most part, precipitation wasn't a problem for most areas. In fact, it snowed throughout the day with no accumulations, except at the higher elevations, mostly in the Northwest part of New Jersey. Once again, like Sandy some five years ago, the wind was the big factor.
The winds were so strong that my PWS (personal weather station) which is mounted to a mast, anchored in a 100 pound bucket of cement, got blown over a bit during the event. It didn't tip over and hit the ground, but the wind leaned it just a bit (maybe 20 degrees from true vertical) and the anemometer was blocked by a piece of tall brush overhanging from my neighbor's yard. So for a period of about two hours, the anemometer wasn't spinning and recording wind data. I up-righted it when I got home from work and secured the mast to the chain link fence with two bungee cords to prevent that from happening again. To that point, I had a recorded gust of about 30 mph, but God only knows what I missed.
I'm sure I missed recording the record high wind gusts for the day because there were a lot of trees down in town; and as a result a lot of downed power lines. Knock on wood, our house lost power for all of about 5 seconds, more of a power blip than anything else. Long enough for the clock on the kitchen stove to display a "PF", though.
There was no damage, per se, at the W2LJ residence. Some minor twigs and branches came down, only. In fact, there was a side benefit, and here comes the Amateur Radio part of this post. When I elevated my W3EDP in the maple in the backyard last Fall, the wire got tangled up in the branches and took on a zig-zag kind of route. The wind actually caused the branches to move enough to un-snare the wire some! It's still not perfectly untangled, but it's a lot better than it was.
Tomorrow is another story. Another Nor'easter, but this time the track is different and the air is colder. Currently, the forecast for us is for 6 - 12 inches of snow. The wet, heavy March kind of snow. I'm not looking forward to shoveling and I'm not looking forward to driving back and forth to and from work in the mess of it all. It certainly would be a good day to hang out in the shack and make a few QSOs!
72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP - When you care to send the very least1
The whole nothern hemi atmosphere has gone into reverse past couple weeks. We have had the same cold and windy E-NE conditions, plummeting (for the UK) to -5 Celsius and up to 90mph gusts. This is so rare that trees, leaning to the NE due to the prevailing strong SW winds here, promptly broke off branches that are decades old. It is now much warmer, thank goodness!
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