Copasetic Flow

 I finally got csvs-to-sqlite to work on the Windows machine here! You might remember that the 12, 10, and 8 year-old gang and I had been unable to coerce the utility into working. That was OK because with our workarounds, we could use it on Github Codespaces, so we were still up and running an instance of Datasette that served our ham radio QSOs. It was also really ok, because with the experience we gained, when one of the gang saw a OneSchema hiring banner hanging in a window overlooking the alley where our favorite pub is located, they immediately knew what the company did, and made sure to point it to me. This led to us checking out their website, and discussing even more of the vagaries of csv files and jobs in the tech industry over our lunch. Unschooling works! Today, I found a way! First, I re-read my original post . I changed our pandas install back to 1.5.0 as the post instructs. I got further. The utility errored out because it was upset about the number of columns named

 Just a quick note that the QRP ham radio rig, Project TouCans, was spotted on the RBN network this morning in New Zealand! Off to the West spots and contacts always amaze me even a little more because the rig, suspended in its half wave dipole antenna is about five feet below the lip of a hill directly to the west.

The latest fun engineering problem in ham radio Project TouCans! There's an unhappy capacitor lurking somewhere! I've realized that what I thought was a water intrusion issue is not. It actually appears to be stray capacitance, but where? And is it even stray capacitance? The main, bad symptom Immediately after charging the battery, the radio when hooked up to the new charged brute merely buzzes. The magic fix There's one way around this that works somewhat reliably, and that's to do what's called a 'battery terminal rub start'. This entails the following Attach the radio to the keyer, (which  also sends p9ower up to the radio in the antenna) by plugging its Ethernet cable in. The batter is disconnected at this state. Attach the keyer's negative terminal wire to the negative battery terminal Do not attach the radio's positive terminal wire to the battery. Intead: Rub the edge of the keyer's terminal wire on the gnurled surface of the positive bat

 Yesterday I used Datasette to make a map of the QSOs I'd made from the Pantoll Campground area, Then, I remembered that I also wanted to know how the locations of the stations on the receiving end of my POTA QSOs from there compared to W6CSN's . That map turned out to be very easy to make. I remembered that the Datasette cluster map looks for the column names 'longitude' and 'latitude'. Keeping that in mind, I renamed the columns that I'd use datasette-leaflet-freedraw to search for to 'longitude_t' and 'latitude_t', and then added two more columns containing the latitude and longitude of the receiving station. So,  select rm_rnb_history_pres.tx_lng as longitude , rm_rnb_history_pres.tx_lat as latitude, rm_rnb_history_pres.timestamp, rm_rnb_history_pres.dB, rm_rnb_history_pres.Spotter, rm_rnb_history_pres.QSL_link, photo_path.path, photo_path.uuid, json_object( 'image', '/-/media/thumbnail/' || uuid, 'title', Spotter

 Reading W6CSN's post on his recent POTA at Mt. Tamlpais got me thinking. How many QSOs had I made from the region, and had I sent out QSLs for all of them, and had I updated our log database to reflect those QSLs? We have a mapable QSO log, so clearly, I could just zoom in and out on the map, but I wanted to do something that felt fancier. I remembered a Simon Willison  blog  posts about Datasette mentioning there was a plugin that allowed querying of databases based on regions drawn on a map. That's the thing I wanted. Actually Doing the Thing So, I wanted to be able to display a map,  draw a region on the map, and then review the QSOs I'd made from that region. Armed with a map of QSOs, I also wanted to be able to click each QSO to see if I'd updated the QSL photo for the occasion in our QSO database.  After working though the issues I discuss below, I was delighted to be able to search for our QSOs from the Pantoll Campground Region like so: Now that we've seen

 The kid passed her technician radio exam at UC Berkeley last night!!! She built most of the Tuna Topper amplifier in Project TouCans and now she can get on the air soon! (Not on that rig since it's in 20 meters, a non-Technician band), but she's looking to fix that two different ways. She wants to get to work building a radio of her own, and she's going to take the general class exam again next month!

