Of Stationery Stickers and a Ham Radio POTA from Mt. Tamalpais State Park K-1178

The little Rockmite and a sticker this time once again prove that the crotchety old hams of my youth whor wrote, "You've got to solder your RF out!!!" were just crotchety, not correct.

While I'll give you that soldering, done well, can make for a better connection, I wish ten year old me, who wasn't allowed to solder yet, had realized that it wasn't such a big deal. I could've gotten passable results on a lot of projects that I didn't even attempt.

This is the second time the rf out to antenna coax solder joint has brokenn while I was out and about with the 12, 10, and 8 year-old gang. This time we were camping at Pantoll Campground north of San Francisco. Last time, we were at LA State Historical Park hanging out in the mornings before taking the Gold Line over to AlienCon in Pasadena.

On both trips, the Rockmite also reached far further West than it usually does. On the LA trip, before the washi tape patch, the RM was spotted in Japan on the RBN.

Wednesday night, when the Rockmite went mysteriously quiet on recieve, while making sucking noises over the headphones on transmit, I immediately knew the rf out wire had deatached again. I, however, had no washi tape, and was forced to work with the next best thing, the stationary stickers picdured above. The second night of our trip, with the sticker still in play, radio was spotted on the RBN for the first time ever in Hawaii.

Soldering indeed! Some of this stuff can just be stickered together!

Park:

Mt. Tamalpais State Park, K-1178

Getting there, public transit route(s)

We took a variety of routes. The gang had hoped to setup camp on their own with me meeting them later in the day. They set out to take the GGT 130 from downtown that morning, but it ghosted on them. Consequently, they wound up taking the later GGT 101 and hanging out in Sausalito waiting for the next Marin Stagecoach 61 up to the campground. By then, I'd made it over to Sausalito on the GGT Sausalito Ferry, and we all headed up to the campground together.

Radio Details:

Same old radio with a little more adhesive :) The radio was about 10 feet off the ground on the very edge of a slope that plunges down from Pantoll Campground into, eventually, Muir Woods.

QSO/RBN spot map:

In the maps below, a blue map marker indicates a QSO while a yellow marker with an 'R' indicates a reverse beacon network spot.

First night out:

Second night out:

Notice the Coast to Coast P2P with W2AEW!!!

Happenings of Interest

Turkeys mobbed the campsite! The 8 year-old, Tawnse spotted about a dozen turkey hens in the woods while she was making oatmeal. They stayed for most of the morning.

QSO Log

I'll pop this in in a bit.

Callsign	rx RST	tx RST	Time (GMT)	Frequency
KBTEST	539	559	16:42	14058.3 kHz

Unschooling Highlights

Did I mention it was the first day of public school and we were out camping? We didn't know either, and certainly didn't set up the trip that way on purpose, but it was a nice little giggle when we found out.

POTA tx QSL:

QSL rx album:

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...

Copasetic Flow

Search This Blog