Copasetic Flow

 There's a beach on the Bay just south of Oakland in Alameda. I wouldn't have known if not for ham radio and parks on the air POTA. Headed to the beach. The San Francisco skyline Park: Robert W. Crown Memorial State Beach K-3550 . Getting there I took the Alameda Seaplane Ferry ! It's a really nice ride with plenty of things to look at like the San Francisco Skyline above, the Bay Bridge, and the USS Hornet, (after the transit map below.) Other Things To See On The Way USS Hornet The museum ship, the USS Hornet , is a short walk from the ferry terminal. I didn't get to stop in the day of the POTA, but I'd like to soon. Furniture If you're in need of a couch, the Pottery Barn clearance store is on the walk from the ferry terminal to the beach. Sooo many discounted white couches. Lake Chalet I met part of my extended family in Oakland for dinner. Making the bus connection was a little intense thanks to my planning skills, but I was able to catch the 20 about a mil

I heard VK7ROY from Tasmania, Australia on the Rockmite ham radio up at Pantoll Campground over the weekend! Of course, the station didn't hear the Rockmite's quarter watt. Costa Rica and lots of other places did though.  And still, I hadn't realized up until that day that 'ham radios talk to stations all over the world' included places like Australia on 20 meters. Here's the sloping dipole with radio-at-feedpoint I heard the station on at 11:30 GMT that day.

 I needed a data set to try out the new ham radio QSO/spot mapping features I built today so I loaded in the Mt. Tamalpais POTA data. I was busy that week, so this is the first chance I've had to look at it, and wow! Park: Mt. Tamalpais State Park, K-1178   Our station was located at the highest camping site in Pantoll Campground. To get there, we headed to the ferry building early that morning, caught the first ferry to Sausalito , and from there caught the Marin Stagecoach 61 up the hill to the campground . On our return trip, we try to synch back up with the ferry, but we're not at all above just catching the GGT 130 in Sausalito near their ferry terminal, and taking the ride back into town over the bridge. Radio Details:    We made perhaps one of our highest tree mounted antennas to date. If you look at the first picture of the post you'll see the radio up in the antenna as usual. I was able to bring the keyer into the tent for night station operations.We made perhaps

Washi tape has been protecting the connections on the back yard ham radio half wave dipole for the last few weeks, and I'm a little stunned. Noticing that one of the POTA antenna setups had started to look a litttle grungy a few weeks back, I resolved to do tape wraps on all antenna connections moving forward. I didn't have electrical tape the last time I worked on the backyard dipole, so I'd used washi tape instead because I had it, and why not combine my two niche interests, ham radio, and stationery? It turned out to have been a good choice. When I hauled the antenna in for a connector switch this morning, (having nothing to do with the washi tape, and everything to do with low-balling my BNC barrel budget, more on that later), I discovered that the washi tape had become a very hard to remove shell that had protected the wires quite nicely. Consequently, after changing out the male BNC to banana connector for a female—ridding the antenna of the need for a barrel connecto

I saw the faintest trace of the RockMite on the Utah SDR watching the 20 meter ham band, and then this at 5:30 in the morning!🇨🇷🇨🇷🇨🇷☺️☺️☺️

Google Chrome hasn't been letting me into the lgdc.uml.edu database, (maybe their certificate expired?) There's a way to tell 'curl' to get the information anyway. Up until a few days ago, I could retrieve data from the Pt. Arguello ionosonde using Now, I just get where the advanced button does not let me into the site anyway. So, I put curl to work with: curl --insecure "https://lgdc.uml.edu/common/DIDBGetValues?ursiCode=PA836&charName=MUFD,hmF2,hmF1&fromDate=2023.03.22&toDate=2023.03.23 and immediately got back the data I was looking for:

I've noticed a new phenomena that I'm delighted about: signal reports on POTA from stations that I didn't QSO.It tells me more about the Rockmite's propagation. Awesome! The reverse beacon network is nice, but more data is always better! The above  report came in on the POTA site a few minutes before the little QRPP radio was spotted in Japan: It was a wonky day signal-wise, at least for me with my small-ish amount of experience doing this. In the morning, a station was running SSB on the CW portion of the band the Rockmite uses, then the Japan thing, and then that night, there was RTTY. It was nice to have it confirmed that the radio hadn't just gone wonky. With respect to the RTTY, a look at the POTA spots revealed: SWL in the age of RBN is pretty cool!