 I've run into issues of late with the keyer on the Rockmite inside of Project TouCans rebooting as the output power of the amp was increased via increases in the final transistor's bias current. Simply put, after a certain power level, the keyer would spontaneously reboot when the 'dit' key was pressed. In keeping with our more is less theme, our key is homemade. I wrote an article about it that appeared in Sprat 195 this year! The homebrew nature of the keyer meant there were lots of possible root causes for what I was observing. Here's the radio's view of the mechanical portion of the keyer. The switch on the lower left is the one that was was causing resets. Here's a view of the whole rig, battery (since replaced by a LiFePO4 of the same size), keyer, and Project TouCans mounted in the antenna over the backyard. The key switch that caused resets is mounted on the right hand side of the keyer from this angle. The switch on top is the keyer programming bu

 I had to take a few weeks' break before this one made sense to me. It finally did though, and now when the gang and I look at our QSO map in Datasette, we can see which outing generated a QSO by clicking on the marker of the receiving ham radio station. So, for example, if we're wondering when we finally made that recent QSO with Hawaii? Oh yeah, it was during the California QSO party! We've still got some data entry to do—if I had more tactical time at the moment, I'd use the datasette-write package and a form to make the entries more quickly... Anywway—but eventually, we'll have a pretty slick map. The technical details As for the details of what finally got everything to work for me (on a Windows machine.) You'll need datasette datasette-cluster-map datasette-media datasette-json-html and a metadata.json file. (This was the bit that just kind of hurt me deep down and slowed me up for a few weeks. Once I accepted that there was no way around, and then spent

 I've never outright said it, but one of the points of these ham radio posts is to demonstrate that you can have a whole lot of fun with ham radio without doing a whole lot of prep or worrying a whole, whole lot about perfection. Towards that end, I wanted to mention our QSL cards, and our antenna launcher. I'm getting the QSL cards ready to go for the recent California QSO Party. I'm using our tried and true design that involves photos printed by the Walgreens at the bottom of the hill on our 54 line, and USPS double reply postcards . Here they are: The picture features the TouCans radio housed in the antenna that sweeps from the top of the house just above the kitchen window down to the back fence. The radio is also sporting its rain/fog cover which is a donut bag from the donut store at the bottom of our hill on the 52 line.  Turns out the inside of donut bags are waxed, and that's quite enough to shield the little radio and amp housed in a pineapple and tuna can fr

 Project TouCans made 52 QSOs in well under 24 hours while the gang (12 year-old Diaze, 10 year-old Mota, and 8 year-old Tawnse; all internet monikers), and I were camping in Cibola National Forest above Mountainair, NM. That's more QSOs than we've ever done in a POTA before! That's also more QSOs than we've ever had in a 24 hour period before! Project TouCans is working great!!! Here's a map of all the QSOs. On top of everything else, Project TouCans was spotted by two European RBN stations. That's never happened before. No European QSOs (that has happened before ... more than once ... before the tuna topper amp of Project TouCans), but still!

 Sigh... I used to never, ever take Android updates. I need to get back into that habit again. After the latest update, my Panasonic camera would no longer transfer images to my phone. Just like that, the whole, really nice feature was swizzled and dead. Fortunately, grahamashton.net ran into the same issue back in 2017 and has a workable solution ! Because things disappear on the internet, here's the crux of it. Put your phone in airplane mode, then, and only then, hook up to your camera over wifi. Somehow the lack of a cell data network makes everything feel better for the phone.

