We were late in plugging-in the semi-permanently mounted V-dipole antenna to the 'recording' AGS, but happy to see it standing on the peak of the garage roof, glinting orange-pink in the sunlight, without anyone attempting to hold it in place, as it received an image from NOAA-18. After several antenna radiation pattern calculations, we decided to try a test antenna height of 0.8 metres off the pinnacle of the roof. While some radio forums suggest putting the antenna as high as possible, others suggest this is not necessary, especially if one is already mounting on a semi-conductive wooden roof (as opposed to concrete or steel). Depending on what surface the v-dipole antenna takes as 'ground', the antenna height can create different patterns of reception, and can even lead to 'null' points where no signal data can be received. However, as Gainesville can get very strong, hurricane force winds, and we couldn't see many examples of tall antennas or rooftop weathervanes in the neighbourhood, we opted to keep the antenna height under one metre, and 0.8 seemed to work great today, despite our lateness. To secure the antenna mast to the roof, we used a steel 'weathervane' mount with special wood screws with deep ribbons that we had gotten at the local ACE hardware store, and a good coating of a transparent sealant gel called, somewhat counter-intuitively, 'Through the Roof!' We managed to hit a stud with one side of the steel mount, which was a good sign for the sturdiness of the antenna, but also meant that the drill pushed further into the roof on the stud side of the mount, and slightly unbalanced the mount. We unscrewed, knocked some wooden 'shims' under the metal pad at the stud side, and checked its straightness by hanging a roll of tape on a golden ribbon next to the mast. Tomorrow, hopefully, we will be able to tie the RF cable onto the mast, and bracket / secure the cable to the roof, wrapping it around the edge of the garage door and entering the garage where the AGS will stay plugged in.

A huge amount of progress was made today with AGS reception! It is hard to contain the excitement while writing this weather note. After several months exploring ‘herringbone’ distortion patterns and deep diving into NOAA APT + Raspberry Pi tutorials, the team found an ‘instructable’ tutorial via which several people seemed to be receiving relatively long and clear NOAA images. In this tutorial, Grayson noticed a filter option for rtl_fm called -F 9 that we hadn’t tried to implement in the AGS code yet, and he added it in an update yesterday. Last night, the roof mounted turnstile in Florida had to be taken down due to a lightning storm and ‘extreme’ tornado warning. Yet even though it was up against a garage wall and under an overhang, the last evening pass of the day yesterday showed telemetry data at the top and bottom of the image, where previous captures only recorded static. This morning, despite an ongoing storm and tornado warning, the Turnstile was positioned out on the front lawn for a 70 degree max elevation pass shortly after 11:40. In stark contrast to previous ‘letterbox’ type images in which satellite data only appeared in the central strip of the recording, today the image is significantly longer and clearer, with telemetry data clearly showing through static at the beginning and end of the pass. Also, the typical ‘herringbone’ type distortion seen in all previous images appears to be gone! More testing will verify this but at present this is something to celebrate.

We joked that Orlando kept getting farther away as we drove south on 75, east through Ocala National Forest, over the waters of Lake Monroe, and alongside cattle pastures and skeleton scarecrows. Rain splattered intermittently on the windshield. Billboards declared that ‘at 18 days since conception, a baby’s heart is already beating’, or ‘man up: your child needs you.’ An entire single story house rolled down the highway taking up two lanes, flanked by pickup trucks. A corner ‘yard art’ shop burst with bronze eagles, brown bears, American flags and an original Bob’s Big Boy sculpture, complete with a checkered red and white outfit and a sculptural hamburger on a plate.

