Project TouCans POTA K-0647: The Deets

Working POTA in San Francisco is a treat!

On the way to the POTA site—Lands End—I got to sttop off at two art musems, and ride, oh, I don't, know, at least 7 different buses, and it was awesome! My first stop was at the DeYoung Museum. While there, I checked out the Robert Henri paintings. He founded (helped to foun?) the ashcan school. We know about him because he influenced Leroy Neiman who made several paintings of one of our favorite hangouts, the Buena Vista.

He's also an interesting artist to me because up until about a year ago, there were portraits of his wife and his mistress—hanging on opposite walls of a gallery in the DeYoung—staring at each other. The mistress was missing from the DeYoung yesterday. I remembered that I'd last seen her painting hanging in the Legion of Honor and since I was headed to Lands End anyway, I made the Legion my next stop.

And the buses lined up! I'd walked to the bottom of the hill to take the 44 to the DeYoung. I hopped back on when I got done there, rode up to 6th & Geary where I waited about 4 minutes, hopped on the 38R and rode to 33rd and Geary. There, I waited another four minutes, and caught the 18 to the front drive of the Legion of Honor. Piece of cake.

The Legion was a thing to behold, as always. I started in the Central Rodin Gallery

Wait, first I hit the men's room actually, but even there

Just before I left the museum, I found the Monet's

Strikingly calm after my visit with the Monets, I started my short walk to my operating site. Two falcons helped to up the mood just a bit. As they flew over a golf course tee box directly to my left, they started keening and passed almost straight overhead, veering just a bit as they saw me. One held a pigeon in its talons, apparently the source of all the excitement.

Upon arrival, I started to set up the station in earnest. I always see station setup pictures like this at qrper.com and I couldn't resist taking one

The rig, keyer, antenna, and battery had made it handily through two museum coat checks and four bus rides. Yes, I did finally break down and purchase a LiFePO4 battery. The deciding factor was that the battery weighed the same as the 8 D cells that Project TouCans uses. Bonus points: The box the battery was shipped in has become the new keyer box.

In fairly short order—only four twine tosses as I got the feel of that day's lever stick—the rig was safely ensconced in the center of its half wave dipole antenna under the eucalyptus canopy.

I sat down and began to call CQ POTA at the foot of a tree with—very—distant views of the Marin shores and the Golden Gate Bridge.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the QSOs were spread out all over—mostly—the Western United States:

About an hour or so after I started calling CQ, I brought down the antenna and Project TouCans, and headed for the house.

The buses didn't link up quite as well on the way home. I had to wait maybe 10 minutes for one of them. On the ride I started working on logging and mapping QSOs.

I ran into a few bugs in my logging and mapping apps or I'd have been done before I got off the bus.

As it was I carried on my work with a beer and a brownie as I waited for the 54, my last bus of the day.

Project TouCans is still very much a work in progress. It did phenomenally well though, and San Francisco—as always—made everything fun.

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:

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

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

Copasetic Flow

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