Had I set the power amplifying transistor's bias high enough, or did the radio always work this way with the amp? It's good to have data! I've been collecting reverse beacon spots and QSO data since around the start of this year . The reverse beacon data is collected automatically, inspired by a productivity and documentation talk by Simon Willison. Last night, rain got into the Project Toucans radio. It's not waterproof enough yet, I guess. Turns out there are whole issues in using Tuna and fruit cans as radio cases that I'd never thought through. The lid is corrugated making it difficult to seal holes against water. Anyway... Earlier this evening, I had the radio/amplifier combination back up and running, but were they running well enough? Fortunately I had data for that. I queried the data using datasette . I asked about reverse beacon spots since the amplifier was added into the station mix a few days back: select rowid, id, tx_lng, tx_lat, rx_lng, rx_lat,
OK, so this isn't so much one I learned, as one I remembered, and then empirically proved. Did you know that human thumbs are capacitative—as in they act like capacitors? Yup! They are! The project TouCans Rockmite/ TunaTopper stack suffers from the same issue the Flying Rockmite often did. Sometimes, the RFI from the antenna gets to be too much, and the memory keyer decides to stop keying out its memory. I noticed that when using the keyer with Project TouCans, if I put my thumb across the leads to the 'dah' keyer switch, the issue went away and the memory keyer ditted and dahed along to completion. I had brought a small capacitor out to the radio site to try placing across the headphone leads to solve an AM pickup problem inherent with having 25 foot long headphone wires. The same issue on a far lesser scale had been solved by Mark— N6MTS —as part of his work on the Open Headset Interconnect Standard, OHIS . The cap hadn't down the job for the Flying Rockmite or Pr