Hawkins

Where, training w/ West 38 Moto, or the GEICO Rally?

@J5ive I will take you up on that. Let me know when you are recovered from your trip and we'll get a frosty mug and catch up. To everyone else, thank you!

I am far from ready for a trip of that scale but man that sounds like a great time. I need more skills related to route planning, camping, off-roading, comms gear, everything, etc. That sounds like an absolutely wonderful way to decompress, get out of the rut of work/life, and smash the reset button on mental health. New life goal added.

Hey @shutterrev you can have my 3-bike trailer if it helps you with any of these plans. I can't take time away from Thanksgiving to do stuff like this, but I'm happy to help out with gear.

I'll be doing training with West 38 Moto, coming home for Halloween with the kids, then packing up the land yacht and heading to the campground where the GEICO event is taking place. We got a spot there for the week. I'll have my Africa Twin and my wife's Himalayan on a trailer behind either the RV or the Suburban. That's a lot of riding in a 1-week span!

I wasn't familiar with GMRS so I went to the Googles for more info - pretty neat service! Uses a small slice of the 450-470 MHz (Ultra High Frequency or UHF for short) amateur radio band No testing needed to obtain a license Due to physical UHF limitations, this will be mostly line-of-sight communication but the range is far superior to technology like Bluetooth Allows users to talk to repeaters, which opens up a pretty big coverage area From your location, you can talk to a well-placed antenna on a mountaintop or tall building (Otay and Black Mountain have repeaters) That antenna is connected to a radio configured to listen and immediately re-transmit your signal using a large amount of power and prime location Some repeaters are linked to other repeaters so you can "hop" from one mountain/high location to another - and sometimes across the internet! FCC allows some data transmission such as GPS and text messaging, making it easy to figure out where you are and where the listener is More info from the FCC

Glad to hear you are getting back on two wheels and two legs again. We'll see you on the dirt again before too long.

Happy to help anyone interested in training.

The class was a 9-hour, fast-paced, exam-cram followed immediately by the exam. The questions are public knowledge, so anyone can read them and see the correct answers ahead of time. If you had done no studying ahead of time I don't think the class alone would have gotten you to a point where you could pass the exam - it is just too much data to absorb that quickly. On the other hand, if you study ahead of time (I have a physical/digital/audio book recommendation at the bottom of this post) and you are able to retain and recall what you've studied, then the cram is more of a review and you'll be super crisp for the exam. The majority of the class passed, with at least one person out of the ~15 people there failing, though I believe he opted to sit the exam again right away with a new random selection of questions. Speaking of questions, there are a little over 400 questions to choose from, and I believe those questions are divided into 35 categories across 10 broad topics, and the final exam will have 1 question from each of those categories. The chart below is from NCVEC (National Conference of Volunteer Examiner Coordinators) and gives a good idea of how the exam's design requires you to know a little about a lot. If you just can't get your head around Antennas and feedlines, for example, you would only stand to miss 2 of the 35 questions should you avoid studying that topic completely. The problem lies in the fact you must get a passing score of 76%, or 26 right out of 35, leaving room for only 9 wrong answers. Section Number of Questions % of Exam Chapter 1: Introduction to Amateur Radio 6 17% Chapter 2: Operating Procedures 3 9% Chapter 3: Radio Wave Characteristics 3 9% Chapter 4: Amateur Radio Practices 2 6% Chapter 5: Electrical Principles 4 11% Chapter 6: Electrical Components 4 11% Chapter 7: Station Equipment 4 11% Chapter 8: Modulation Modes 4 11% Chapter 9: Antennas and Feedlines 2 6% Chapter 10: Electrical Safety 3 9% I passed with 34 correct out of 35 (pretty happy with that score!) and I'm waiting for my callsign to be sent to me from the FCC. From there my license will be good for 10 years (!) and only cost me $35 thanks to this free class. For anyone interested in learning how to use HAM radio, I highly recommend the book The Fast Track to Your Technician Class Ham Radio License. I am not the best reader and thus prefer audiobooks, however, I did something new with this book: Audible allows you to hear the audiobook while viewing the digital copy of the book, and even highlights where the speaker is reading. Very cool way to absorb information that has lots of math (not that HAM is math-heavy per see, but there are certainly a lot of numbers involved in the data) and pictures.

But then how do we have any fun‽

Running RUBY Moto R5s with an ezCAN. Both are excellent products.

I have baseball games Sunday afternoons and I’m coaching on Mondays. Let’s make a public event via the calendar.

I want to do this ride.

Wow, what a view! Can you tell me how to get to this spot? I am very new to riding in this area so you'll have to send me a point on a map, not just the name of the trail. Thanks!

Don't even get me started on the ~40 MB PNGs that some users have uploaded. *rolls eyes* Thanks for the helpful advice!

I would 100% call it their use of the file system. Here is why: This shows the top 16 files ranked by size. I've obscured the owner of these files because I don't know the best way to approach this yet. The key takeaway is the red arrows. That is almost 7 GB of data that has in some cases sat there for multiple years without a single download. That isn't growing a community, it is bad policy that needs to be rethought to stop even unintentional abuse like this. We don't have bad actors among us, but we do have bad policies in place that allow even the best-intentioned among us to have a negative impact on our community. Good rules enforced fairly and evenly build good communities. It is commonplace to upload videos to YouTube instead of to individual forum servers. Of the top 16 files shown, all 16 are videos. And that means all 16 could be uploaded to YouTube and then linked rather than embedded.

