Skip to main content

Flying Rockmite or Operator Down Below? It's All Relative

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 where the cable was waiting, hanging in the air patiently, for me just outside the back door.




I attached the cable to the keyer. (I guess it's more of a cozy keyer now? Maybe I should have anchored the cable with an Agatha Christie or Maureen Johnson cozy mystery? I digress.) T



he 11 year-old and I immediately tried the radio out working remotely from my room, and???


The little rig is up and running!


References:
I originally heard about the standard on the really fun podcast, Ham Radio Workbench Episode 167.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Valentine's Day Magnetic Monopole

There's an assymetry to the form of the two Maxwell's equations shown in picture 1.  While the divergence of the electric field is proportional to the electric charge density at a given point, the divergence of the magnetic field is equal to zero.  This is typically explained in the following way.  While we know that electrons, the fundamental electric charge carriers exist, evidence seems to indicate that magnetic monopoles, the particles that would carry magnetic 'charge', either don't exist, or, the energies required to create them are so high that they are exceedingly rare.  That doesn't stop us from looking for them though! Keeping with the theme of Fairbank[1] and his academic progeny over the semester break, today's post is about the discovery of a magnetic monopole candidate event by one of the Fairbank's graduate students, Blas Cabrera[2].  Cabrera was utilizing a loop type of magnetic monopole detector.  Its operation is in...

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 ...

More Cowbell! Record Production using Google Forms and Charts

First, the what : This article shows how to embed a new Google Form into any web page. To demonstrate ths, a chart and form that allow blog readers to control the recording levels of each instrument in Blue Oyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" is used. HTML code from the Google version of the form included on this page is shown and the parts that need to be modified are highlighted. Next, the why : Google recently released an e-mail form feature that allows users of Google Documents to create an e-mail a form that automatically places each user's input into an associated spreadsheet. As it turns out, with a little bit of work, the forms that are created by Google Docs can be embedded into any web page. Now, The Goods: Click on the instrument you want turned up, click the submit button and then refresh the page. Through the magic of Google Forms as soon as you click on submit and refresh this web page, the data chart will update immediately. Turn up the:...