Copasetic Flow

 The gang and I are very lucky to live in a San Francisco neighborhood where we have markets, a family owned pharmacy, and family-owned restaurants, coffee shops, and delis all about a ten block walk from the house. Here’s the haul from our Farmers Market that we walk to along with our local butcher shop and dim sum bakery a few weeks ago. Consequently when I saw a mention of local-first software ,[ via ] I was intrigued. (As a side note, the presenter, Maggie Appleton, at one point in the not to distant past , worked with Elicit, a research paper summarizing AI startup with an office in Oakland, so kind of surprisingly local, but I digress.)  It turns out that local-first development advocates for keeping the data for an app offline, i.e. keeping the data with the person who created or is using that data by default. But, what happens to collaboration? Well, the local, offline data is synched to the cloud when a connection is available allowing for collaboration while also creating

 I finally landed at a quiet tape vs. noise  configuration for TouCans on Saturday afternoon. Here’s how. In the picture above, the wires circled in green include the + and - power wire, (white and red respectively), and the keyer wire, (also red.) When I taped the bundle of wires including the single turn coil shown in the white wire to the side of the can, the noise from the power supply went away. I was left with only noise from the radio, (the kind I want), and a gentle hum from the power supply because it had switched into buck converter mode to step its voltage up to the required 15V! The helicoptering from the Pico-W was also almost gone. In other parts of the project, the Pico-W has started burning through pairs of AA batteries rather quickly.

 Slowly but surely, KO6BTY, Tawnse and I are making our way back to the West Coast. Last night, we stopped in Quincy, MA for the flight we thought we were going to take this morning... It looks like we are gonna call the East Coast our headquarters for a few more days, This has however, opened up POTA opportunities. Last night, I had the chance to activate Saint Pope John Paul II Park, US-8422 , in Boston just across the Neponset River from where were staying in Quincy. The park is relatively new. It was opened to the public in 2001 and commemorates the Pope’s visit to Boston in 1979. It was constructed on the site of a landfill and a drive-in movie theatre. Setting up near the river turned out to be a wash. The park is arranged so there is fairly thick vegetation between park denizens and the river. I did, however get to set up about 10 yards back from the river in a pleasant little copse of trees.  First though, I had to get the spools of twine up into the trees. For that, I was hap

  The weather finally started to cool down a bit the day before LosterCon started. We had plenty of sun, but it wasn’t baking hot.  The campground, where LobsterCon was held, Thomas Point Beach and Campground, was clean and well appointed, maybe too clean. There were no rocks laying about that would fit in the end of the tarred twine spools, so we wound up launching the antenna using pine cone stoppers. We had plenty of nice, flat ground for our two tents, and managed to get Project TouCans about 20 ft up between a pair of pine trees. TouCans made two QSOs during LobstserCon, but the really nice part was all the in-person QSOs getting to hang out with everyone.  KO6BTY and Tawnse diagrammed TouCans on the nearby beach the first evening. Later that night, the rig reached KF9VV in Wisconsin.  The night after that, I made a short DX QSO with M7LLS. Then, we had lobster! So much lobster! During the flea market, we got to check out new and old kits from W1REX of QRPMe . TouCans is defi

TouCans is back up and running! The culprit did in fact lie in the path between the power supply and ground in the PA chain. I didn’t see it coming though. Here’s the problem: There was a cold solder joint on one side of the inductor. When KO6BTY and I measured the resistance across the inductor, it was infinite. When we remarked about this, 11 year-old Tawnse immediately said, that’s not what inductors are supposed to do. And yeah, she’ right. They’ supposed to conduct at DC. Anyway, a few minutes later, we’d gone from this Notice the magnet wire tint to the two wires whose solder joints are completely in the picture? To this      Which, in turn, led to this later that evening. The moral of the story for me? Always check the two terminal component first because they’re the easiest to fix.     

 We headed from Boston down to Philadelphia. Yeah, I know, that's no way to get to Maine, but when my partner and I were doing grad studies at Brookhaven on Long Island, Phillie was one of our favorite hangouts, so here we are! With all the mapping Cesium has enabled of late, we were pretty tickled to get to visit their headquarters here in town. We got to demo our mapping tool that works with Datasette, and then got to ask questions about Cesium as well. Turns out the small object we frequently notice on the horizon is the Moon! From there, we headed to Isgro near Christian and 10th. Armed with delicious pastries, we wandered up and down 9th St. checking all the other delicious things! A few hours later, Paesano's became our favorite place in town for pasta. We've had lunch there twice now, and just, oh my gosh, the food is so good! Another day, a little further down 9th St., we found $5 cooked crabs and demolished them! I didn't understand why they asked if we wanted