The soil moisture monitoring project won a prize in the "Data Loggin' Contest".  The prize was a $100 Tindie gift certificate.

I thought it over for a while, and had a good look around Tindie, then decided I'd like a useful tool.

I used the prize to order a NanoVNA2.

I haven't done much with it except to turn it on and see if it is alive.
I have some ideas for things to try out with it, but I'm going to need to buy some adapters first.

I haven't posted updates to the soil moisture project since the contest ended.  I needed a break from it, and I also had something new come up at about the same time.  I'll describe that "something new" some day in a project page here on Hackaday, but not now.

The soil moisture project is still running.

I have loads of data collected.  I need to make some improvements to the software - I've found that the heatmaps are not correct.  There are areas of the yard that I know don't get that much moisture, but the heatmap shows them as being right up there with the wettest spots.

We had a really hard rain last week.  One of the local creeks came up about 5 feet from its bed and flooded the surrounding fields. My house is up on a hill so we don't have to worry about flooding.

We did get a lot of rain, though.

The heatmap says the whole yard was soaked.  I know it isn't true because individual sensors close to the house stayed at about 35%.  That chart up there says the whole yard was above 60%.

This is one sensor showing the same time period:
The flat area to the left is a little over 30% - at the same time the heatmap is showing 60% over the whole yard.
Something in the interpolation is wonky.  The data (in the database) are correct, it's just the heatmap that displays it wrong.

I'll be working on that as I get time.  I've been rather busy lately, and I don't see me getting to this for a few weeks.

I've got something else to do this weekend.  I'm going to see if I can combine work and exercise to lose some of this spare tire I'm dragging around.  That'll get its own project page if it works out.