Can't work on website, building Yagi Antenna

Well, I read online that some people were using Yagi antenna's for receiving talk over the AAR channels. I have two monopole antenna's but I thought I would try building a Yagi. I sort of got it working I guess but I still don't think its as good as it should be. I guess I'll give it a while and see how it does. Hopefully I can get it optimized and then I'll leave it be. I haven't worked on the www.rtprailfan.com site for a while because i've been wrapped up in antenna design. Hope to post some pics soon.

Its been a while

So I was on vacation and I haven't updated my blog in some time. I took some railfan trips, to Hamlet, Aberdeen, followed the Durham and Southern from Apex to Dunn, NC, went to Selma, NC on the old ACL mainline. It was quite a vacation. I have a ton of stuff to update http://www.rtprailfan.com/ with. Also, the search engine optimization we did is paying off, for some reason i'm highly ranked for "amtrak cary." I guess because of the one article I have on amtrak and Cary, NC. I went there also. I also am working on a video page but I did some stupid stuff the other night in Dreamweaver and I screwed up one of my CSS pages. I need to fix that tonight. Hope everyone had a good holiday and check out the page, I'll have new stuff soon.

Morrisville NC Development

I have to say I am rather upset to see this. Not that i'm suprised because of the ridiculous amount of growth that is going on in Morrisville. I heard there are going to be no trees left there an I believe it. Recently I saw this in a news article and its rather depressing. I large section of an area that I use for walking/railfanning is going to be used for a retail development. I hate that they are doing this but I guess there isn't much we can do. Castro Lifestyle Properties is developing this section of Morrisville that I have visited many times. I hate that its going away.

Park West Village Morrisville NC

http://www.castolp.com/lifestyle/profile.cfm?proID=14

http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/2016249/

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Railfanning in Cary

Cary, NC is a nice place to go because its quite, and more importantly, its close to where I live. Sunday's are pretty lite on traffic buy you can usually see an Amtrak and a freight train. Today wasn't a very fun day to go because it was pretty cold so I didn't stay forever. I did catch the Amtrak 80 though. I worked on the webpage some more. I also got a lot of help on SEO which I really appreciate. I think I'll work on the forum some more though, it still needs work.

RTPRailfan has a FORUM!

http://www.rtprailfan.com now has a forum for people to chat about railfanning in our area. It can be reached at http://www.rtprailfan.com/rtprailfanforum/ . Feel free to stop by and chat for a while, leave a picture, etc. I'm still setting it up but the basic stuff is up and running.

Almost time for vacation

And what better way to spend a vacation than doing some railfanning. Actually I will only probably get in a day of it with all the other things I have to do. Oh well. My railfan site is making progress each day, although I have taken a bit of a break recently. I need to get the title navigation bar working and the site map built but other than that I think its pretty much laid out. For my railfan site, I want to have it be interactive for users. The way the site is set up is you have articles and every article has a description of what you saw and what the area was like. Along with this you have a picture gallery and a google map to show exactly where it is. I am going to create, somehow, a main page that is just one big google map with place markers. Every place marker will pop up a balloon when you click on it and the balloon will have a link that goes to the article. I think that will be really cool for seeing railfanning locations around you. The problem right now is getting traffic to the site. Time to do more search engine optimization. On a different subject, I think the railroad people must know I sit out and railfan at lunch because I haven't seen a train in more than a week and a half. Its getting old, I think I'll have to switch times.

RTP Railfan

Finally, I have something to show for my effort. http://www.rtprailfan.com is sorta finished. I have some bugs and some of the links don't link to anything but I have the main page up and 3 articles. Hopefully I can get the last of the articles that I wanted to do completed soon. I took a break for a while, had other things going on. In antenna news, I got my Smiley antenna tuned to 160 MHz in. Its pretty nice, I can definitely hear more of what is floating around the airwaves than I could with my Diamond. I think I heard the dispatcher in Raleigh the other day but that my have been a fluke because I haven't heard anything recently. I also have a mag mount for my car that helps when I'm driving around. Pretty nice. Well thats about all thats happening. I should have more of my website together soon!