Storing Tree Trunks (part 2)

I built this wood crib to hold some of the larger trunks we anticipate taking down once the spring build season gets into full swing.  Behind the crib you can see one of the many stacks of firewood we have been accumulating up until now.

Can you hear me now?

When we are on our land in West Virginia we are very cut off from the rest of the world.  There is no nearby cell phone tower so coverage is spotty at best.  Also, since there are no utility poles running to our land there is no electricity, no land line telephone, and definitely no internet.  It's even hard to get the news.  The local gas station only carries the local county paper which is a weekly publication containing little information beyond the latest high school sports schedule.  I am pretty sure that if WWIII started while I was out here the first I would know about it would be the green glow of the radioactive fallout.  Some day we will bring a bit of the 21st century to our spot of wilderness.  We are talking to the power company about getting poles put in but it is a complicated process involving getting permission from other land owners to have power lines traverse their land as well as a significant amount of money.  In the meantime we are trying to work with what we have.  There is a cell phone tower about 30 miles away beyond a couple of mountain ridges.  A wee little bit of electromagnetic energy from that tower will diffract its way to our location but it is too weak to be detected by a regular cell phone.  We are trying to utilize this weak signal by boosting it with an auxiliary RF amplifier and an external antenna.  We put the antenna on a pole on top of our trailer and hooked everything up.  The result was mixed.  On some days we can get a clear signal and once again talk to the rest of the world.  On other days we get nothing.  I think the antenna needs to be higher up.

We used a couple of 10 ft sections of PVC plumbing pipe to make our pole.   We erected the pole on top of our trailer.  The trailer height of about 10 ft plus the pole gives the antenna height about 30 ft.  Unfortunately it is not enough for a consistently good signal.

A close up of the antenna atop our pole.