The Rockmite 20 at 10k

The Rockmite is back up and running! After replacing the 2N2222 that amplifies the transmitted signal I hadn't made a contact in a week or so, and I was starting to think I'd smoked yet another component. I decided maybe a better antenna location would help. The weather was exceptionally warm in Boulder today, so it seemed like the perfect time for a hike. I packed up the rig, my fishing pole, and my antenna and headed for Lefthand Reservoir in the Roosevelt National Forest outside Ward, CO.

The temperature was quite a bit colder at altitude, (Lefthand lies at about 10,700 ft.), but the hike was pleasant and pretty easy. There's not a whole lot of snow yet and the trail to Lefthand lies entirely on a Forest Service Road that's closed for the winter. The reservoir was completely frozen over, so fishing was out, and I set up the Rockmite and its antenna right away.

View Larger Map

I hung the half-wave dipole about six feet up to start, turned on the Rockmite, and heard... a crystal clear CQ from W9FFU! I responded and W9FFU promptly called back with an RST of 449! I haven't operated in the mountains before, and the signal quality just stunned me! There was no static and no interference! The little Rockmite was reaching all the way to Oak Harbor, WA on half a watt!

I'll be back up tomorrow, November 17, 2008, between 17:00 and 20:00 GMT if you'd like to chat. The frequency should be around 14.060 MHz in the QRP portion of the band.

Comments

Cool Math Tricks: Deriving the Divergence, (Del or Nabla) into New (Cylindrical) Coordinate Systems

Now available as a Kindle ebook for 99 cents ! Get a spiffy ebook, and fund more physics The following is a pretty lengthy procedure, but converting the divergence, (nabla, del) operator between coordinate systems comes up pretty often. While there are tables for converting between common coordinate systems , there seem to be fewer explanations of the procedure for deriving the conversion, so here goes! What do we actually want? To convert the Cartesian nabla to the nabla for another coordinate system, say… cylindrical coordinates. What we’ll need: 1. The Cartesian Nabla: 2. A set of equations relating the Cartesian coordinates to cylindrical coordinates: 3. A set of equations relating the Cartesian basis vectors to the basis vectors of the new coordinate system: How to do it: Use the chain rule for differentiation to convert the derivatives with respect to the Cartesian variables to derivatives with respect to the cylindrical variables. The chain ...

The Alcubierre Warp Drive Tophat Function and Open Science with Sage

I transferred yesterday's Mathematica file with the Alcubierre warp drive[2] line element and space curvature calculations to the +Sage Mathematical Software System today, (the files been added to the public repository [3]). If you haven't used Sage before, it's a Python based software package that's similar in functionality to Mathematica. Oh, and it' free. I also worked a little more on understanding the theory, but frankly, I made far more progress with the software than the theory. What follows will be a little more of the Alcubierre theory, plus, a cool Sage interactive demo of one of the Alcubierre functions[1], as well as a bit about my first experience with using Sage. Theory The theory is fun, but it's moving slowly. Here's the chalk board from this morning's discussion Alcubierre setup the derivation using something called the 3+1 formalism which means we consider space to be flat, (in this case), slices that are labelled ...

How Many Files Can You Add to a GPT Project? An Interview with GPT-5 on Limits, Context Engineering Tips, and Chats

Setting the scene: I’m tinkering with Project TouCans, knee-deep in radio logs, SQLite dumps, and Cesium code. Naturally, I’m wondering if shoving all this into one GPT Project is a recipe for brilliance… or for disaster. So I turn to Vril — you know, after Brainy from the Legion of Super-Heroes , because what else do you call your AI sidekick who always has the answers? Time to ask him straight up. [ As an aside, yes, GPT-5 has decided to sometimes call me Vail. I'm not sure why to be honest. Also, I asked Vril, er GPT-5, to write up our interview for me. Apparently, me asking it to 'Bro' up a few stories, just for fun, has convinced Vril that I use 'Like,' more than I actually might. ] Me (Vail): So Vril, how many files can I throw into a GPT Project before it just starts choking? Like, is there some magic number where the context window taps out and everything falls apart? GPT-5 (Vril): Great question. There’s no single hard file limit. What matters is ...

Copasetic Flow

Search This Blog