Copasetic Flow

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...

 The Soldersmoke blog referenced a post about a really cool missile tracking helical antenna.  Soldersmoke reference to EI7GL's writeup of the antenna. The specificity of the plaque down to the Marker Number reminded that the gang, my partner, and I had visited the White Sands Missile Range outdoor missile museum back in 2017 . Glancing through my pictures to see if we'd taken a look at the antenna, I came across this doozy which had this plaque on display in front of it I'm just saying here: when you have to start out with the sentence, "Not a flying saucer" and then follow up later with "action was initiated to start the vehicle spinning for stability" and then offhandedly mention that the vehicle traveled at 1.2 times the speed of sound before firing an explosive charge at apogee... ahem... Not a flying saucer indeed, but you know, totally a flying saucer :) Here's the entire plaque text: " Balloon Launched Decelerator Test Vehicle Not a f...

 The TouCans keyer works much better than it ever has in the past, (apologies if you were on the receiving end of a key down lockup), and it's all due to connections I made while unschooling with the 14, 12, and 10 year old gang of kids here. This story stars when they were 9, 7, and 5 years-old, so strap in :) I've probably written about this before, but here's the rough chain of connections The, then, five year old, known as Tawnse here, and I attend a design exhibit at SFMOMA where She and I find a Foldscope , a simple origami-inspired microscope that's pretty fun, and pretty cheap Tawnse develops an interest in microscopy The gang and I join the San Francisco Microscopy Society The Society is working on archiving their old documents. Daize, (aka K06BTY), and I are working on a book about Mike Gladych where we've accumulated a lot of documents. We attend their archivist committee meeting. I read the list of committee members, and there's a name I recognize, S...

 I've read a little bit about 'local data' lately, and I've become fairly excited about the idea. Two of the features of the concept that I like are that your data should be your own, not stuck behind a corporations gated off wall on the internet and that you should have a copy of that data that lives on physical media within arms reach. I won't venture into the second one today except to say that with Google, in particular, somewhat constantly doing away with applications it becomes bored with and Amazon deciding it has and then has not rights to serve movies I 'purchased', having my data in a usable format and in arms reach physically makes more sense than I'd like for it to. Today, I'm going to talk about the first thing, being in control of your own data to use as you see fit. As someone who develops open source apps, there are benefits to everyone beside me holding on to their own data. The biggest one for me being that I don't have to figu...

 OK, so this is just kinda cool! Suppose you're operating near mountains and are curious if your QSOs are hopping over the mountains, or if they're knife edge diffracting after smacking right into the mountain. You'll need to know how high the F2 layer was between your station and the receiving station and you'll need to be able to visulaize the path with respect to the mountain. It's taken a while, but we have that now!  Thanks to the GloTEC data curtesy of the NOAA, we know the F2 heights all over the world at the time of each QSO. We can also map our QSOs on a Cesium map with toplogy. This allows us to start with maps like this: where I wondered on the day of the QSO if TouCans' signal would clear the high way embankment, and found out that yes, yes it did. Check out the interactive map below. It has all the QSOs loaded with their actual F2 skip heights.

 I didn't manage to activate this El Paso, TX adjacent park this time, but the innovative antenna KO6BTY and I prototyped back in December did a pretty good job in kinda lousy band conditions! Then, I had to flee the dust storm and head for Albuquerque to catch a plane the next morning. Project TouCans watches the dust storm roll in with its big brother Park: US-3012 Franklin Mountains State Park near El Paso, TX. As is usual for my trips to New Mexico, my radio ops over the weekend were all car transit. Radio Details: Rig: TouCans and a Stick on the only band it uses right now: 20 meters The radio worked well considering the antenna was taped to a rest area trash can. Propagation in general was bad, but I learned a few ways to make things better with respect to the trash can. The rig does better when the insulated antenna wire is not touching the trash can lid. Go figure. It makes sense, but still. Go figure. Here's a closer view  of how the antenna was mounted, although you...