 The gang—12 year old Diaze, 10 year old Mota, and 8 year old Tawnse; internet monikers all—and I spend a significant amount of time looking at propagation maps from our POTA outings. We do it to see how our little radio is doing, to learn about geography, and to discuss physics—all popular unschooling topics here. It's important to remember though that sometimes a correlation is just that, a relationship between variables, not a causation. One of our QSO maps from this weekend's POTA illustrates this perfectly. Keeping in mind that red place markers indicate RBN spots and that blue markers indicate QSOs, at first blush you might be tempted to say that Project TouCans was getting out to the East Coast and environs, and rather flummoxed by the Rocky Mountains behind our campsite. Sure, those fancy RBN stations—some of them are very fancy—out West could see us, but that's just because, well, you know, they had better antennas. But, real stations? You might think that TouCans

The QSL cards for Project TouCans first POTA have gone out, so now I can talk about them online without any spoilers and—hopefully—a few clarifications and elucidations. First, this was Project TouCans first POTA , so it was kind of a big deal to the (12, 10, and 8 year-old)gang and I. It became even a bigger deal because TouCans managed to do—in a single outing, no less—something the Flying Rockmite hadn't been able to do in two different POTAs to the same site; namely, to breach the Golden Gate Bridge with a QSO! In our previous two attempts, all of our QSOs avoided the center span of the bridge leading us to hypothesize about the number of 20 meter wavelengths that might fit into the bridge span, the height of the bridge above the water and whatnot. Here's a look at the QSOS from our cliff-side perch during the Flying Rockmite outings. And here's roughly the same view with Project TouCans! Notice the green (I've added RST color coding to our mapping app since the fi

 Discussing ham radios embedded in antennas in the comments of the previous post this morning inspired me to look through some POTA videos and make a new one. Here's a Google Earth tour of the path from the Organ Mountains to Stanford, straight through Baylor Pass. And... Here's Baylor Pass up close.

Thanks to the California QSO Party, I made more than 30 QSOs this weekend running < 5 Watts with Project TouCans: a Rockmite into a Tuna Topper, both mounted inside a pineapple can with a tuna can as a covering housing and antenna mount; the entire rig resides suspended at the feed point of a half wave dipole.

 I never expected the Rockmite ham radio to get anywhere close to working all 50 states. Consequently, the QSO database for the rig doesn't include state or county columns. Diaze—my12 year-old partner in crime—and I set out to fill in the missing data this weekend while she learned to program Python. I'll discuss the complete project soon. While we were working, I learned that I could query Datasette via URL. My SQL is a bit rusty. That pushed me towards controlling Datasette from the outside, and frankly, that made more sense and was more on theme for learning about sending URL requests and using the returned json text—a topic Diaze is working on learning this week. It was also a more complete solution that didn't require moving data from a web page into a Python script. I noticed that when I ran a Python query, and then pressed the link for either CSV or json output, the URL of the output reflected the original query. Here's the query for outputting all QSOs from th

 I'm curious about how many QSOs I'm waking with TouCans from the home station with Project TouCans. I know I'm making many more QSOs, but the data should also bear this out. I could do a cursory glance at my log book, but since most of my QSOs are from POTAs and SOTAs, the analysis becomess a little tedious. Fortunately, I learned SQL years ago, and then the gang and I found out about Datasette.. Here's my query for QSOs per day: select strftime('%Y/%m/%d',timestamp) as day, db, count(*) from rm_rnb_history_pres where dB > 99 group by day order by day asc This yielded the following fairly noisy data because POTA/SOTA. I made the chart by clicking the CSV link in 'This data as json, CSV' on the Datasette page for the query results, copying the data into Excel, and then charting. To find out only about QSOs from my home station, I refined the query to only look at QSOs with tx_lat and tx_lng that were within a few 1/1000s of a degrees from the house a

 I spent some time testing out a theory about briefly running a quarter wave vertical antenna from the backyard.The short answer? The theory did not pan out during an empirical trial this morning. A few days ago, while adjusting the antenna with the radio in beacon mode, I accidentally dropped the end that stretched down to the backyard. The sturdy little radio bounced off of some chicken wire below our back deck. The rig—still embedded in the antenna—was about five feet off the ground, hanging from it's antenna mount on the second floor of the house, and still transmitting. When I got everything sorted back out about half an hour later, I noticed something that seemed weird. The radio had reached W3UA and W3RGA just before it went away during my fixes. I knew I had data on the whole thing , so I put off checking things out until last night. After I updated my database, I wrote a query that found the dropped antenna data select rowid, id, tx_lng, tx_lat, rx_lng, rx_lat, ti