Did Project TouCans Have a Vertical Quarter Wave Antenna for Just a Bit?

 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, timestamp, strftime('%H:%M:%S',timestamp) as tod, dB, frequency, Spotter from rm_rnb_history_pres where "timestamp" > :p0 and tod > strftime('%H:%M:%S','13:01:01') and tod < strftime('%H:%M:%S','16:01:01') order by timestamp 

Quickly enough, I found the two stations:

11286	1661375211	-122.42299	37.72286	-112.0417	33.3125	2023-10-05T14:07:00	14:07:00	16	14058.0	K7MJG
11287	1661375206	-122.42299	37.72286	-94.9583	39.1458	2023-10-05T14:07:00	14:07:00	9	14058.0	K3PA-1
11288	1661374995	-122.42299	37.72286	-122.2917	37.8958	2023-10-05T14:07:00	14:07:00	2	14058.0	NU6XB
11285	1661375503	-122.42299	37.72286	-76.7083	40.8958	2023-10-05T14:08:00	14:08:00	3	14058.0	W3RGA
11284	1661376390	-122.42299	37.72286	-71.4583	42.8958	2023-10-05T14:10:00	14:10:00	8	14058.0	W3UA
11306	1661392150	-122.42299	37.72286	-114.4583	51.8125	2023-10-05T14:50:00	14:50:00	10	14057.5	VE6WZ
11307	1661392145	-122.42299	37.72286	-122.5417	49.1875	2023-10-05T14:50:00	14:50:00	6	14057.5	VE7CC

Notice that everything is going smoothly until 14:08 GMT; then TouCans was spotted by two stations on the East Coast; then it wasn't seen again for forty minutes while I put the antenna back up.

But was this different than any other morning in this time window? Let's find out by narrowing down the stations and expanding the time window.

The first pictures we have of operating the Rockmite with the Tuna Topper amp are from 9/12. So, we'll only look for those stations after that:

select rowid, id, tx_lng, tx_lat, rx_lng as longitude, rx_lat as latitude, timestamp, strftime('%H:%M:%S',timestamp) as tod, dB, frequency, Spotter from rm_rnb_history_pres where "timestamp" > :p0 and tod > strftime('%H:%M:%S','13:01:01') and tod < strftime('%H:%M:%S','16:01:01') and (Spotter = "W3RGA" or Spotter = "W3UA") order by timestamp 

I turned on mapping for the query to show that the stations are on the East side of the US.

8421	1653280026	-122.42299	37.72286	-71.4583	42.8958	2023-09-17T14:06:00	14:06:00	7	14057.4	W3UA
11031	1660548883	-122.42299	37.72286	-76.7083	40.8958	2023-10-03T13:09:00	13:09:00	3	14058.1	W3RGA
11050	1660558911	-122.42299	37.72286	-76.7083	40.8958	2023-10-03T13:44:00	13:44:00	4	14058.1	W3RGA
11285	1661375503	-122.42299	37.72286	-76.7083	40.8958	2023-10-05T14:08:00	14:08:00	3	14058.0	W3RGA
11284	1661376390	-122.42299	37.72286	-71.4583	42.8958	2023-10-05T14:10:00	14:10:00	8	14058.0	W3UA

The above data shows that we did in fact hit both stations the morning of the 17th, but...

The morning of the 17th, we weren't in San Francisco, the kid and I were in New Mexico where we did a POTA:

Which leaves the question of what—if anything—was going on on the morning of the third. It looks like nothing all that different, but also, TouCans didn't hit W3UA that morning. Expanding the date range and looking only for W3UA using

select rowid, id, tx_lng, tx_lat, rx_lng as longitude, rx_lat as latitude, timestamp, strftime('%H:%M:%S',timestamp) as tod, dB, frequency, Spotter from rm_rnb_history_pres where tod > strftime('%H:%M:%S','13:01:01') and tod < strftime('%H:%M:%S','16:01:01') and Spotter = "W3UA" order by timestamp 

Reveals we've only ever hit that station twice in the morning since the Tuna Topper has bee in use. Only once from San Francisco—on the morning I dropped the antenna.

What if we ignore the time of day?

