Skip to main content

Great Basin National Park POTA: Geomapping via 20 m ham radio de KD0FNR

 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 content:


Happenings of Interest 

See above


QSO Log

Table containing QSOs in text

Callsignrx RSTtx RSTTime (GMT)Frequency
KBTEST53955916:4214058.3 kHz

(Add callsigns as post tags?)


Unschooling Highlights

Just a quick note, so nothing here.

POTA tx QSL:


QSL rx album:


References


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...

The Alcubierre Warp Drive Tophat Function and Open Science with Sage

I transferred yesterday's Mathematica file with the Alcubierre warp drive[2] line element and space curvature calculations to the  +Sage Mathematical Software System  today, (the files been  added to the public repository [3]).  If you haven't used Sage before, it's a Python based software package that's similar in functionality to Mathematica.  Oh, and it' free.  I also worked a little more on understanding the theory, but frankly, I made far more progress with the software than the theory.  What follows will be a little more of the Alcubierre theory, plus, a cool Sage interactive demo of one of the Alcubierre functions[1], as well as a bit about my first experience with using Sage. Theory The theory is fun, but it's moving slowly.  Here's the chalk board from this morning's discussion Alcubierre setup the derivation using something called the 3+1 formalism which means we consider space to be flat, (in this case), slices that are labelled ...

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...