Florida balances over one big aquifer: a hidden cavernous water system fed by rainfall that stretches beneath the everglades, wetlands and an ecological system known as 'moist sandy pine / hardwood woodlands'. Walking through the Sweetwater Wetlands south of Gainesville yesterday, we met some of the water on its way into the depths. Today, at Rainbow Springs, an hour further south, we saw some of it come out, bubbling up through pale white-gray sand, so abundantly that it creates the Rainbow River, a wide, flat river sustaining alligators, turtles, catfish, frogs, coral snakes and other wildlife. Rainbow Springs exists because of the thinner karst rock separating the aquifer from the surface, while elsewhere in the state, the rock-shield is much thicker. The upwelling makes the water below feel very close, even reachable, but we learned that the water in the Floridan Aquifer is between 17,000 and 26,000 years old. The springs seemed otherworldly in their crystal clear shallows, ferns and mossy trees, and two impressive waterfalls cascaded over towering rocks. One of the waterfalls was named 'Seminole Falls', after local Indigenous peoples who never ceded their land. We speculated that the two tall waterfalls might have been built up as the upwelling spring water deposited minerals over thousands of years. Later a park ranger informed us that the waterfalls were entirely man-made in the 1930s, created with sediment dredged from the bottom of the springs, and that water has been power-pumped to the top of the rocks for decades, just so visitors can watch it fall.

"What is this obsession with 'manned' or 'unmanned'?!" jokes Bowen Yang, playing 'A Drone' on Saturday Night Live. "For the record" Bowen continues "I can get a man whenever I want!". The skit plays on political divisions haunting thousands if not millions of American Christmas Eve dinners this year. I had not heard about the reported drone sightings prior to arriving in Florida, but they have been raised by local family members at every opportunity. "What is the government really doing?" "Remember the media explosion about that one Chinese balloon?! Now there are hundreds of drones and no one is talking about it!" Or, "I just worry about what could happen in New York on New Years Eve". Earlier in the week, when Steve and I set up the turnstile antenna on the roof of my Mom's house, a family member walked over and asked if we could listen to the drones. I decided to preserve a bit of mystery: "this is for satellites, but both satellites and drones communicate via radio waves".

After a few hours at Florida's coast, one begins to see beyond the obvious signs of damage from Hurricane Helene to houses and infrastructure, and other more subtle signals become visible. At the edge of the marshes in Suwannee, a town at the mouth of the Suwanneee river, the land had subsided significantly. We spotted a red life jacket caught in top of a stand of high reeds near the waterline. Near the Cedar Keys museum, a bleached log had been lifted into the upper branches of a Cedar or Juniper. "Have a good time on the island- or what's left of it" said a Cedar Keys resident named Tom as we left the community garden he had set up and repaired from storm damage. We noticed how local mud clams grow in clumps, clustering on each other, rather than on rocks, like the clams and mussels of California and the UK. In the mud, the footsteps of boots traced a path to a dense outcrop of clams, presumably for a local clam harvest. Raccoon feet looked like tiny hands sunk deep in the mud. "When I was young we all used to go clam stomping" said a woman we spoke to in Cedar Keys. "You would stand in the mud and stomp your feet down over the clam. They were huge" she made a sign with her hands, fingers arranged in a large diamond shape, "nothing like what we eat today", she added.

"How high did the water get?" asked Steve. Our waitress silently walked to the door of 'Steamers' cafe and pointed to a green line drawn on the wall above chest height. "The previous high water level was all the way down here" she added, bending all the way down to a wave pattern drawn with Sharpie about a foot off the ground. "Then Idalia was here" she said, referencing the 2023 Hurricane, and pointing to a black mark around two feet off the ground, not far from the lower mark. "We prepared for it to be somewhere in between" she said. In the midst of the bustling cafe at lunchtime, we all took a moment to look at the marks on the wall in silence. The distance between the water level that the town of Cedar Keys had prepared for, and how high the water rose during Hurricane Helene, was almost unbelievable. Later, driving through Suwaneee, another Gulf-side town north of Cedar Keys, we saw tree branches hoisted into upper tree branches, boats that appeared to have been lifted and dropped in driveways, broken windows, boarded-up holes, and debris still clinging to the upper branches of palms, cedars and other bushes. The newer houses were built on stilts 16 feet high or more - the new 'code' for building, we had learned from the waitress.

Day 1 of the Florida Automatic Ground Station testing phase. A turnstile antenna is taped to a tripod sitting on the angle of the roof. An RF cable runs through a crack in the garage window to the AGS on a worktable inside.