 The ham radio POTA where the Rockmite was spotted in Japan! Also? The following day, the RF center conductor was secured back to the BNC jack with washi tape. Coincidence? Park: Los Angeles State Historical Park a few feet from the Gold Line Chinatown Station. Getting There (Via Public Transit) Oh my gosh! As usual, we used public transit, and it was so easy to get to the park! (I have POTA to thank for making me aware of the park . I had never seen it before even though I'd stayed within a quarter mile of it any number of times.) We took the LAX FlyAway bus from the airport to Union Station where we took the Gold Line one stop up to Chinatown. (We also took the Gold Line to our Pasadena non-radio destination.) The LAX FlyAway bus was new and very, very plush. It had leather seats and 3-prong  120 V outlets (two outlets per two seats) for charging devices. The Metro Gold Line  might feel confusing if you've never taken it from Union Station before. You'll wind up on an el

Yet another new feature has been added to the ham radio RBN spot/QSO mapping project. I'm really starting to like the way the maps look these days. The latest new feature places 'R' icons at reverse beacon network stations and 'radio station' icons at the sites of QSOs so the two different kinds of activity can be easily distinguished. You can read more about it at github in the associated issue .

It was difficult to tell the paths from KD0FNR's 20 meter Rockmite to Reverse Beaccon Network spotting stations, and actual QSOs. I started by labeling the paths, and then took a final step to make the spotting paths transparent and immediately evident. The first new set of features includes adding descriptive labels to each path including the callsign of the receiving station as well as the time and date the call was received. The labels appear when the path is clicked. If you'd like to try any of these features out, you can load the kml map at  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dNkpzdjHaQqMRrulhPYHprZb9OJHbSup/view?usp=sharing into Google Earth on the web. I also wanted a way to determine the relative strength of signals at a glance. I developed a color coding scheme for the paths based on ROYGBIV with brown added in a 0 for 'unknown'. The color coding is  Color S value Brown 1 or uknown Red 2 Orange 3 Yellow 4 Green 5 Blue 6 Indigo 7 Vi

The ionosphere has been doing reallyfun things on the 20 meter amateur radio band the last two mornings. The Rockmite is 20 dB into North Carolina at 11:00 GMT! (In the dark.) The F2 layer of the ionosphere is 428 km up, and isn't supposed to be useful at 14058.4 MHz with an maximum Usable Frequency (MUF) of 13.36 MHz, and yet! I'm guessing the grey line near the receiving staions on the map can't hurt. I'm not hearing any stations sending the other direction, yet. Update 3/20/2023: I finally heard a station from South  Carolina this morning at about the same time, (ok, ok, it was more like 4:30... I slept in.) Sadly, this morning, my signal did not seem to be making the return trip as my spots were limited to Berkeley, locked soundly in the ground wave range from San Francisco. Interestingly, the ionogram for California showed conditions that might have supporoted the trip: They just didn't. For those curious, and new to ham radio, the app I use to determine how

 On the first POTA activation, the kids had hiked the mountain before, but it took ham radio to get me up there. The views ere incredible! I had no idea! Here's the view from the radio in the halfwave dipole. Park: San Bruno Mountain State Park ( K-1196 ) So far all the California POTAs have been reached via public transit. I took the SFMTA 43 to Chicago and Cordova and then hiked the rest of the way up the hill. Radio Details: Rockmite 20 meters using a Hamgadgets PicoKeyer. The halfwave dipole with embedded radio was about 8 feet up. This is evidenced in the picture above where I was able to get the camera very close to the radio.   QSO/ RBN spot map: Happenings of Interest   It seems like antenna height might not matter as much up here as I would have thought. The Rockmite and antenna were a few feet lower than on our second outing to this site , but QSOs were made further out.  This, of course, could have also depended on the time of day, and/or the ionosheric conditions,