Copasetic Flow

 I'm on a two day streak of activating US-0757 San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park.  This time, I was able to take a cable car to within 30 yards of the park. I hopped the Hyde Street cable car at Powell Street BART. It was a fun, easy ride that I take as often as I can get it. After realizing yesterday that TouCans seemed to do better with its ground wire on the pier than it did with the thing in the water, I ran a few more experiments and watched the signal into Utah decrease as a the ground wire touched the water. Also, the interference from AM broadcast stations also became louder exactly when the wire dipped into the water. I ran most of the activation with the rig's ground wire laying on the pier next to me again. I made more QSOs today, but all in all the signal levels were more contrite Here are the QSOs Callsign tx RST rx RST Time (GMT) Frequency n7jtt 579 419 2024/11/05 16:21:00 14057.4 n0aie 449 529 2024/11/05 16:21:00 14057.4 k6pb 559 559 20

 In radio engineering as in all thing, it pays to be kind. This morning while activating US-0757 with TouCans Vertical, I noticed a swimmer I'd seen before headed towards the pier I was prerched on.  Bear with me a little nautical explanation is in order to understand the rest of the this tale, so here goes.  There are currents in the San Francisco Bay. Currents thtat sweep out towards the ocean are called ebb currents. Currents that see in from the ocean are called flood currents. Even at Hyde St. PIer in its somewhat sheltered indentation in the shore of the Bay, swimmers experience these currents. They're a thing and sometimes they're just about as fast as a swimmer cares to swim. Getting back to this morning, the swimmer I saw coming occaionally takes advantage of currents to do 'infinite lap pool' swimming under the pier. She backstrokes while going nowhere because she adjusts her speed to the speed of the current. She also sings quite pleasantly while doing al

 Heartened by the vertical antenna results at  San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park US-0757, I headed out to a pier in San Francisco near the Pony Express Trail, US-4578. Project TouCans did not disappoint, and I made one eyeball QSO in addition to the 7, (yeah, I didn't quite make the activation before the keyer's batteries ran out), QSOs I meade on the pier. Here's a map of the QSOs and Reverse Beacon spots. Blue markers denote QSOs while yellow markers denote RBN spots. The color scale indicates signal strength using resistor value color coding. I find it really interesting that the rig made it up to Alaska again! The other interesting point about this activation attempt is the location. I took the MUNI F to the Washington Street stop and then walked just a bit north to Pier 7 Here's what the rig and antenna setup looked like. The antenna is one half of TouCans' ordinary dipole taped to what's supposed to be a carbon fiber rod, (it doesn't seem

 I wanted to take a look at the ionosphere over North America late last week, and that meant I needed to explore ionospheric readings via radio occultation from the satellite constelations launched by Spire and PlanetIQ. Spoiler: I haven't been able to get ionospheric data from either constellation yet, but that's a data publishing issue, not a data file structure issue. Exploring the availabel data was a bit clunky at first to say the least. Then, it occurred to me that I could probably ask an AI to write Python code to pull out the strucutre of each netCDF file somewhat automatically. Sure enough, the Google Gemini search enginee version gave me an immediate answer I modified the code just a bit per my personal taste. The complete code can be seen here . From there, with only the filename, I could get output like Where to get the data I was having the best luck with PlanetIQ data as published by UCAR at  https://data.cosmic.ucar.edu/gnss-ro/planetiq/noaa/nrt/level2/2024/ Howe

 Sometimes you get an idea about two variables that might depend on each other, so you look to see if there's a correlation. That's science. What happens not as much is that if the variables don't correlate, or at least they don't seem to,  you should publish anyway. The lack of a relationship can in fact be new information. So, along those lines, here goes.  We activated US-0757 twice last week. In both cases, we deployed the TouCans vertical antenna on a pier with the ground wire submersed in the Bay waters below. In both cases, one of the Utah RBN stations that spotted us suddenly had very high signal levels with respect to our station on 20 meters. On the second day's activation I happened to notice that the water seemed closer to the pier when the signal dBs went up than it had been at the start of the activation. As it turned out, I was correct about the water level so I graphed tide levels vs. TouCan's signal into Utah. It turned out there wasn't an o

 Soon, I'll get the bandwidth to document Project TouCans entire power supply system. For now, suffice it to say that, like the rest of TouCans, it is non-standard. One of the non-standard issues we run into is that while there's a USB-C cable accessible outside TouCans for charging the internal batter pack, the battery pack's charging indicator is hidden inside of TouCans in its optional batter pack housed in an empty can of Progresso tomato soup. Consequently, we've occasionally not charged the batteries because the USB-C connection was unhappy. Enter the MakerHawk multimeter. The meter acts as a USB-C female to female adapter, which frankly we needed. It also ships with a USB-C female-to-female barrel, I'm not sure why yet. We haven't used it. When we plug the radio in to charge, we plug the charger into one side of the meter and the internal battery pack's charging cable to the other. When the cables are plugged in correctly, (sometimes we have to flip t