Copasetic Flow

 Here's another example of how unschooling works. You're sitting around minding your own business, when a kid walks by and asks what USB is. They don't mean Universal Serial Bus, they mean Upper Sideband. They noticed it on the software defined radio screen . So, you wind up explaining about mixers. Not a whole lot, just enough. You explain that when you modulate you create the carrier signal (14 or so megahertz in our case) as well as a modulated signal above the carrier and a modulated signal below the carrier.  These two signals carry the voice, data, or whatever you modulated with. You then explain that the AM 9 band shortwave doesn't pick up Morse code super well because it wants to hear both sidebands and Morse code (CW) tends to act like a single sideband. They wander off. You'll ge the opportunity to cover more details later. A few hours later, you find out they can practice Morse code on the radio while you operate the station as long as you're present....

 After losing the negative power lead while transporting the radio that's supposed to be ultra-easy to transport, (I'm trying to develop a type of ham radio akin to free-running, but anyway), it became apparent the RJ45 connector needed to move inside the radio case sooner rather than later. Here's the broken power lead: Yes, produce is an important part of amateur radio around here. The initial idea was to use a dremel to cut notch the box for the RJ45 connector, but there wasn't a shaft for the cutting blade. The next idea was to use a hacksaw, but well, there wasn't a blade for the hacksaw. But! The maker space I work in, Noisebridge , did have a pair of tin shears! Oh My Goodness! It was so easy! It was like cutting paper.  There were a few issues entirely of my own creation. I forgot I had the box of spiffy matching nylon spacers in my backpack, so the first prototype wound up with mismatched metal spacers: (Notice how the wall of the box is simply folded down...

 I've been using the Northern Utah SDR site to augment the Rockmite's receiver. It turns out, per the organizations' CW listening tutuorial, so are a lot of other users. The tutorial, in addition to quelling my anxiety about my use mode offers insights into how the SDR is put to best use for CW: Sushi Rice!!! I learned something new about one of my favorite things: sushi rice! Turns out it's sweet because it's cooked with Mirin! We use Mirin in a salmon glaze, but I had no idea it was in sushi rice as well. Yum! I found out thanks to a Christmas present I received, Let's Make Dumplings! by Sarah Becan and Hugh Amano.  I used to read Sarah's web comics. The book has the same tone and flavor (see what I did there?)

 While my Masters dissertation hasn't been made public domain yet, I found the pages pertaining to the logarithmic amplifier in one of my way back machines—a briefcase I won in science fair that I used to cart things around in graduate school. I also found cassette tapes of talks from the 2000 Java One conference hosted in San Francisco: one on aspect oriented and another on testing object oriented systems . If you ever wondered how people reviewed conference talks before the age of Zoom and YouTube, in this case, it was cassette tapes. Prepping to construct a standing wave ratio, (SWR), meter for the Rockmite has brought me to the end of years of trepidation I developed reading amateur radio books about winding toroids . After spending a few decades with fears of ‘ruining a toroid’ permeating me like the magnetic field through a FT50-43 ferrite core, I’ve finally come up with a solution: order more magnet wire than I need. Gosh. That was easy.  The instructions I found for ...

 The remote KD0FNR rockmite ham radio station finally came together easily at Noisebridge, our local San Francisco maker space. After unceremoniously  dumping the radio from the second floor to the ground a few times—thank goodness for solid state construction and good-enough solder joints—everything came together today. The radio was mounted on the end of a 1 x 2 inch piece of wood using a bar clamp, and then suspended about five feet out the second floor window. The rig still made it out to Utah quite handily! There were no CQ responses, but it's really nice to have station setup and tear-down to under 10 minutes on either side. Here's a video of the setup: And the twitch stream of the rig into Utah on SDR.

 The Rockmite ham radio could be heard in Mauii on a software defined radio (SDR) yesterday afternoon on 20 meters! I decided to try the station on a lark more to verify what I thought "couldn't" happen than anything else, and there the little Rockmite was CWing away in the static.   Here's a recording of the signal: Interesting things to note about this : First, a geodesic drawn through and at a perpendicular to the antenna, roughly, points in the direction Utah (lots of contacts with Utah), and Maui. Second, the antenna is located on the East Side of a ridge line. The feedpoint is maybe 3 feet above the ground as seen from Maui. As seen from the East, the antenna is 120 metes about sea level, (and the Bay), per Google Earth.  From the ground that you can actually stand on below the antenna the feeed point is about 20 feet up.   For those who haven't been following along, the antenna is an inverted vee halfwave dipole suspended outside the kitchen window su...

The little radio—its keyer at least—was featured live on twitch from Chez KD0FNR for the first time today! I didn’t raise any other stations, but I did work out how to make a cell phone tripod and microphone cradle out of a bunch of bananas, continuing the produce theme that comes with with operating from the kitchn work table. Here's the stream! I look forward to seeing if we can capture other statoins one day.

