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.

Comments

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 concept very sim

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:

Copasetic Flow

Search This Blog