We shipped our first milestone release last night, so I got to think about something other than 3D graphics editing today.  My ham radio emergency services group (WC-ARES) is scheduled to take part in assisting a nearby county with some communications needs on Monday, so I spent part of the day getting all my stuff ready.  One part of the preparations involved programming the frequencies that we’ll be using into my radios so that I’m ready to go first thing Monday morning.

It’s a good thing I went through this today.  One of the frequencies I had to program was 442.225 MHz, and neither of my radios would let me because their frequency step sizes were set to 20 KHz.  The closest I could get was 442.220.  I had to dig out the radio manuals and figure out how to set the frequency step.  If I had not prepared today, I would have arrived at the site Monday totally unable to participate in the exercise.

As a bonus, I threw the radio manuals into my equipment bag.  There’s nothing like being out in the field, wading through eight levels of menus on an itty bitty LCD screen, trying to figure out how to make a radio do something that I know it can do.

My aerospace instructor used to remind us often of the seven Ps.  Proper Preflight Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance.  Minus the “Preflight,” it’s true in almost everything.