Copasetic Flow

 The kids and I got to hike today! It was magnificent! Also, we got to play ham radio on 20 meters doing a POTA activation of Candlestick park, K-7493 . We took the 29 southeast to the end of the line, then walked about three quarters of a mile to the park. It was utlimately going to rain on us it seemed, (our forecast is rife with the stuff this week), but it never did. I don't have much to report in the way of mapping so far, I'll have more in the morning, but I wanted to briefly share our original antenna mount which was pretty unique I felt, and worked well. There was a wooden railing along the wooden pier that stood, I supposed, about 15 feet above the water of the Bay. We mounted the half wave dipole alogn the beam, and then, since no one else was in the park, pulled the antenna mounted radio back a bit so we could sit on the other side of the pier. The spots on the reverse beacon network, ( RBN ), were just about as good  as when I hung the antenna from trees later in t...

 The KD0FNR Rockmite ham radio posted to new distance records last night! At 250 mW it reached stations more than 2,700 miles away. The first record it set was to ZF1A in Cayman Islands. The second was to TI7W in Costa Rica. Here's the map of the last two nights' distance records: Distance to ZF1A Caymen Islands at 03:15 GMT: 2,775.84 mi Distance to TI7W Costa Rica at 03:42 GMT: 2,954.98 mi

 The KD0FNR Rockmite transmitted it's furthest disnce ever last night. It was spotted by an SDR in Newton, NH, W1NT. The heading to the station, interestingly, lines up with the previous record in Maui. I used the maps API to find out how straight the line was. The previous record, (set almost daily), is off to the West in Maui .  Here's the two spots on the same map. For those of who might be wondering if the Boston, NH and the Maui station are on a perfectly straight line, I wondered the same thing. They're not. They miss by about 4 degrees. How do I know? Turns out Google Maps has an API for that. ( and a demo ).  Using the demo, I was able to get the two headings and then add them to determine how close to a straight line (180 degrees it actually is). OK, let's look at the headings. To Newton, NH, we have To Maui we have Adding the two headings we get 176.0069 degrees. So not quite on the exact same line to the antenna, but close. I also wondered if my imprecision a...

 There'll be more posts on this over the next few days, just some early thoughts on a really fun day playing ham radio at Mt. Tamalpais.  The antenna wound up fairly high at our final location near the campsite. I thought there might be issues with the high winds, but aside from being generally cold outside the tent, everything went great. Earlier in the day, with a much lower antenna we demonstrated more of what I started to see at Baylor Pass . The radio was setup in a canyon along Bootjack Trail. I surmised we'd only reach stations pretty much directly south of us, and sure enough : and in more detail the one station, K6FOD, that spotted us in our admittedly very short time transmitting was lined up along the canyon.

 A quick note today. There's a lot going on, but very little time to write about it. I have a Google sheet for recording new QSO locations. Up until today, though it munged the date and time field. That's where teh https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3094139?hl=en#null comes in. Using this function, I was able to specify the formats for date and time which were then preserved: Update: The day of learning to fomat text. To get 24 hour time in a Microsoft Word mail merge , use HH:mm, not hh:mm.  And Finally? If you're printing on USPS double reply postcards and an HP printer, the print on both sides feature won't work because the paper's too short. That's OK, you can do a gyration of printing odd and then even pages and flipping the pages in between, but... Even though the printer won't print on both sides, you still need to tell it not to in the print dialog properties or it will still do wrong things, inserting blank pages.

 Today I learned that the National Forest Service will just give you a kmz file containing national forest boundaries. This comes in handy for mapping things like POTA boundaries. Also, if you'd like to modify the boundaries so say they had a brigher border, well, you can, after you unzip the kmz file. Free Forest Boundaries: Eight year old Tawnse and I got to play radios in the forests of New Mexico over the last few days, specifically at Villa Nueva State Park and again at Cibola National Forest. The scenery was phonemal and the POTA contacts were ample.  But, sometimes, especially in National Forests, I wonder if I'm actually in the forest. It turns out teh forest service has an answer for that. You can find kmz files containing forest and other interesting boundaries at https://www.fs.usda.gov/detailfull/r3/landmanagement/gis/?cid=stelprdb5201889&width=full Consequently, I was able to cofirm that yes, I was very well within the forest at the campsite pictured above The...

 I'm hoping to do a few more ham radio POTA activations of New Mexico parks today. In prep, here's a bit more data on the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks activation. In documenting the 'add your own QSO' feature on the RBN tracker, I created a few interesting pictures I thought I'd add as an update to my earlier ocmments on radio optics and mountains. The following picture shows the spots, (blue lines), and QSOs, (green lines), made during a few days worth of activations. From the perpective of the entire countyr, a rough pattern becomes apparent: Zooming into the peak, we can see why: (Basically, the neighboring mountain is affecting propagation.) Of particular interest to me though: notice the pattern of the QSOs when the radio was located further up Baylor Peak. There are fewer QSOs headed out to the North. I think (but don't have enough data to support) this might have been caused by the antenna's angle of radiation being reduced due to the steeper slopes o...

