Copasetic Flow

 Early Sunday morning, the code generated by ChatGPT became noticeably clunky. Why!? I figured it out when this message arrived Ah yes! The LLM that berates me a bit for the code it wrote :) At some point after the release of GPT5, OpenAI started defaulting my chats back to 4o. For me GPT5 is better. I switched back over 5 and a bit later, the code coming out of the LLM was just working, and when it didn't, I got messages like this By the way, at that point GPT5 was fixing code created by 4o when I had specifically asked for: " Also save the vh and vw settings of the subpanel in subpanelsize and resize it to its original extent if the subpanelsize arg is present in a url  " Anyway! GPT5 rocks for me. If you're using the browser UI instead of the API, check to see what model you're using before you go too far down the wrong path.

 With Cesium Ion Sandcastle users can try out various parts of the Cesium JS library to create maps. Once their code is working, they can also share those maps with the code. I initially wondered about the infrastructure that required to store and then serve every single map examples code. Then, I realized that the code isn't stored in a server, it's in the share URL! I originally started to put this together when I noticed how long a typical Cesium Sandcastle is. They tend to look like this: except longer. The seemingly random characters are a base64 encoded transcript of the JavaScript code along with the html and styling for the Sandcastle project. The fact that everything was encoded in the URL made me wonder what else could be achieved with the URL. A lot, it turns out. NOTE : I discovered it's important to place your additional URL args before the #c anchor that contains the Sandcastle code. Otherwise, your args get interpreted as being part of the JavaScript that...

 I'm using the new map in map feature I coded up this week to for a map that demonstrates that as the sun sets in Sweden, it's rising near Las Cruces, NM. A few minutes later, my QSO to Sweden from the Organ Mountains went through. The code is in a github repo . Here's the map: And here's a video demonstrating how to interact with the map above: For those who are curious, here's how Project TouCans was situated that day. Note that the dipole is only about five feet off the ground.

 I frequently find myself zooming in and out of QSO maps to see where the sun was with regard to my station's horizon  vs how far a given QSO propagated. I wanted a way to view maps without all the zooming. Now I have it! How I got It I've had Cesium maps on the blog for a while. Once I got the idea for a better way to view QSO maps, I deliberately executed on the habit I've been trying to build in myself:  I immediately asked GPT5 if it could augment my existing code. It turned out that it definitely could. In under half an hour, I had the new map view pictured above. You can steer around the maps at my POTA post .  The code for implementing map in map can be found in the csm-map-n-map repo.

 Project TouCans made it back on the HF airwaves last night! I had forgotten that urban POTAs are kind the epitome of luxury here in San Francisco. On my way to the bus stop for the MUNI 49, I noticed that it was happy hour, so I stepped in for a drink. Perched on a barstool at the joint's open front window, I contemplated the world outside and whether or not the radio would work. The power switch latching relay for the rig gave up on the last day of our Great Basin National Park camping trip. That'd been perfect timing, (if the thing was going to break at all), but also led to me not being on the air in the better part of two months. I wound up making the ten QSOs to activate the park in just over half an hour. My operating site was on the campus of City College San Francisco (CCSF.) The view across the city is kind of nice. I was there just into the night this time, and the city lights up after dark. I'm trying something new in the map below. I asked GTP5 to help me with...

 One of the first things I realized about my RockMite, (the tranciever at the heart of Project TouCans, our low power, Morse code only, ham radio), is that the sidetone output is, shall we say, LOUD! This works for me since my hearing isn't great and I'm frequently operating from urban environments where there's lots of ambient QRM in the air around me: horns, crowds, sirens, and so on. I'm often reminded of that the sidetone is loud by other posts I find00 about working on old RockMites. The author usually starts by mentioning that theyauthor turned down the sidetone volume by changing the circuit. The post that comes to the top of my mind is  Taming the Wild Rockmite  by G. Forrest Cook. It has a great section on boosting the output power Rockmite's that I've put to good use. In any event, while workking on training an AI to decode Morse code, I started looking at spectograms of the Project TouCans audio output. Here's what I saw  Those vertical bands tha...