The Drake Blog

The Drake blog is officially online. Stay tuned for more.

Our due date is Friday, March 10, but little boy has shown no signs of making his entrance anytime soon. I guess we just wait! I can’t wait to meet him!

In an ongoing quest to know when the 20M band has openend, I’ve decided to make a 20M CW receiver. My focus is specifically on 14.100 MHz – the frequencies used by beacons. I plan on running the AF output to a PC in the shack, which will continually monitor signal strength. As a secondary objective, I will correlate the CW input with the known call signs of the beacons. I plan on having various levels or categories. When a certain level is reached – meaning that that one far away beacon is reaching me and therefore the band is open – the PC will send me an email.

A 20M CW receiver is one of the simplest to do. The harder part will be the analyzer.

No baby yet – not even a hint! We think the baby is in for th long haul, in which case we’re looking at at least another two weeks. Keep checking back.

So that whole ‘babies are born on a full moon’ myth… not true – at least for us. The baby has been active, but there are no signs of even a hint of labor. But, one thing is a guarantee – the baby will arrive before the end of March.

Our friends, Tim and Amy, brought up a good point – we’ll be posting some pictures here on the ‘blog, but we’ll have a lot of pictures in the gallery. A username and password are needed for the baby pictures in the gallery. If you’d like to have access, please send us an email! We haven’t sent a mass email giving out the info, so don’t be offended if you didn’t get one . We’ll update everyone with the info once we have the baby.

Brayden was born Sunday March 19 at 12:20PM. Mom and baby are very well. He is 7lbs, 7oz. More to come…

Hi there, well, here we are a week after Brayden was born and everything is great. He is a healthy happy boy who loves to eat and sleep! Mom and dad are doing well too. Dad took this week off from work to help out until Brayden and mom get the hang of things. Our awesome neighbors are making dinners for us, so we are well fed. Brayden got his social security card and health insurance card today, so he’s pretty official! TTYL

Happy to say Brayden had a great Dr’s appointment today, he is up to 7lb 12oz, more than when he was born!

Ugh, tried to upload 60 pictures from the digital camera, Corupt, gone..:-(

we’ll just have to take a lot more in the coming weeks and upload more frequently.