Copasetic Flow

 I got to take pictures of the Aurora Borealis for the first time this week! I got up in the middle of the night while camping above Mountainaire, NM during the G4 geomagnetic storm on Thursday evening (the early, early morning of 24/10/11.) Left to my own devices, I couldn't see much of anything at first, but the cell phone camera did. It took me  a while to get used to how the Samsung S23+ camera worked vs the old Google Pixels I've got more experience with. The Samsung kept trying to save me time by putthing me in simple night mode. It did not save me time. Without being able to extend the shutter time I got kinda cool, but not the best pictures (Note: I need to find a way to turn the page background block on selected posts like this one.) A 1.5 second exposure came out like this While a 5.5 second exposure resulted in I had a heck of a time figuring out what had happened to the top of the tree ine middle of this picture because, well, pine trees don't have tops like tha

Found this cute video about equitorial plasma bubbles and why they matter from an international consortium between Japan, Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos. They've deployed a series of very high frequency, (VHF), radar to detect bubbles in real-time to avoid problems with important things like airplane automatic landing systems. Here's the video . 

 We finally got all of the relays to work at once! We've been using a HFD2 003 M L2 D latching relay as the on/off switch for Project TouCans. I should say, we've been trying to. The most recent issue was that our keying relay was rated for 12 Volts nominal coil voltage due to a previous design decision that went away in favor of 3 Volts. A Digikey order later and some kinda messy soldering and we had the 3 Volt relay in. I left the 12 Volt relay in place because on occasion in the past, we've had to run the keying line through a second relay as a passthrough (literally using the 'normally closed' portion of the relay) to make the entire system happy enough to key the rig. That wasn't the case this time as it turned out, but it was also easier to just leave the relay in there because it's superglued dead bug style to the circuit board. The latching relay along the shorter wires to the Rockmite/Tuna Topper II pair are delivering plenty of current. The rig was

Over the weekend, KOTBTY and I got to spend more time moving the CW key relay inside Project TouCans and adding a power on/off latching relay. As you can hear and see in the video below, the latching relay is up and running! Thanks for Simon Willison for the Claude artifact that enabled me to easily package up the video below. Ha, that's interesting! It's not so much a video packaging as a video thumbnail tool , which is of course what it said it was. Well, here's the video all bundled up into an iframe ready for your viewing—and listening—pleasure. I'll have to work with the gang on a version of the tool that outputs iframes soon. What you can see in the video: the Darlington array has two control leads coming into it from the PICO-Ws GPIO 17 and GPIO 18 pins, (the orange and red wires respectively.) Now that we're using a latching relay, we need one control wire to latch the power on and a second wire to latch the power off. Positive rely coil power is attached

 One remotely controllable switch that Project TouCans has been missing is an on/off switch. Once the rig's up in the air, it's powered until we bring it bakc down or the battery goes dead. We're working on changing that. A few weeks ago after reading about Darlington arrays on a ham radio forum message I can no longer locate, we put a plan in place. K06BTY got our twow main comcponents soldered ont a board and we stepped away from the project for a few weeks. We're back and just about ready to go. Here's what we have now K06BTY installed our keyer relay dead-bug style using superglue below the single-pole double-throw power relay . We're using the Darlington relay pictured at the top of the column to protect the Pico-W from directly delivering current to the relay coils, an activity that can destroy at least the GPIO portion of the Pico-W, (ask me how I know.) More updates soon. For step by step progress updates see TouCan's github page for this project .

 Project TouCans is rock locked, meaning that it operates on a single frquency: 14057.4 kHz at teh moment. This leads to station operation that looks a bit different from most. Notice that while we do use the RBN , it's mostly as a wellness check for TouCans. For us to call a station, they have to be on frqueqncy, so we also use the tool shown in the terminal window to the left, rbn_telnet.py . We can start it with a signal range such as  python3 rbn_telnet.py -b 14057 -e 14059 The tool then connects to the RBN's telnet feed and filters for only calls between the -b and -e arguments in kHz.