Can a RockMite send RTTY without a modification? Maybe. There are are two reasons it might not be able to. First, the keyer might not quite work the way I'd like for it to. What I need the keyer to do is to allow me to hold the key down in straight key mode while changing the FSK frequency of the rig by tapping the programming button. The second reason is that the frequency shift on RockMite's is between 500 and 700 Hz. Meanwhile, most rigs on the ham bands use a 45.5 baud rate with a 170 Hz separation. However, the German weather teletypes transmit at 50 baud with a separation fo 500 Hz, so there's a precedent for recievers that could decode RockMite RTTY if a RockMite could RTTY. The nice thing—the thing that got me thinking about teletype at all—is that RockMites have a built in, controllable FSK. Consequently, I asked ChatGPT to write microPython code to pull the FSK line on the RockMite. What I hadn't thought through was that KO6BTY, or I still needed to add a re...
When making our QSO skip maps one of the issues we encounter is that the lines from our station to the F2 layer don't always start right at the ground. This seems to be an artifact of CZML and the fact that the Earth is not a sphere, but rather an ellipsoid, and even then, there are all those hills and mountains. The initial QSOs can wind mapped as up coming from underground: or, they can wind up starting from above the surface of the Earth In any event, it's been necessary with each map to adjust the elevation height of our station. I've yet to find a parameter to set in a czml that makes the starting point always be on the ground. "clampToGround" works for polylines that are always on the ground, but not polylines whose next point has an altitude greater than zero as the ground station to F2 layer polylines do. I added a feature into the JavaScript mapping application this week that allows me to adjust the height of all of the QSO's starting points at...