Copasetic Flow

 The (newly) three quarter watt Rockmite ham radio reached Hungary from Great Basin National Park a few days ago! Maui relayed the receive side from Hungary. A few days ago, a POTA outing from Great Basin National Park ( K-0032 ) had kind of petered out. I listened for the RockMite on the Maui software defined radio , SDR, because—for whatever reason—I can usually find the 20 meter output of the RockMite there during the day whether I'm operating from San Francisco or Great Basin. Sure enough, there was the station: But, this time, I heard another station as I listened. And! They were calling me! A bit more listening revealed that it was HA9RE . I answered back on the RockMite, where I could not hear HA9RE, and was immediately rewareded with his answer which I could only hear on the Maui SDR. Here a few more vidoes that detail the contact, the first ever software defined radio relayed contact with the Rockmite! From the IRL point of view: From the SDR point of view: ...

 A fairly gentle hike led to a QSO with Japan at 3/4 watts, and a brand new SOTA ham radio activation. Summit:  W7N/WP-147  8340 Getting there Welp, there's no public transit avilaable to this particular summit, so the gang and I drove.  If you're not from the area, and you're able to, plug in the cooridnates of the peak and let Google plot a route for you. You'll also want to download the offline Google maps for the area; there's plenty of phone signal at the summit, but there are places on the drive in where there’s none at all. Google Maps led us through several forks in the gravel/dirt road to a location just to the south of the summit.  If you stop where we did, you may notice a set of tire tracks that lead most of the way up to the mountain’s central ridge. They make for a nice easy start to the hike. When the tire tracks peter out, you can navigate the rest of the way up on a variety of game trails. My path deposited me on a picturesque saddle in the ridg...

The straight key thing is working out. I'm getting used to it! And today, the first QSO from Great Basin National Park was to Alaska, another first for me and the RockMite! Backing away from the cliff at Great Basin National Park K-0032 also brought in Florida! Notice also that Canada is no longer seeing us! Tomorrow: experiments with reflective cliffs. That's all the news for now! 

Welp, I guess if something was going to give out on the RockMite, being stuck not being able to use a paddle for Morse code wasn't the worst thing. And, it's kinda cool I'm getting to work on my nascent straight keying skills.  Meanwhile I'm continuing to have a blast with our resident cliff face up here at Great Basin National Park. Here's the POTA QSO map from the last time the paddle and memory keyer did work. Notice the cliff is still doing it's thing, but since I moved a bit away from it, the RockMite was able to sneak over the low edge to Texas. Oh! And the radio made it's first forray into California since we arrived in Nevada. Here's the station location:

 I accidentally demonstrated one of the aspects of POTA ham radio that I have the most fun with yesterday: radio geomapping.  Notice how all the QSOs and spots are confined to a, (pretty much), ninety degree quadrant. Well, I made the outing about 10 in the morning when the Rockmite has historically kinda dumpy results, and it was hot so I didn't stay out long, but was that the reason for only making two QSO? Maybe. Was it the cause of the quadrant propagation pattern? Probably not. Zooming in on the map gives My POTA location was nestled right up against a set of cliffs and rock outcroppings. The propagation pattern bore this little secret out perfectly!  Park: Great Basin National Park near Baker, Nevada. K-0032 Getting there, public transit route(s) Radio Details: Power bumped Rockmite, naked radio version, halfwave dipole between a cedar and a conifer.   QSO/ RBN spot map: and on Google Earth where you can squiggle the cliffs around to your heart's co...

 In addition to some interesting ham radio happenings, there were fighter jets and hummingbirds. Stand-alone cameras rock! Park: Mt. Davidson in San Francisco:  W6/NC-423 I used the best-for-me-for-early-morning-transit route I mentioned in my last SOTA report  for this summit. I also used my Google Pixel phone to record the actual slope of the hike up from the bus stop. You might remember that I took umbrage that Google claimed the route was almost flat.  Today, I measured it using the 'degrees off kilter' display on my cell phone. The slope is a wopping 12 degrees. Hardly flat. Here's what the world looks like if you take a picture of the 'mostly flat' sidewalk: Radio Details and Gear: I saw that the  qrper.com  trip reports include a gear list. I hadn't ever thought about it before, so I figured I try it out. Interesting, or no? Radio: A green board Rockmite 20. You can get the red board kit at  QRPMe . Antenna: 12 gauge wire cut to a half-wave dipo...

I found a workaround for providing links to Google Earth web maps. Up until this morning, to share a map with you like the following from Google Earth: I would have had to point you at the associated kml file on Google Drive, and then instructed you to open it by clicking on the 'Projects' menu in Google Earth, then clicking on the 'New Project' button, selecting 'Import KML from Google Drive', and then pointing it at the kml I mentioned above. So, instead, I just linked—embedded actually—shared QSO maps from Google's almosot forgotten—in some circles—but still very functional MyMaps site. Here's the map on MyMaps: Today while I was looking at a map to embed for  my Mt. Davidson SOTA earlier this week, I noticed that there's a link to view the map in Google Earth. I clicked it, and sure enough, the map appeared in Google Earth. I then copied the resulting, final, link into an icognito window, and got back a Google Earth map of the same area, b...

