Saturday Sprinkles

Today's Tracking via Ham Radio and GPS

I must have wiggled a loose connection on my radio-electronics cluster since all of a sudden my tracker worked quite well today.
It rained all night last night, making sleep difficult.  Steady rain isn't too bad to sleep by, but the overhead trees tend to modify the rain-flow and make it come in blops, slams, and sheets.
So everything was soggy this morning but the sky was merely gray with fog, not black like those clouds that dump rain.
I got down to the dropoff point, unloaded the trike, and took off.  I had not gone more than a mile or two when it started sprinkling on me and I could see heavier mist directly ahead, so I wimped out and turned around rather than get soaked.
It was only sprinkling slightly when I got to the Exploder parked at the intersection/dropoff point.  I activated the radios and waited for the timed beacons to transmit so I could listen to them and see if anything sounded wrong.  After at least 30 minutes NOTHING sounded wrong since nothing had been transmitted even though the maximum delay between beacons, sitting still, was 10 minutes or so, at least to my recollection.  It takes a laptop/serial connection to check such things in the settings, which was not available at this point.  So I began double checking connections and suddenly it started transmitting positions.  I sighed and started to finish loading the trike onto the roof of the Exploder luggage rack, when I noticed the SUN had come out, no sprinkling was going on, and the immediate area seemed clear of rain.  So instead of loading up the trike I loaded myself down into the seat and took off for ride attempt #2.
This time I got a few miles enjoyably down the road when, again, splats of rain began hitting me in the face, with dark clouds looming dead ahead threatening real rain.  So I again turned around early and rode back and gave up for the day.  Of course it hasn't rained the rest of the day, at least until we drove over to Knoxville to take my Martin to the guitar repair man.  It seems we cannot make the hour-plus drive to Knoxville without rain falling on us somewhere around the metroplex.

Ride Started: 10:00 AM    Ride Ended:  10.42 AM
Beginning Battery Voltage:   12.2 Ending Voltage: 10.9  Lowest:  10.9
Beginning Blood Glucose:  178     Ending BG: 118  
(Ate breakfast this morning;  insulin pump basal rate set to 80% for the ride)
Lowest Temp  71 F      Highest Temp: 75 F   
Stats from the GPS:    Total Miles:  7.04 
Overall average speed            Moving Avg               Max Speed  
7.9 MPH                                 8.3 MPH                     15.6 MPH 
Total Trip time                       Moving Time             Stopped Time 
42 minutes                             40 minutes                   2 minutes