Skip to main content

Flying Rockmite with a Topping of Tuna: A Quick Prelude

The twelve year-old, Daize, and I flew the Flying Rockmite with the Tuna Topper II+ amplifier installed for the first two times ever this weekend! The results were outstanding!

And! The kid made her first QSO ever on Sunday!

She and I wrapped up amplifier construction late in the week. From there, we were able to do some basic testing on the back balcony of the house where we learned that the LED was soldered in upside down, and that our multimeter was reading rather wonkily because it's battery was (already!?) going dead, and maybe also a heavy dose of RFI (radio frequency interference.) I'll be writing up way more about the initial tests, the ideas they spawned for the radio/amp packaging you'll see below, and other things soonish.

Anyway, after our one brief day to test the amplifier, the kid and I were scheduled to hop on a plane to New Mexico where we would camp just below Manzano Peak and eat breakfast each morning in Mountainair, (Yum!). We took the Rockmite and the Tuna Topper with us. The trip was tremendous!

But, for now, the important stuff. We were making a QSO a minute for a while!!! Let me say that bigger:

We were making a QSO a minute for a while!!!


This has never happened before, and while our SNR numbers from the Reverse Beacon Network didn't seem outlandish, the frequency (no pun or confusion intended; every QSO but one took place on 14057.4 MHz), of QSOs says to me that the amplifier is working quite nicely.

Here are the Flying Rockmite and Tuna Topper in their proper home: outside, and up in the trees! The packaging is still very much in its prototype stage, but already gives us some things the Flying Rockmite solo packaging never did, (more on this later.)


Here's the QSO map:



Here are the QSOs!

Callsignrx RSTtx RSTTime (GMT)Frequency
VE3CWM5395392023/09/17 14:37:0014057.4
WI5D5595592023/09/17 14:38:0014057.4
W2SKY5595592023/09/17 14:39:0014057.4
AC5K5795592023/09/17 14:41:0014057.4
KJ5W5595592023/09/17 14:42:0014057.4
K4CTF5494492023/09/17 14:44:0014057.4
KU8T5395592023/09/17 14:46:0014057.4
WD5GRW5695592023/09/17 14:47:0014057.4
KG8YT3393392023/09/17 14:49:0014057.4
KJ7DT5795592023/09/17 14:52:0014057.4
KI5JIM5795992023/09/17 14:53:0014057.4
W0MM5595592023/09/17 14:58:0014057.4
N6PF5795892023/09/17 15:00:0014057.4
N2VGA3395992023/09/17 15:01:0014057.4
KB9RPG5995592023/09/17 15:20:0014058.0


Anyways:

We also listened to three Ham Radio Workbench episodes while we were out, and boy, will the kid and I have comments.

Rockets

Amplifiers

SolderSmoke





Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please leave your comments on this topic:

Popular posts from this blog

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
1 comment
Read more

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
11 comments
Read more

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:
Post a Comment
Read more