 Since the 20 m Rockmite has video game switches on the keyer, it only makes since that it should have its own twitch stream! I'm still learning twitch. The 10 year old here, Mota, has more experience, so he's helping me, and we're getting there. Starting yesterday, we got aspects of the Rockmite and it's little video game keyer up on twitch !  So far, we've mostly been doing propagation tracking using an SDR defined radio in Utah. Hopefully, we'll have station videos and the like soon. (It would help if I could figure out how to turn on the microphone. I know, the irony of a CW operator not being able to get the mic to work. Go figure.) Also! A question: I think we're the first CW (Morse code) amateur radio station on twitch. Are we? Have you seen any others?

 We've confirmed the Rockmite can make it to Utah! First, through the traditional QSL card method over the last few weeks: But! More predictably by listening to the KD0FNR Rockmite on a radio actually in Utah. You can do that these days! Who knew? The guys on the Ham Radio Workbench Podcast are the ones that pointed it out to me. This morning, we cruised over to the Utah software defined radio , tuned for the Rockmite frequencies and listened. Here's what the 11 year old and I heard: So! The station's getting out, and we can meausre it. This is huge. Now, it would just be nice to have people on the other end. Anway :)

 Sharing everything I do with the 11, 10, and 7 year-old gang works best for me in unschooling. Of course, YMMV.  Allow me to elucidate. This morning, I decided that Forrest Cook was exactly right . The diode that was protecting the Rockmite from dying if I ever hooked up the batteries backward was also succking up 0.8 Volts that could be used to transmit a bit further. I decided to take the thing out. But first, I called the gang in to talk about it. They've worked with LEDs before; they know that if you hook them up backwards they don't conduct, and therefore don't light up.I explained that this was exactly the same, except the here diode doesn't light up ever. It does however flat out refuse to conduct if the battery is hooked up backwards, (the same thing as the LED being instralled backwards.) I then explained that not conducting when the batterey was backwards kept other bits of the circuit from dying when hooked up to a backwards battery. Finally, I talked about ...

 I hadn't realized the NAQCC has a newsletter! Also? Continuing this month's theme of glue and radio, I found out glue sticks are handy for ham radio as well. If you still haven't checked out the North American QRP CW Club, and you're into low power radio and Morse code, here's a little more enticement. They have a monthly, free newsletter ! I found the above glue stick trick there. I'm still leaning towards making an Arduino VFO rather than a purely analog VFO, but wow, choices! Update: Here's a really nice video demonstrating the construction and use of the glue stick PTO CW Practice Nets The club is also looking to add new CW practice nets : Github projects can have web pages!? https://docs.github.com/en/pages/quickstart

 The gang and I worked on getting the Rockmite's half-wave dipole a little higher up and a little further away from the house, and in addition to the fun of trying to decide if leaving a fishing rod permanently twined to the house was simply kitschy, or a bit too much it seems the antenna is just working better !  The Rockmite made it's furthest away spot at this location! Last night while (trying to?) participating in the NAQCC sprint the station was heard in Kansas, the far side of of Kansas, Tonganoxie to be exact! The project started from this sketch: More details: there's a piece of cable (maybe for an old satellite dish?) on the rear wall of the house. The cable happens to have broken away from one of its plastic support brackets at one point, and that's how all that started. Where other people might see 'broken bracket', the QRPer sees 'antenna mount!' The idea was to plalce a twine loop around the brooken bracket with a piece of much longer twin...

 Today, I learned about whole wave dipole antennas and their impedance problem; details I suspected about the novel The Natural; the nicest radio club I've come across so far, the North American QRP CW Club Full-wave dipoles First, lets talk about full-wave dipole antennas. Spoiler, do not  run out and build one without reading to the end, I almost did. It turns out that while the things offer some gain, they have this impedance issue which is... i nfinite impedance at the feedpoint !!! In other words, oh my goodness will your power reflect back into your transmitter without a matching network. Why was I reading about the cursed things? Well, that takes us to this ARRL article on QRP  (From April 1984 QST, p 52). The article suggested that what I really wanted was a full wave dipole: You know? If I had the resources to build an antenna tower, I'd probably also have resources and patience to build the impedance matching network so really it's a matter of resources that inf...

