Friday, January 9, 2009 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM
< previous day | archives | next day >
Sitting in the Shade, Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM, January 9, 2009
The light is on...
This morning I took a walk in the park to try to figure out if it would worth my while to move to another site for a stronger Verizon signal and found a pretty consistent 2-3 bars on my cell phone all over the park. Nope, moving won't help.
Then I plugged the USB720 modem directly into the laptop and took it outside to walk around and see if for some reason it would pick up a signal directly that it wouldn't pick up while plugged into the router. Nope. But I got absorbed in fiddling with the VZAccess Manager software that has never worked with the modem (but I keep hoping I can fix whatever the glitch is and keep trying this & that) when I noticed the little green LED on the modem was on solid indicating it had locked on a signal. Oooh! A signal! But no access through the VZAccess Manager - I still haven't gotten that to work.
Inside I go, plug the modem back in the router and fire it up.
We're on! And cooking! This thing is really cooking!
Bye, I've got stuff to do.
Night camp
Site 7 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM
- Verizon cell phone service - good signal
- Verizon EVDO service - very good signal and access speed ( I have to qualify this - during my January 2008 visit the signal and access speed was excellent - in January 2009 it was practically non-existent during the day and slow at night with unpredictable short periods of excellent access)
- Go to Oliver Lee Memorial State Park website
- Go to Oliver Lee Memorial State Park on my Nightcamps map
- Check the weather here
Heliograph routes of the 1890 Practice
The date was May 15th, 1890, and the Army's Department of Arizona had just completed a major heliograph practice; it was, in fact, the largest the world had ever seen. I call it the "Volkmar Practice", after the man responsible for it, Col. Wm. J. Volkmar, the Assistant Adjutant General and Chief Signal Officer for the Department of Arizona. Although the practice lasted only sixteen days, preparations for it took months of reconnaissance and preparation. Involved in the long range signaling maneuvers were twenty-five heliograph stations stretching from Whipple Barracks near Prescott to Fort Stanton near Ruidoso, New Mexico. My guess is that close to two hundred men were involved, both cavalry and infantry.