Project TouCans: Doing more Radio with Less Since 2023

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 from the elements. Starting to see what I mean about getting on the air with less?

I love the idea of the double reply post cards. I read up on their history, and they started as a way for exclusive resorts in Japan to ensure that only people they invited would make reservations. You received your resort invite on the one card, and replied with the other. Likewise, when you receive a QSL card from KD0FNR you can reply right away with the other card. You can also paste your card to the reply card. You can also cut the mallard off the reply card and paste it to your card. (Yes, I've tried all these things.)

Oh! If anyone reading the blog has a line on International Reply Coupons, please let me know! These things are great! They enable a double reply postcard sort of exchange, but for hams who don't live in the States! The US doesn't sell them anymore, but is required to honor them.

Hams making use of their side of the double reply card was slow going at first—probably more because we weren't making as many QSOs pre-TouCans—but hams are starting to figure out innovative ways to use the double reply cards we send out. Here's a video of one from KR8P we received this week.

Getting back to the antenna shown on the QSL cards Constructed from 40 feet of 12 gauge stranded wire bought—once again—from a hardware store at the bottom of the hill on the 54 line. The big technical evolution two weeks ago was to turn the banana plugs backwards and use terminal lugs to attach the antenna to Project TouCans.

The idea worked extraordinarily well, and I didn't even have to shop for the terminal rings. The 12, 10, and 8 year-old gang hopped the 54 down the hill, visited the hardware store, got a pastry at a coffee shop, and wandered back up. Also, we just used the channel-locks we had on hand to crimp the connections. We did not buy a crimping tool.

The other thing I'm enamored of today is our antenna launcher. It involves butcher's twine and sticks provided by the trees we're using to mount the antenna. Here's a video of our antenna launch in last weekend's POTA at K-4514—Cibola National Forest—above Mountainair.

I keep saying 'we', and that's because most of the time I play radios with the 12, 10, and 8 year-old gang here whose dad I am. That's the eight year old playing recovery crew for the butcher twine spool. The ten year old is the filming crew. The gang together also frequently provide a cheering section.

Tawnse—internet alias for the 8 year-old—and I found a stick. I've talked about the discovery of the stick launcher before. A few weeks ago, I finally figured out that by snapping my wrist at the end everything just worked. It's all in the wrist—apparently. Using a roll of twine rather than a weight is also a hugely important point. The twine—as you can see by playing the video at a lower speed—unwinds itself as it falls to the ground. Perhaps paradoxically, this keeps it from getting tangled in the tree. When we used rocks and other non-spinny things for weights, we often wound up with rocks wrapped around limbs which wasn't incredibly helpful and a little bit embarrassing.

Next time, I'll show you the radio launch and the keyer!

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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

Copasetic Flow

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