 We run crystal radios here. The Rockmite is a rock-locked radio meaning it operates on a whopping two frequencies in the amateur 20 m (ours anyway, there are also 40 m, 80m, and probably other bands available). The reason for this paucity of frequencies in the radio is that it has a crystal controlled oscillator. The crystal oscillates at a single, precise frequency based on it's dimensions and what it's made of. In our case, the crystal operates at 14057.6 kHz. Anway! This is all important because of Quartzfest, the crystal radio ham radio festival in, bet you didn't guess it, Quartzsite, AZ. I found out about it through Jeri Ellsworth , local, (Fremont), engineer, and ham radio operator extraordinaire. And up until an hour ago, I was pretty certain the kids and I could transit our way to the festival. Here's what I learned though. The Greyhound route promised by Google Maps is a lie: I looked on Greyhound's website: nothing. I called the Greyhound ticket operator...

First, a San Francisco note: On the rare occasions it does freeze here, all the rooves change color. (Normally, they're black.) The scorpion tail switch for Rockmite programming was getting cumbersome, so I finally gathered up my courage to intstall a video game switch for the functionality . It worked! The initial mockup of the Rockmite programming switch didn't get in the way of keying, (those are two screwdrivers that came with the RJ45 breakout boards 'holding' the swithc in position, (they're simply placed through the holes.) So, I wired the thing, and voila: The ergonomics are good. Keying took about five minutes to get used to. Switching frequencies and keyer speed is so my easier, even with having to reach across to hold the switch in position to use it in this initial prototype!

Keep microscop slides... clean! New Q Codes; (Learning by using: aka experiential learning.)  I started a new github repository for notes on my goal of using the Foldscope to look at something every day. It worked. I looked. What I learned: I put a solder blob scraped off the bottom of the radio case into a slide with two adhesive transparent sitckers holding it in place. I learned thta I have to be super careful to keep other things out of the slide, especially with the adhesive covers. There were lots of interesting things to look at, but not many of them involved the edge of the solder blob. CW Operation (Morse Code): I learned two new Q-Codes today, one by using it QSK: "Can I interrupt?", and another by hearing it: QRZ: "Who is calling me?" There's a nice Q Code reference at: There's a nice page of ham radio CW abbrevisations at  https://cwops.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/CW-Abbreviations.pdf The site is run by KB6NU who've I've been acquain...

Digging into radio's past, reliability of video game switches as Morse code keys; reliability of Superglue???; Sound in 1948 with amateur radio I'm finding more and more entertaining ham radio resources. The net is spreading out thanks to my starting point a few weeks ago, Ham Radio Workbench.Podcast . Today, I wound up at the 73 Magazine archives on the Internet Archives . 73 Magazine was an amateur radio print magazine that ran from 1960 to 2003. (I was kinda stunned about the 2003 end of that range... wow... magazines). Some of the covers are regrettable. Some of the articles are interesting though. At the moment, I'm spelunking through 1967 looking for an article about permeability tuned oscillators mentioned by Bill Meara in the Solder Smoke podcast episode from December 3rd, 2022 . Found the article:  https://archive.org/details/73-magazine-1967-10/page/n21/mode/2up And again, so sorry for the... every gendered thing.  I'm into week two of the Rockmite handset . H...

Covid has hit the house. We're all doing as well as can be expected, but as a result KD0FNR rockmite station control has moved down a floor. The Flying Rockmite is paying dividends, even grounded at the house. So! I set out bulidng a CW version of N6MTS's open headset interconnect standard  with the thought of building a better antenna-mounted 'Flying Rockmite'. Relativey though (special and general) teaches us that well, it's kinda obvious, all things are relative. Consequently, when I tested positive for COVID, after a day of being completely down, I sent out an order for a 25 foot CAT-5 Ethernet cable. It arrived today. I'm back up and around a bit, so I went up to the kitchen where the Rockmite is sitting on a table, and unplugged the short cable used in the original prototype: I plugged in the 25 foot cable to the rig, anchored the cable to the table with a copy of The Kingdom of Copper, picked up the headset/keyer, and then toodled back down to my bedroom...

 An unschooling practice known as strewing , (the setting about the house of things kids might be interested in), is often framed as something parents do FOR kids. I've found that as often as not, it's very much handy for me as well. This morning, the 10 year-old, Mota (as he's known here), took a few minutes out of his schedule to stress-test the Rockmite's new keyer . (For those ham radio afficionados who may be concerend with FCC Part 97, the station was not energized.) Also, a note on the strewing post linked above . I think the reason strewing works so well for us is that we do not intentionally  strew. As the post author says, we do it in a way that I think is 'authentic'. Rather than strewing things we really hope the gang will become interested in, we tend to just leave things, our things, lying about, as people do, and the kids do or do not become interested. When done in this way, I think it's more enjoyable for us all. We get to genuinely share i...

 I'm having to figure out how to re-organize my blogging activities. I'm not posting to any social sites at the moment, consequently, some of my creative output has nowhere to go. But, there's a fix for that! Here it is. We had a gorgeous morning interlude between rain storms here in San Francisco, (Excelsior district to be specific)!