Technologists, Nomads
The varieties of nomads that I meet out here in the wilds is interesting. I’m convinced, for instance, that a sizable proportion of the people that you meet out here would have been explorers, perhaps astronauts, in a different reality. Perhaps a reality where the tighter budgets of the Nixon administration didn’t cancel the Apollo program, and we had continued to explore the near earth bodies instead of building ridiculous stockpiles of destructive weapons…Technological Do-It-Yourselfers
Take a look at this vehicle. A roof rack full of photo voltaic
panels that are both elevated and rotated to follow the sun.
There’s also a weather station and mystery antenna mounted on
the roof rack. This sedan wasn’t built to be an RV, or even
necessarily for camping out of, but with a little enginuity, the
owner becomes his own Mark Whatney roving the desolate reaches of
Mars.This is a theme that you find across the population of RVers. ARRL (American Radio Relay League, the chief advocacy group for ham radio operators) finds the tech streak in RVers compelling enough to hold a rally in Quartzsite right after the Rock and Gem show and the RV and camper show, as they have been doing for about thirty years. My father (a ham) would have loved it. Apparently there are a huge number of roving ham shacks.
With more resources.
Another example. With the trailer being pulled by this RVer,
he’s generating around 6.5 kilowatts… I’d be
ecstatic to find enough real-estate to put 300Watts of PV panels on
my roof-top. And what do you do with that much power, simply run
your AC because you’re forced to be in the hot sun in order
to make good on all those photo voltaic panels?Anyway, technologists are well represented in this group, and I’m eager to meet a multitude of them.
