Daniel Adi Nugroho dot Net

Not all of LIDAR data acquisition flights are fun and fascinating. Never in my life was I gripped with the near-death experience as close as what I am about to tell you in this post. 

In August 2011, I was aboard the most luxurious and spacious survey aircraft I’ve ever seen, a shiny, well-furnished, air-conditioned, 9-year old Cessna 208 Caravan with a large hatch on its belly. It has a “toilet” too! All other aircrafts that I’ve ever flown on survey sorties are usually more than 30 years old, cramped, hot, smelly, and doesn’t look very safe. This particular machine is really a belle. The avionics looks quite modern, with weather radar, autopilot, and all. For the propulsion, it has a turbine engine driving its three-bladed propeller. I really love the whirring noise and the deep roar of the turbine engine during the starting up, compared to the less appealing thudding and cranky sound of piston engine startups.

Long story short, by 4:30 PM we have finished our LIDAR and photo survey job over Pelabuhan Ratu coastal area, south of West Java, and we were ready to fly back to Halim Perdanakusuma Airport in Jakarta. We were flying at about 7000 feet, and there were four people on board, the two pilots, myself, and the security officer from the Air Force. Unfortunately, bad weather confronted us, and the pilot decided to take an alternative route. I saw the dark, menacing wall of clouds on the horizon in front of us. However, a few minutes after we took the alternate route, we found ourselves completely enveloped by thick clouds all over the place. No discernible horizon, no visible terrain, no blue sky, nothing, just dull, dark-gray colour outside, decorated with tiny streams of rainwater outside the windows. 

I remember when I was a kid, I used to enjoy listening to shortwave broadcast using an old transistor radio, and as I browse along the shortwave bands to find a clear signal and intelligible voices, I often stumbled upon some strong morse code signals. My shortwave listening hobby goes all the way through my early days of high school.

When my radio hobby surfaced again in 2009, I bought Yaesu’s VHF transceivers – VX-7R handheld portable, (which I sold already), and then I bought FT-1900R, a VHF-only transceiver. I love experimenting with it, and most actively in APRS mode, to study the propagation of low-power signal over different conditions and weather. For further experimentation, especially in HF SSB and CW, I would like to get an FT-817ND all-mode QRP transceiver or an FT-450, an HF transceiver, both from Yaesu. However, due to restricted cash, I am postponing the purchase, and prefer to try the much more primitive, and cheaper, alternative – Pixie 2, while learning morse code and wire antenna techniques.