 There was a lot going on this morning. Propagation was almost exclusively to the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains; I successfully used an atlatl to launch the attena twine; and the RockMite reached Japan!.  There were so many mosquitos up there this morning, I managed to get a rain coat on farily soon, but I'm so going to pay for that. The recent rains left a couple of largeish puddles near my usual antenna spot, and the mosquitos took adavantage. Park: Mt. Davidson  W6/NC-423 I finally lighted on what I believe is the easiest public transit route for an early morning arrival at the summit—keep in mind, the park opens at 5:00 AM PST. Catch the  43  at Geneva and Mission, or you're favorite stop. Ride to Juanita—yup, that is the first step of the gang's and my original route. Here's the change: wiggle through the streets to Dalewood, and make your entire ascent there. In aboout 10 minutes, you'll be at the trailhead next to the 36 bus stop. This is much fas...

I learned about atlatls and their application to ham radio today. First, they're not to be confused with  Axolotl , one of the Characters from catscafe : An atlatl is a spear thrower according to Wikipedia. I vaguely remembered them from third through fifth grade social studies classes in Hobbs, NM, and Anthropology 101 at Ohio State. The reason I rememberd them is becuase of the degree of difficulty in stringing a half-wave diople on Mt. Davidson,  W6/NC-423 . There's a pair of trees that look awesomre for just such an installation on 10 meters, but the branch of one of them is tantilizingly just out of reach when throwing a spool of butchers twine by hand. The tree in question: So, it usually takes upward of half an hour just to get the antenna and radio launched. But! Today, I figured out the answer, and it's—get ready for it—an atlatl. Placing the spool of twine on the end of a stick, and then throwing it resulted in the antenna line being ready to go on the first thro...

 The sky was gorgeous! The Milky Way was finally out on this trip, so there were great photos. Ham radio also did really well on 20 meters QRP. Park: Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument K-4551   Take US 70 out of Las Cruces headed East Towards Alamogordo. After you get through the pass, look for a sign on the right hand side after the rest area, but before you get to the Missile Range entrance. Camping out here is only $7 a night. You don't need a reservation. The place is gorgeous. What else can I say? Radio Details: I was at the park for two nights—silly Southwest Airlines and weather delays—but at a different site each night, so the antennas were pointed different directions. You'll see this in the map below if you zoom in far enough. The radio was the old POTA workhorse: the RockMite on 20 meters.  I wound up out on the mountain for two nights. Here's the first antenna placement: and here's the second QSO/ RBN spot map: The map above is both nights combin...

The automated QSO mapping project can now handle p2p POTA and s2s SOTA QSOs. It does this, for the moment, by accepting two optional fields at the end of each QSO line in the .csv file the app uses for input. Those two fields contain the latitude and longitude of the SOTA/POTA station. When they are found, they are used immediately , rather than the geocoded information for the QSO receiving station. Here's the feature summed up in video This is the SOTA log the map is based on. I indicated which QSOs were S2S in my notes Here's the map with s2s locations denoted: and here are a few examples that show the summit to summit feature in action. The map to the summit is overlayed with the map to the home station: AA7OY and KT0A

I've had a number of intersting photos and videos come out of the Pixel 6a over the last few months of camping—especially in New Mexico. Most of them involve evidence of things in flight—think meteors—during minutes long exposures. Clearly meteors don't fly overhead for minutes at a time, so I needed to better understand what the phone was doing. Here are the articles I found so far. Astrophotography with Night Sight on Pixel Phones Night Sight: Seeing in the Dark on Pixel Phones Handheld Mobile Photography in Very Low Light The third one was written by the authors for a conference, so is a bit more of a scholarly read than the first two. Together the papers address that the phone is using HDR+ techology to average over pictures to get a better picture, (hence the ability to capture the movement of meteors in a four minute exposure), but  none of them mention if there might be parameters embedded in the video or associated image that reveal how long the meteor took to pass over...

Rockmite ham radio QSOs are now mapped in one fell swoop without me having to look up addresses or geographic locations for receiving stations. rm-rbn-history now creates kml maps from QSO data automatically! The mapping program for QSOs from the Rockmite has come to full fruition, (at least for the moment). With an input list of QSOs like the following POTA Organ Mountains de KD0FNR 23_04_25 -106.557943661198000 32.371302453347500 K4SUE,2023/04/25 02:35:00,599,599 W7OQ,2023/04/25 02:07:00,579,599 KB4N,2023/04/25 02:12:00,559,579 W6DX,2023/04/25 02:15:00,449,559 WB8DTT,2023/04/25 02:40:00,599,599 W9MET,2023/04/25 02:42:00,559,599 WB2WGX,2023/04/25 02:49:00,339,599 KG4ZQZ,2023/04/25 12:27:00,559,559 WB8DTT,2023/04/25 12:32:00,559,589 KF9R,2023/04/25 12:35:00,559,599 N8BB,2023/04/25 12:35:00,559,559 NG6R,2023/04/25 12:38:00,559,599 KA9DCU,2023/04/25 13:00:00,559,579 KB3AD,2023/04/25 13:02:00,559,589 N2EM,2023/04/25 13:04:00,329,579 WK4DS,2023/04/25 16:08:00,339,449 the repository autom...