One additional item showed up in the mail this past Thursday, so let's see what is in that other small box... Turns out it was my newly repair Garmin Foreunner 405 GPS sports watch. I had sent it off to Dan at FixYourGPS.com on Sat, Oct. 4th and got it back on Thu. Oct. 9th. eBay seller "fixyourgps" or directly to http://www.fixyourgps.com/ Now it seems the Garmin 405 and 405cx watches use something like a LIR304 rechargeable Lithium cell which you can pick up for around $15. But I viewed a couple of how-to videos on the battery replacement process in the 405 and decided it was well worth the additional $20 to send the watch into FixYourGPS to have them do the work. It seemed to be lots of very small, tightly packed parts inside and some delicate manipulations and soldering.Plus they can reset the continuous reboot problem that shows up with the old battery, mine was doing that. And so far, I have gone out on a few outings and the new battery in the 405 seems to be working like a champ. I did not recharge it when I received it and it is still at 57% charge according to the display. I used the GPS a few times and ran it down to 0% in about a week. So I've run down and recharged the battery a few times now and it seems to be as good as new. It'll run up to two weeks depending on usage. And now when the battery runs down, it shuts off and stays off. None of the rebooting, beeping and shutting down that it used to do for hours on end. So if anyone has a GPS watch that doesn't run as long as it used to, by all means, consider a new battery for it. And yes, I do charge this on my solar powered USB charging station. Now at ~1WH of energy storage in that battery and charging it every week or two, that is not a great deal of energy I am saving. But it is the idea of deliberately moving more and more devices over to renewable energy that is important. At some point, you may find the majority of your devices are powered off renewable energy. Here's how I replaced my defective Garmin ANT+ stick: https://youtu.be/zIX9uxEMzcs Hope your enjoyed this brief video review. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYzo9iQm-iM

This was a spur of the moment decision to head up this road that I first explored in March 2020. I had stopped partway up the hill at some heavy brush. After this past year of exploring, I had more experience navigating this sort of brush and decided to take a 2nd shot at it. There's an old gate post part way up the road. At the top switch back, I should have studied the hill shade map a little more as I now see there are 2 more faint road traces there. If I do get back up here, I think I might try crossing the bench above the old road and see if I can re-join that road where it heads back up the canyon. This bench is nearly 1000 ft. (300m) below the top of Montebello Ridge, where there are a lot of vineyards, some dating from around the time this road was in use. Not sure if this bench was a used that way or more likely it may have been an orchard of some sort. Hoping that hiking across the bench might run into some old trees or grape vine plants from back then. There's also hints of a road that heads along the side of the canyon that may join up with a road coming up from gate MB10. About the USGS HTMC: https://www.usgs.gov/programs/national-geospatial-program/historical-topographic-maps-preserving-past View/download maps on the TopoView site: https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/ More to come... Subscribe for more content like this Comment, rate, share & click the bell icon And as always, thanks for watching ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lD6DshiUKyA

Trying to find out why the solar panel input power to the EPSolar Tracer-2215RN charge controller was low. I had recently reconfigured the solar panels on my tiliting rack to put a pair of 270W panels into the new EPSolar 4210BN charge controller feeding the Lithium Ion battery bank. This left a pair of 60W/12V panels (in series) in parallel with a single 270W/24V panel feeding the 2215RN controller on the 12V lead acid battery bank. I noticed that I wasn't getting any more than 3-4 amps from the solar panels. Yet, when I tested each panel separately, I would measure the typical short circuit current. As it turned out, the one 270W panel had a shorted bypass diode that was reducing it from 60 to 40 cells and about 24Voc. In parallel with the pair of 60W panels, it never was able to add any current since the voltage was too low. Temporarily removing the shorted diode, I did see the expected Voc voltage. However, with the short circuit test, I found some high resistance tabbing connections that arced and smoked. More to come, with the panel down on the ground for a closer look... Be sure to rate, comment and share And as always, thanks for watching Intro: Louisiana Fairytale by Austin Rogers http://drfiddle.com/show_tune.php?id=94 ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCUOCgeGweI

Let's set up this DC Boost converter as a DC load/virtual solar panel and see how well it works. In short, it works like I anticipated, I have a DC load that can pull a relatively fixed current or a virtual solar panel that can transfer a fixed amount of power to a grid tie inverter. I connected the input terminals to my solar battery bank that is charged by a 40 amp MPPT charge controller: - https://youtu.be/YH0iVSzkOgU I set the output voltage to 38.5V and the output current limit to 4.0A. The output is connected to a solar grid tie inverter (24-48V input) that's off camera. The inverter also has a 24V solar panel connected to it, so the boost converter is in parallel with that. So the MPPT controller inside that inverter is finding the maximum power point of the panel plus the boost converter combined. That panel has a Voc of 38.5V, so I have matched that with the boost converter. This demonstrates how you can add current sources in parallel. It seems the conversion efficiency is about 90% at this input/output combination. The temperatures of the inductor and heat sink reach about 55C in free air at the 9.6A input current. I'll look into adding a small 12V fan to help cool the device. In the next video I'll show a bit more of how the system is connected: - https://youtu.be/Iae2ONg-5JI Soundtrack: Solar Flares by Silent Partner https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/music ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJRxYUs6Wl8