Rockmite Log: 2023_02_05 Flying Rockmite parallels the slope of the hill

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 Canada.
This is the first time the KD0FNR Rockmite has been spotted by W7MRF which iterestingly is a school station setup by NXP.
Changing the antenna position may have changed increased our received signal strength. On the other hand, it could just be that we're operating later in the day. We'll collect more data to find out.

It looks like W7MRF is not a new spotting station as they have results at througout the day today, but they have no spotting results on January 31st (randomly chosen data download to check for the station). We may have been spotted there for the first time today because this is one of the first times they were listening.

Update!!!

And then this happened!

This is very different compared to the rest of the day prior to this update. The difference, at least the visible one is that a large rain storm in the East Bay is lifting away to the East.

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