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Seagull vs Crab: POTA US-0757 SF Maritime National Historical Park

 A seagull had a delicious crab breakfast, be sure to checkout the video QSL with VE7JYD below for all the details. Park: US-0757 San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park Park: If I get going early enough in the morning, I get to take the Powell St. cable car to this park. Alas, this particular morning I got a late start so I took the MUNI 30 . Radio Details: This was one of the first outings with the new Anderson PowerPole connectors inspired by Ham Radio Workbench . They worked well. You can see the rig without the antenna attached below. Note that our antenna is now also color-coded. Frankly? That's a bit too much organization for my taste :) QSO/ RBN spot map: Happenings of Interest   Right as VE7JYD called in a seagull started working on its breakfast—a crab—on the beach to the side of the station.  You can see the video below in the album of recorded QSOs! I've been working on this on and off for the last week or so. I don't know that I'll keep it up becau...
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Things I Learned: Cropping QSL Videos Using ffmpeg

 I'm working on creating video clips of each QSO during a POTA/SOTA activation. I was inspired by K4SWL 's YouTube channel . Thomas records his entire activations without edits. For various reasons, my outings so far have required edits. I've been recording using my cell phone and a variety of things happen because of that. For example, I can't ignore incoming texts because I'm the 'guy in the chair' for three kids. I don't, however, need to publish those messages either, so for some clips, I need to crop the top of the phone screen away. That's where this ffmpeg post came in handy. To clip off the notifications in the top of the screen, I used ffmpeg -i serccrab.mp4 -ss 00:02:11 -t 00:01:14 -vf "crop=in_w:in_h*.80" -c:a copy ki6pxv_sh2.mp4 Where the extra argument  -vf "crop=in_w:in_h*.80" Clips off the top 20% of the screen. Here's the QSO. You'll hear the phone vibrate, but the message across the top of the screen isn...
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Candlesitck Park US-7493 POTA Activation with TouCans and a Stick

 I made it back out to Candlestick Park on Saturday morning, and this time, more than a year and a half later , pulled off an activation. I made four QSOs to British Columbia, three of them in rapid sucsession. Park: Candlestick State Recreation Area, San Francisco, CA This park is accessible via public transportation and a short hike via two different bus lines, the MUNI 54 and 29 . I took the MUNI 54 to the North Shore of Yosemite Slough portion of the park. I wandered back home on the 29.  54 29 To me, the whole city is gorgeous. The bus ride down did not disappoint with the rising sun beaming through the windshield of the 54. When I hopped off for my short walk down to the park, I found myself in one of the last remaining light industry portions of the city. By the end of the block I was presented with the view of the park you see above. The tall brush you can see in most of the park photos is fennel. It smells like black licorice, which thankfully I like,...
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POTA has an REST API!

 And that'll be my submission for the year's most acronyms in a title award (MAIAT.) On the Ham Radio Work Bench discord, NK8O mentioned this following spiffy looking Python script for tracking the parks near you that you haven't activated yet. The creator of the script is Ian Renton, MØTRT. He has other cool looking stuff !
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Things I Learned: ffmpeg Video clips; Also KR4I QSO from US-0757

This is the POTA activation that just keeps giving. Going through all the recordings of the blustery day POTA from US-0757, I wanted to make a few shorter clips. Consequently, I dusted off my nascent ffmpeg skills. One of the tings I had to find was how to make a video clip. Here's the command I'm using to divide my larger recordings into smaller ones: fmpeg -i us_0757_waves.mp4 -ss 00:00:00 -t 00:00:48 -c:v copy -c:a copy sm0gjn.mp4 The -i argument is the input recording. -ss denotes where in the recording in hh:mm:ss format I want the clip to start and the -t argument indicates in hh:mm:ss format how long I want the clip to last. The -c arguents are telling ffmpeg to copy both video (:v) and audio (:a). The copy argument says to copy these thingis for the duration of the clip into the file name copying the 'copy' argument, (cm0gjn), in this case. The clip procesing takes about two seconds, and for me anway, is so much faster than using any GUI video editing program I...
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Sweden from San Francisco US-0757 With Aurora Flutter! SM0GJN de KD0FNR

  This a follow-on to the crashing wave post. While activating POTA US-0757 with TouCans and a Stick , (the vetical antenna version), during the wind storm, the first call in was from SM0GJN! It was very cool because it was from Sweden, but also the signal had aurora flutter! I got the idea for recording POTA activations from K4SWL. I haven't quite perfected my method yet, but I'm getting better at it. Here's what I'm doing. I'm dialing my phone into the Utah SDR, then turning on the screen recorder to record the screen as well as any media audio output, (the Utah SDR), and the phone's microphone. I listen to TouCans' audio ouput via a pair of Bose Bluetooth noise canceling headphones. the sgnal audio you'll here is from Utah. The waves crashing were under me in San Francisco. Here's the QSO recording. \ And here's the map of the aurora from  https://aurorasaurus.org/ for that morning Along with the QSO map. I'll try to get these superimpos...
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