I hope my suitcase is big enough. I keep finding more things I forgot to pack.

@azonenberg man the TSA is going to shit a bird over this.

I truly hope they don't wreck your setup.

Do you typically try to give the airline people some sort of heads up like "look these cases full of wires and circuitry are for.." or anything?

@elebertus honestly i think they're more likely to complain about the brick of business cards which apparently has the same density as C4 on the x-ray (ask me how i know)

@elebertus that's also why this is all carryon. Nothing sharp or scary. If they need to search something they're going to do it right in front of me where I can guide them on how not to break anything expensive

Almost forgot the 18 GHz directional couplers oops

@elebertus @azonenberg I've gone through with a pelican case full of test equipment before. It happens every day, they're pretty used to it.

@vathpela @elebertus @azonenberg that's been my experience too: if it looks like a nest of wires on the x-ray so they want to look at it, but when I open it up and it's clearly a bunch of expensive-looking stuff they basically don't want to touch anything and just sort of wave me through. I got an order of magnitude more hassle for having a USB cable in the bag with my toothpaste than having a whole case full of electronics stuff.

Just like many things, once what you're doing looks complicated enough people tend to just leave you alone.

@palmer @elebertus @azonenberg I think complicated is one aspect, but there's a very serious component of when they recognize "this is a person doing a trade". Once that happens it's just like wearing a hard hat and hi viz while holding a clipboard with a form on it.

@azonenberg @elebertus yeah that exact thing happened to me too. But we had plastic business cards (f if I knew who made *that* stupid decision), so the 'density' probably is different. Did they tell you that? I think/thought it might be because it's a uniform featureless rectangle/box.

@equinox @elebertus my recollection is they specifically said they thought it looked like a bar of explosive

@azonenberg @elebertus that's exactly what I mean with featureless box - off the top of my head I can't think of anything in normal luggage that's just "a brick"

@equinox @elebertus i wouldn't know my luggage is not exactly normal