Copasetic Flow

 I've been able to play radios in the mountains of New Mexico this week. I made three contacts at Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument on Friday afternoon with the little Rockmite. The views were gorgeous, complete with shooting stars ! From the radio's point of view on Friday afternoon when I made two QSOs , the park looked like this.

 So, adding automated remote station location updates to the code that tracks the Reverse Beacon Network spots of the KD0FNR Rockmite has become a bit of an oddysey , but here's more cool stuff: The output python script new_key_cat.py is supposed to present only lines of output (to stdout) that do not contain keys that already exist in rm_rnb_history_pres.csv. Tests are being built for the script using pytest. pytest mutes stdin because the tests are intended to be automated rather than interactive. This makes sense to me, so I'm changing the method in the script that handles input to look for a file name argument, and if it doesn't have one to use stdin. The second issue though was how to write an automated test case that looks at stdout. It turns out pytest has that covered. It's all written up at https://docs.pytest.org/en/7.1.x/how-to/capture-stdout-stderr.html And here's the pertinent code example from that page: def test_myoutput(capsys): # or use "capf...

 For reals! The little ham radio was suspended between two trees that used to support the antenna and the radio, but today supported the antenna AND the radio. Results were mixed. The radio worked, the antenna and connections held steady. The signals were smaller compared to signals from the inverted vee at the home station. The up close picture highlights that the wires didn't sag much under the weight of the radio, and with  that tension, they held fine with no issues. As a final note, there was significantly less noise at the park location.

 It's so much fun when the propagation physics works out in amateur radio. The last few days, the little Rockmite 20 meter radio de KD0FNR has caught the grey line to canada, and the immediately been seen nowhere again until the sun completely up about two hours later. Here's what the gang and I have seen while watching the Reverse Beacon Network while calling CQ. On Mondy, the Rockmite was heard as the grey line crossed the spotting station in Canada I should point out again , that no, we're not in Nebraska, we just freuqently get aliased from KD0FNR to KD0F.  Then, today we hit the grey line on both sides, first as it passed by us: And then one last time as it passed by the spotting station about 10 minutes later: And then, just as the day before, nothing for a few more hours: The above picture was taken just now when I'm writing this up now, so please ignore the picture's grey line, but do look at the time stamps between the last Canada spot, VE6JY and the firs...

 I released a new version of the ham radio exams practice app featuring the new FCC Technician class pool questions this week. The code's greatly simplified from the 'do everything older app. The biggest visible change is that the only login mode remaining is the simple one that accepts your username and password over an unsecured form not attached to any other social services. Login is only useful for tracking your scores and which questions you've practiced as shown below. Before I get into other details, you can find the site at  https://hamdaise.wl.r.appspot.com/hamtest and the repository at  https://github.com/hcarter333/ham-radio-freedom . So, handy, but don't use any passwords or usernames for that matter that need to stay secure. This just isn't that sort of program :) I'm slowly but surely getting the ham radio help topics lined up back up with the questions. I did the first dozen or so today . There are over 400 questions though, so this part will t...

 Anyone with a github account can capture their ham radio station reverse beacon network spots and map them over time using kepler.gl . I've been working from Simon Wilison's screen scraping examples to create animated maps of the Rockmite's reverse beacon network spots . I believe, (and hopefully I'm about to find out), that I've created enough documentation that others should be able to fork the project to create their own maps! So, before I show what can be done with the tool, if you're interested, please follow the instructions , and let me know how it goes! Also, if you can't follow the instructions, or something doesn't work, please file an issue on the project, and I'll get to work on addressing it. I'll cover this more in a future post, but here's something interesting I saw in the spotting data from the Rockmite leading into last night's NAQCC sprint .  Utah and Arizona are one of the Rockmite's usual strong spots, and ind...

 Listening to a recording of myself sending Morse code over the weekend, it finally occurred to me why KD0FNR is frquently aliased as KD0F by the Reverse Beacon Network: NR sounds a lot like the character '/'. The LCWO code practice site made it easy to tell you  and  show you: First, listen to the entire KD0FNR callsign: Now, listen to just NR: And now, here's the character '/': Hear the similarity? The RBN ignores characters after '/'. Thus, the 'slash' (that's really NR) is ignored, and the callsign KD0FNR truncates to KD0F. Ham Radio and Unschooling The middle kid, 10 year-old Mota, is mildly interested in ham radio and he's learning Morse code. He is however, very interseted in programming. Consequently, he's been working though an html5 game programming book. In the book, he's having to learn both html and JavaScript. Consequently, he knows what a div is, and he knows where his JavaScript code gets pulle...

