KD0FNR Rockmite Booms into North Carolina on 20 meters... In The Dark!!!

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 far the little radio reaches is called the reverse beacon network. It's a network of software defined radios (SDR) that listen on a variety of frequencies to the ham radio bands. The networked SDRs automatically decode Morse code (CW) and report the callsigns they hear to a central server.

Here's the MUF chart at the time.

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