 The QSL card using United States Post Office double reply postcards is coming along kind of beautifully if I do say so myself. I've updated the template (I'll upload it to github soon) so it does a mail merge with an Excel spreadsheet. Using the double reply cards , I can simply print out my QSLs after a Parks On the Air activation . On the backside of the card, I can paste a picture of the night's operating conditions And! If the recipient doesn't have a QSL card, they want to send back, well, we've got that covered as well There was a small issue with the little label falling out of the folded over card, but a glue roller was the solution

 There are more radio stations than I thought at UC Berkeley. To be specific, there's two. Yesterday, the KD0FNR Rockmite was seen by both of them: the first piece of evidence that changing the conductor diameter of the half wave dipole had a measurable effect. As it  turns out, changing the dipole conductor width led to more questions than answers & also better propagation... maybe. The aerial wires for the Rockmite's dipole have always seemed somewhat vanishingly small to me. I don't have an exact size right now, but if I had to guess, I'd go with them being 24 AWG or about 02 inches in diameter. They're signle stranded wires that break at the BNC to banana plug adapter about once a week, gradually shortening the antenna and raising its resonant frequency. Out of a suspicion (vague recolection from EM class?) that a higher diameter wire would result in better power output, and some vaguely supporting research materials, I swapped out the single strand wires fo...

 How many apparent callsigns can one little ham radio bear? Google Earth on the web has a URL API of sorts, but apparently NO animation! Grrr..... Google Earth's URL stores the initial view of the map like so https://earth.google.com/web/@37.78472548,-122.50134987,111.08460648a,1238.99361831d,35y,-168.52095559h,74.50108975t,0r It may come in hand for doing something involving GUI screen scraping and unit testing  in future projects with the Rockmite ham radio. There's a new callsign in town for the little KD0FNR Rockmite. It's KD0R. So far, I have no  idea how this alias is coming about. Google Earth (at least on the web) doesn't support animation at the moment as far as I can tell. (Sigh, I'm stuck in kepler.gl for that feature for the moment.) Google Earth Studio will apparently support animation though? I hope to find out. For reference, kepler.gl is a nice platform, but I'm more used to working with kml files from back in the day when I had apps tracki...

 The Rockmite ham radio flies above San Francisco, and maybe has new RBN spotting results? After having quite nice results at Organ Mounains when running the antenna along a ridge as opposed to across it, the 12 year old and I repositioned the home station antenna to run down our hill instead of across it. We don't have a whole lot of data yet, but things look promising. First, here's a video of the antenna arrangement at Organ Mountains. Note that the Rockmite connector is embedded in the antenna 'flying rockmite' style: We took down the inverted Vee at the house, replacing it in a similar fashion with an antenna that roughly matches the slope of our hill with the radio again flying in the middle: So far, results look promising, but we don't have enough data to make a clear call yet: Things to note: The spot in Canada was before we brought the radio in for rain proofing. The house-side antenna mount is now about six inches lower that it was when we were spotted in...

 Why using pytest (or another framework) to test code routinely (as in every time code is added) saves bogs worth of time for developers.  I've found myself running away with adding new features to the reverse beacon network ( RBN )  mapping project over the last few days. It's been a lot of fun, and now there are prototype maps —for example —that show ionoshperic skip. It's been a LOT of fun, but I haven't been augmenting my documentation or testing for the project. So, this morning, I earnestly wrote myself a note to read back up on the importance of testing , then I  was slammed from my lofty testing heights back to the alley of  'banging out code' by inspiration for a shiny new feature , and I was off. Fortunately, the note in my journal acted as a positive reinforcment. As I started to write the new feature (animating maps via timestamps in Google Earth), I also popped open an existing pytest file , saved it under a new name, and started writing tests fo...

 In electronics engineering classes at both Ohio State and Texas A&M I did homework problem after  homework problem working out radio wave propagation. One of the fundamental points was that radio waves are just another kind of light, and therefore behave like light. Radio waves however are not like visible light in one major way, their wavelenghth. The Rockmite operates on the 20 meter ham radio band. That means that the radio waves emitted  by the little ham radio have a wavelength of (about) 20 meters. Meanwhile, visible green light (as an example) has a wavelength of about 510 nanometers (that's 510 billionths of a meter.) This rather huge difference in wavelengths affects how the two different kinds of 'light' interact with their worlds and —for me —produces rather dissapointing results. While we can use the same field equations for both green light and radio waves, in a lot of cases radio waves do not (apparently) behave like the green light we're used to. For...