 I'm big into using whatever's already lying around for amateur radio, and the laptop batteries complete with an external charger—for a laptop I no longer use—weigh heavy on my mind each time I change out the (8!) AA batteries for the Rockmite 20. Well, I was finally able to put them to use . Unlike a two terminal AA battery, the MKFVP battery has a whopping 9 connector slots. I measured voltages between slots to no avail, I couldn't fine the advertised 11.4 volts I'd hopeed for. Then, the article at  https://www.electroschematics.com/laptop-battery-secrets-part-1  came to my rescue. The article was about all manner of laptop batteries rather than my specific one, but that was enough. The author also noted that the outside terminals of laptop batteries are usually the power delivery leads analagous to the two terminals of a AA battery. I'd measured the voltage between those two connector slots already, and there was nothing... zero volts. However, the author also me...

 I was intrigued by Simon Wilison's posts about screen scraping data using github, so I got right to work on it with respect to tracking the Rockmite's antenna performance, and WOW! The map above was created using data from the new project so far. Screen Scraping via the Network Tab of the Chrome Browser Developer Tools Tab Using Simon's lightning talk , it was pretty easy to find the data I wanted from the RBN site.  Github Actions Again pulling from Simon's talk, I was pretty quickly able to create a github action that runs a few times an hour to collect all the calls spotted from ham radio call signs that fit the pattern "KD0*". It took me a large-ish bit of time to debug whether or not the curl command or the jq command used to process the data were having issue. (It was  the curl command. If  your URL has arguments following a '?' you'll need to enclose it in double quotes.) Now that I was pulling out the call data , the immediate next issue...

 This is kinda interesting, and gives me a bit more faith as well as a bit more data in and about the Rockmite. (Funny how those two things—faith and data—often go hand in hand.) The Reverse Beacon Network, (RBN), uses software to decode Morse code. The software is quite good, but today I found out it's not perfect. While working on my own python script for reading the telnet data stream that feeds the RBN site directly, I typed in a search string for my callsign—KD0FNR—as KD0*. Then, I tried doing the same thing on the RBN web site. The results I got back were unexpected, but answered a lot of questions. RBN map showing KD0F* QSOs Callsigns that were variants of mine like KD0F, KD0FN and KD0FX were returrned. A lot of them appear to actually be my callsign misinterpreted by the software Morse code decoder, and tell a story of the radio's operations that fill in the gaps I've been wondering about up until now. KD0FN is almost certainly me since a review of the FCC database...

 I love documentation of projects!!! Consequently, it might not be a surprise that my favorite blog and associated YouTube video for 2022 remains Simon Willison's exposition on why it's important to document and track your own personal projects .  The key trick is to ensure that every project has comprehensive documentation and automated tests. I've had so much fun with this. It basically led to the last 20 or so blog entries. Those blog entries are simplified summaries of the issue tracking that's been underway for the ham radio: Rockmite. To see the full versions checkout the little radio's associated github repository . Yesterday's radio testing revolved around our recent heavy rains and the radio's antenna. For those who feel the rain may not have been heavy, or soaking enough, we found a tree in McLaren Park yesterday morning that begs to differ: I've worried for weeks that rain water might couple the antenna to the house and the fences below by mak...

 Chirping Morse code! Yes, chirping! I was treated to a few minutes of bird song on the first ham radio morning of the year listening in on the Utah SDR . The chirping was courtesy of WA5BDU out of Arkansas. When I asked what the chirping was about he explained he was using a 1960s VFO (variable frequency oscillator) and that while he'd made every effort to make it stable that in that sort of VFO keying the transmitter caused the frequency of the VFO to shift just a bit causing the chirp. I'm looking forward to building a slug tuned VFO for the Rockmite, (actually a second altered Rockmite). Hopefully we'll hear the same. More on the VFO here .

 After finding this intefering signal oddity on 40 meters at the Maui SDR yesterday, I went looking for information on what it might be. I found the  Signal Identification Guide . It has a nice waterfall and audio catalog of signals you might run across. I still haven't found the one shown above yet.