Project TouCans: Breaching the Bridge

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 first outings) QSO that breaches the bridge! This QSO led to much huzzahing and then a few unschooling projects.

First, we wanted a spiffy QSL card to commemorate the event. Diaze and 10 year-old Mota—aliases of course—collaborated and using Powerpoint came up with

I like to think that Edward Tufte would be proud, but who knows. While the gang and I have been messing with ham radio a lot over the last few months, I've kind of wandered away from posts addressing, "But how do you teach kids to ..... learn PowerPoint for example?" questions. Needless to say at this point, but "This is How." Diaze is into all things programming and art, Mota is inccreasingly into art and design for video game production, and voila.

Seeing the QSO meander over the bridge led me to thinking about what role the ionosphere might have had to play which led to a programming project for Diaze: retrieving data from our nearest ionosonde via the Python requests package. This led to a series of maps that I think Tufte would simply shake his head and walk away from—to be clear, this was my contribution—becasue they are very, very cluttered. But still, they're kind of fun, and they'll get better. In short, they show a model of a simple single skip from tx to rx for each QSO. Here's a video of one of them:

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