Crazy Weather

The usual modus operandus for the rainy season weather in this part of Costa Rica is sunny, dry mornings, followed by rain in the afternoons. Ninety five percent of the time anyway. The last couple of days it's been fickle and fitful, however. The night before last we had a deep, rumbling thunderstorm all night, which was gone by morning, but another was on its tail before morning was over. Yesterday, the rain started more or less on time but it quickly turned into a tempest of howling wind and horizontal rain. This only lasted an hour or so, but it left its effect on the mast of my VK2ABQ antenna as you can see in the picture. 

 The wind didn't bend the mast directly, which is made of 5 mm wall thickness steel tubing, but rather it broke off a nearby tree to which I had tied one of the guys. The tree fell over the embankment with the guy still attached. The angle of the mast was about twice that in the photo and there was considerable tension on that guy to put it mildly. When I cut the guy the mast snapped to attention, ... almost. 



Getting it all down is going to be fun, let alone trying to unbend it, or perhaps I'll have to replace it entirely. Fortunately, my quad and verticals got by unscathed, but at this moment another squall is passing through, so who knows what will come down next.

This weather has also made an impact on the web uptime for my Softrock SDR when the lightning storms have me running upstairs to disconnect it. I try to always leave the web server running, but I change the sign-on message to let folks know why the radio is off. I've been collecting a lot of "DX" on that server, including Japan, Russian, UK, Germany, Netherlands, Italy, and of course the U.S.