4098	1573487640	-122.421006408453	37.80776743	-71.4583	42.8958	2023-04-12T02:20:00	02:20:00	3	14058.3	W3UA
4109	1573489297	-122.421006408453	37.80776743	-71.4583	42.8958	2023-04-12T02:31:00	02:31:00	4	14058.3	W3UA
4122	1573490793	-122.421006408453	37.80776743	-71.4583	42.8958	2023-04-12T02:44:00	02:44:00	3	14058.3	W3UA
4480	1578665448	-122.421006408453	37.80776743	-71.4583	42.8958	2023-04-20T05:44:00	05:44:00	2	14058.4	W3UA
4774	1580768206	-122.421006408453	37.80776743	-71.4583	42.8958	2023-04-25T03:39:00	03:39:00	8	14058.4	W3UA
4844	1581046555	-122.421006408453	37.80776743	-71.4583	42.8958	2023-04-26T06:16:00	06:16:00	4	14058.4	W3UA
4875	1581049916	-122.421006408453	37.80776743	-71.4583	42.8958	2023-04-26T06:40:00	06:40:00	4	14058.4	W3UA
4866	1581051306	-122.421006408453	37.80776743	-71.4583	42.8958	2023-04-26T06:49:00	06:49:00	4	14058.4	W3UA
4892	1581052877	-122.421006408453	37.80776743	-71.4583	42.8958	2023-04-26T07:00:00	07:00:00	4	14058.4	W3UA
4884	1581054493	-122.421006408453	37.80776743	-71.4583	42.8958	2023-04-26T07:13:00	07:13:00	6	14058.4	W3UA
4904	1581056299	-122.421006408453	37.80776743	-71.4583	42.8958	2023-04-26T07:25:00	07:25:00	6	14058.4	W3UA
6216	1635201350	-122.42299	37.72286	-71.4583	42.8958	2023-08-10T03:26:00	03:26:00	3	14058.1	W3UA
6686	1639707187	-122.42299	37.72286	-71.4583	42.8958	2023-08-17T10:18:00	10:18:00	3	14058.0	W3UA
8421	1653280026	-122.42299	37.72286	-71.4583	42.8958	2023-09-17T14:06:00	14:06:00	7	14057.4	W3UA
8580	1653816220	-122.42299	37.72286	-71.4583	42.8958	2023-09-20T01:11:00	01:11:00	5	14057.4	W3UA
8667	1654143172	-122.42299	37.72286	-71.4583	42.8958	2023-09-21T01:54:00	01:54:00	3	14057.4	W3UA
9186	1656003250	-122.42299	37.72286	-71.4583	42.8958	2023-09-24T03:01:00	03:01:00	5	14058.0	W3UA
9169	1656014479	-122.42299	37.72286	-71.4583	42.8958	2023-09-24T03:16:00	03:16:00	5	14057.4	W3UA
10346	1659301184	-122.42299	37.72286	-71.4583	42.8958	2023-10-01T00:48:00	00:48:00	5	14058.1	W3UA
11284	1661376390	-122.42299	37.72286	-71.4583	42.8958	2023-10-05T14:10:00	14:10:00	8	14058.0	W3UA
11520	1661557675	-122.42299	37.72286	-71.4583	42.8958	2023-10-06T01:07:00	01:07:00	5	14058.0	W3UA
11499	1661558730	-122.42299	37.72286	-71.4583	42.8958	2023-10-06T01:16:00	01:16:00	5	14057.9	W3UA
11486	1661559149	-122.42299	37.72286	-71.4583	42.8958	2023-10-06T01:20:00	01:20:00	4	14057.3	W3UA

Turns out the solo Rockmite has hit the station a few times, but never in the morning, only at night, and usually from out of town. The only other time W3UA spotted the Rockmite at that time of morning the gang and I were camping at Mt. Tamalpais.

Given the data, it was worth a try to lower the antenna again. I did that exact thing earlier this morning, and the results were exactly as you might have expected. Propagation got worse to everywhere. TouCans only reached W6YX and W6BB and wasn't happy about it. (Rockmites have a pretty wonderful—albeit unintended—audio SWR meter. The sidetone makes audible rasping and sucking noises when the SWR gets out of hand. If things get too far out of hand, the keyer chip will simply reset itself. (This is my safety net for moving the antenna around while the radio is sending.)

So, no new antenna setups, but it was fun to be able to easily play around with the data and try experiments.