I added a disclaimer to my own post trying to explain that I'm not trying to be offensive. I am right. We don't have unlimited storage and something has to be put in place to prevent the top 10 or so users from using so much space that the rest of us are asked to pay for their use of our filesystem. Please remember that I have more insight into how the system is used that most if not all other users. This is a problem that will be addressed, and it will be addressed using standard best practices like limits on total file uploads. I should have said my piece more kindly. That being said, my background is tech, not PR. When you said, "I don't know of a way to post iCloud content using a link", and I provided not only proof that it was possible but offered to make a tutorial, I expected at least a thank you. Instead, I get complaints that the image doesn't embed - which I have already explained in a post further up this thread. As CiD said to me in a direct message, this is a thankless job. It is also one I do voluntarily. Sometimes I do get tired of helping fix what it ultimately a very fixable problem only to get told that someone doesn't like my solution. I'll do my level best to accommodate the community in such a way that the greater majority of users benefit from the changes being made. If that makes a few users grumpy, tough. There is no main character in this community; it is for the great good of all that we continue to refine processes, come up with new solutions, and ultimately do better.

Agreed, and depending on the service you are linking to the links can be "expanded" to show you what you're linking to without using up disk space on the server. Example: However, iCloud doesn't seem to be supported by this version of Invision Community (the software that runs our forum). Apple is famously restrictive when it comes to working with 3rd party providers and they make money when you use their tools so they have little incentive to make it easier for users to get data in and out of their ecosystem.

Disclaimer: I often come across forcefully. I've been a foster dad to many teenagers, I have 5 of my own kids (3 biological and 2 adopted), and I've managed people and ran departments. I saw all this to at least explain if not excuse my forcefulness. My saving grace is that I am willing to hear all sides of a given situation, and if presented with new data, reconsider my position. @Covered in Dust was kind enough to reach out after I wrote this message and clarify some finer points as well as invite me to future rides. Good guy, that one. Anyway, writing this to explain that there is no anger in the message below. I am simply doing what I feel is right, justified, and logical. It has likely been a while since this forum had that kind of guidance, so like all new things, change can be hard. Thank you all for your patience. Back to the show circus! Addressing this comment: And this one: This works provided you use the URL and not the image itself. Here is proof from my own iCloud instance, compliments of my daughter: https://share.icloud.com/photos/034ESJ4evRtbUUvCB5WUngT9g. I can make a tutorial on how to do this if you'd like. I don't feel that storage limits are arbitrary. Someone has to pay for the storage, and this group doesn't have reoccurring dues. Our current hosting provider, which I am in the market to migrate away from, charges $0.10/GB per month (as shown here: https://www.linode.com/products/block-storage/) just for storage. We pay additional money per month for the CPU/memory/networking/IP/etc. If you're a user with ~3 GB of files on our server, then SDAR pays about $0.30/month - just to store your photos. Literally not much more than pennies on the per-person scale, but we have nearly 3,000 members, and 100's of those are active members. Those pennies become dollars quickly. So these rules are not arbitrary, they are part and parcel to running a sustainable online community with sane limits on expenses when there are no regular revenue streams. You'll be hard-pressed to find any sizeable online community with free, unlimited storage. That is currently a correct assumption. At this time we don't have auto archiving or thread locking emabled. This thread is a perfect example of why we should! Started in 2007, which was 15 years ago, this thread is still here accepting comments and posts. Furthermore, the opening post is largely out of date and serves to confuse users. Because things are never archived, locked, or stripped (images removed), the disk space is never reclaimed, the databases never shrink, etc. Also, and this is something that I need to task my moderators with, threads often veer off topic. Case in point, this thread again! Looks like @paulmbowers and @Covered in Dust are planning a ride. GREAT! We love to see that. There are two problems though: (1) this is a thread about posting photos to the site and (2) as of right now it has 6,597 views and 3 followers so at least 3 people are getting notifications about this ride and likely thousands of people will have to scroll past an unrelated exchange about an upcoming ride. Moderators should be removing posts like that so that conversations stay on topic and in their specific category. It makes a better experience for all users.

I don't have access to club financials so I'll happily leave decisions like this to said leadership. I think the big rides that are put on 1-2 times a year, like Mountain Dash and Desert Dash, pay for the site and then some. Taking my admin hat off, as a paid club member and as a geek in general, I am okay with paying a few dollars a month to be a member of a club/organization provided I believe in what they are doing and I get something for my money. If we had a sticker for our bikes, a bumper sticker for our 4-wheeled vehicles, or a good-looking logo on a shirt or jersey, I'd gladly display them which would be another way to get revenue into the club's coffers. The cost of hosting the site isn't extreme. Even at a paltry $3/month, about 35 supporting members would pay for all the hosting (monthly), domain names (annually), and leave a little in the kitty for nifty things like SEO, advertising, paid themes, plugins, and APIs. As for storage space, we have plenty. The main issue is that it was previously set to unlimited per user, which is bad practice. Rhetorical question, but what do you do when a few users are using 100's of MB or even GB of data, while the other 95% of users are using 10's of MB? That's a hard genie to put back in the bottle. I picked a random number and obviously picked too low. I'm adjusting so that nobody bumps their head on the limits. *UPDATE* Case in point on disk space usage: I was just contacted by a user that cannot currently add more pics. That user has 2,950 MB of files uploaded, which takes 73 pages to display when I am viewing their files. Is this a problem? No, because we want all users to share their love of motorcycling (and in this user's case, photography) with this group. That being said, if even 10% of our nearly 3,000 members used 3,000 MB of storage, that would be (300 users x 3,000 MB = 900,000 MB) right at 1 TB of space. That is approximately 5-6x the total storage that we have available currently and would more than double our hosting costs. The good news is that 10% of our users don't fall into this category. The difficulty is handling the users that do in such a way that it works equitably for all involved.

Seems I missed this thread about photos on the site. Lots of catching up for me to do. Short version is that we can afford to host tons of photos and nobody should feel limited. If anyone is reaching file size limits, contact me.