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A Pain in the Glass

Posted on September 18, 2014 by scott

The past two years have been my family’s personal edda. In that time, this has happened:

  • Wife’s dad died.
  • Epic sewer backup in our basement…in the middle of January, somewhat complicating cleanup
  • Toyota Sienna was totaled by someone running a red light
  • The OTHER car nearly had its engine fall out. (Seriously.)
  • Half a basswood fell on the house.
  • The OTHER half fell on the 34 kV power line.
  • My dad died.
  • Son’s school supplies went missing two days before ACT testing. (Eventually got them back. Clueless coach moved them to a dugout…except son wasn’t on the sports team.)
  • Wife’s mom had to have breast cancer treatments…again.
  • New cat nearly ate itself to death…literally. TWICE. Idiot.
  • My mom died.
  • Kids off to college/high school, other funerals, appliances failing in a non-reparable way…you get the idea.

Oddly enough, it’s the loss of the van that continues to haunt us a bit. The original was a 2011 Toyota Sienna LE that we liked. We bought it primarily because a) my sister builds Toyotas and we get a bit of a discount, and b) it holds my obnoxiously large musical instruments. (We took the cases to the dealers we visited to make sure everything would fit. They laughed at us until we bought the van.)

After it was totaled, we bought a new Sienna off the lot. I knew everything would fit, and you can get a 2013 at a decent price if you’re getting to the end of the model year. And because we bought off the lot, we upgraded slightly to an XLE. The kids liked it a lot, since it has seat warmers (or as they put it, ass-blasters). Several other nice upgrades as well, but I have a love/hate relationship with one of them: the window glass.

The XLE has “better” glass in it that blocks more UV rays than the other stuff. My ancestry is primarily Scots and Norwegian, so I’m very much a “pale skin is healthy skin” kind of guy. Blocking UV isn’t a bad thing. Unfortunately, this glass apparently also affects signals in the satellite band used by GPS, and that is wreaking holy hell on my efforts to have APRS in the vehicle.

My preferred rig is a Kenwood D-710A with a Greenlight Labs GPS. Compact, fewer cables to run, and the Greenlight works pretty well even in questionable spots. Or it DID, before we put it in the new van. Now it has trouble capturing satellites. I’ve confirmed this with my AvMap G6, which will show the acquisition process — IN the van, they all struggle.

Unfortunately, nothing I’ve tried works well. The AvMap did the trick for a bit, but then it started throwing Windows RT error messages (this can be fixed, just haven’t yet). The Greenlight rarely captures at all. I do have a Byonics puck, which is weatherproof and can live OUTSIDE the van, but since they run on 5 volts, there’s a ridiculous amount of cabling and gendering of connectors involved. No solution I have available really works at the moment.

So for now, the Musicmobile has no APRS capability, until I come up with a solution that doesn’t involve replacing the windshield. Open to suggestions on this one.

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