We set up shop in a borrowed bungalow perched above a slate beach, trading studio comforts for salt air and endless horizon. The gear list shrank to a handful of essentials: a ruggedized tablet, a foldable solar mat, and a 4G router taped inside the window. Everything else had to earn its space in the duffel.
Two experiments surprised us. The first was how well the solar mat cooperated with cloudy mornings; the second was how quickly sand finds its way into switches and sliders. We logged failures obsessively—latency spikes after a squall, a drone controller that refused to wake up, the tripod that lost a leg to the tide. Each hiccup added a line to the checklist for the next field kit.
More than anything, the month affirmed that good tools adapt to the environment, not the other way around. The prototypes we trusted were the ones that welcomed repairs, rerouting, and improvised straps. The rest stayed in their cases, waiting for the ride back inland.