Tony is a Geek

Well, it's been a while since my last post.  Have I been up to anything technical? Yes & No. I've returned to the world of campervans! My previous motorhome (Kontiki 635) was stolen back at the end of April 2024 :-(  After a reasonably painless insurance claim process & lots of UK Police time, the motorhome was "found", however, it had been crashed / trashed - so was a write-off. I wasn't looking for another one, however, I then just happened to stumble upon a 2008 VW Crafter Campervan that ticked a LOT of boxes.  It was a professional conversion, it had a full size shower and a proper thetford cartridge toilet.  It had a king-size bed.  It has central heating - yes, the previous one had central heating, but that was a £65k van, this one was £16k! It has a solar panel, leisure battery and all connected up & working okay. It has a great layout inside, someone previously really thought about the design.  I'm the 4th owner and it's done 145k mile...

"A what now?", "What is that and why is it needed?" Basically it's a communications device that does not use WiFi or Bluetooth or 4G/5G SMS / GPRS - it uses the LoRa comms protocol, it's basically Radio Frequency output that will broadcast for miles / kilometers - average of 2Km but if you live in a flat area it can reach 20Km.  That's "free" comms between devices, passing "data", ie. small packets of text based data between devices, it's not built for audio or video (that "can" be done, but it's not the purpose).  So when the world ends, or a nuke drops or a solar flare bursts and an EMP pulse fries all the electronic devices (you did store a bunch of these in a Faraday cage didn't you?) you'll still be able to have comms without using smoke signals. There's a bunch of YouTube videos about that sort of scenario - however, that's not what I was wanting to use it for.  I actually just wanted to have co...