A place to put my stuff
My LNR precision trail-friendly end-fed halfwave antenna has been my go to antenna for SOTA and other field operations for several years. It is compact, easy to deploy in a tree or on a telescoping mast, and it gets good signal reports. Unfortunately, after many years of use and substantial abuse, the antenna broke on my last trip. When I got back, I put it back together, almost good as new.
Most of my equipment had the sense to wait until after I had moved from the US to Madagascar to fail, but not this Acer Monitor. I had picked it up cheap as a bundled deal with a desktop computer in 2009 from New Egg Computer, and it failed early in 2014. I had purchased two identical systems at that time, and the other monitor is still working without a problem.
The monitor wasn’t entirely dead – the power LED is still lit up and when power was applied, the word “Acer” would appear for about a second, and then the screen would remain black. This suggested that most of the monitor was working. Since we were packing up for the move, I thought it would be better to box up the monitor and tackle it on the other end after I had a workshop set up. A year and a half later, it came back out of the box.