Copasetic Flow

 Project TouCans made it to New Zealand at such high levels that it was kinda not believable for a rig that runs 5 Watts. But then, I noticed that W6CSN who was doing a POTA at the Presido just North of me. He was booming into New Zealand even louder! I didn't manage to make a QSO down there this morning, although I did have too really nice QSOs with AZ and WA! It's nice to know the gray line is doing just what everyone says it should! And about an hour later, look what happened: Our gray line had reached New Zealand and turned everything around.

 I've been plunking through our household chargers and power supplies with a few USB-C breakout boards I purchased at Adafruit. As I mentioned previously , it's not immediately obvious which power supplies will do what, and thankfully the Adafruit boards in combination with my power supplies—so far—down-step their voltage if they don't think they can provide enough current. Today, I moved a step towards making this whole process more deterministic when I found a link to the USB power distribution (USB PD) standard on Wikipedia. The tables there at the time of this writing show: I still need to build a table of what portable chargers I can acquire, but this is a good start to—I hope—a really nice backpack or Project ThreeCans supply.

 Project TouCans managed a coat-to-coast POTA QSO with K2JVB out on Long Island the morning! The Dell wall power laptop supply continues to do great things with the rig, driving it to almost it's full QRP allocated five Watts. In other news, the rig was spotted in Uruguay earlier this week! It's signal was anyway :)

 Those of you familiar with Project TouCans can probably immagine where this is headed Could Project TouCans become Project ThreeCans? Should we have a contest to name the new incarnation? Here's what's going on. I set out to write it about this on several occasions, but haven't carved out the time. Sticklers for detail may have noticed that the keyer sprouted a pair of 5 kOhm resistors in the last few weeks. I still don't have time to explain it at lenght, but let's just say that left to its own devices, I'm pretty sure that ground at the keyer is a negative voltage compared to ground at the input of the keyer chip that lives inside  Project TouCans. This leads to the keyer rebooting itself at best, and occasionally getting so cranky that it just gives up. I believe the whole issue is the largeish amount of current that the Tuna Topper amp pulls down the Ethernet cable that supplies both power and the keying signals. The two resistor make the keyer ground more ...

 Welp, this took just under a decade.  To access APRS data, which is handy for tracking things like planes. To access  data use  telnet rotate.aprs.net When the sessions opens, type in your user name and -1 as a password to listen only: user <your_callsign> pass -1 And that's it. You'll get a feed that I won't bother you with the details of,  because I don't know them yet : ) Here's the reference . Notice it mentions port 23. That's telnet! Reference for logging files from Microsoft Telnet .

 Just a really quick note about documentation and revision control. Github will do this When the link to a line of code is 'just' pasted into an issue! Pretty Snazzy! Update This seems to work with Python, but not just plain old text.

 I needed to learn Jinja and/or brush up on my Django skills for work. I decided to go the Jinja route because that template engine is used in other tools at work, plus I could write a Datasette plugin while I learned my way around. It's always bugged me a bit that map_qsos.py programatically writes out the kml files that I use to display our ham radio outings on Google Earth. Print statements are the wrong tool for the job, which—at the end of the day—is to create the same kml lines and points substituting in different station names and locations in a loop. The process fairly screams template engine. Another issue is that even though the data is available in a database after its initial entry, with the previous usage model, I had to collect the versions of qso_update.csv I wanted to map and then combine their calls into a single file. This file was then operated on by map_qsos.py. The whole process was cumbersome, and did not lead to me wanting to explore maps of the log unless t...

 KO6BTY and I took Project TouCans up to Mt. Davidson this morning. We did not activate the summit. We did manager a QSO with K6EL before the keyer may have given out. (We're going to test it here in a bit.) What we did find out is that the imuto charging brick we're using can tune between two really loud radio stations that are presumably both broadcasting from nearby Sutro Tower. With the power cable plugged into the 100 Watt jack, we received the local sports station. With it plugged into the 60 Watt jack, we get music instead. Update: We did in fact lose a keyer chip. When I tried to rub-start the radio, I accidentally touched the power wire to the keyer chip programming input terminal. After that, the keyer chip was forever convinced that I was holding down the programming button. I had planned for this kind of thing—it's happened before—so I had a replacement on hand back at the house.

 Project TouCans can be powered by USB-C! I've been wanting to try this since I learned that there are boards that can be connected to USB-C power supplies that can request different voltages and currents and—if successful—then power a ham radio at that voltage. Today, Project TouCans made it's first ever USB-C powered QSOs! I used a board I purchased at Adafruit. The easiest way to select a voltage and/or current is to solder bridge jumpers and/or scalpel the default jumpers. Beware though, if your input power supply can't handle either your voltage or current request, you'll wind up at the next lowest voltage down the scale that the supply  can support. So, for example, when I broke the default current jumper to ask for 3 Amperes, I went from a happy 15 V supply down to a a 5 V supply, because my laptop charger will not/cannot support 3 amps at 15 volts. I wasn't sure the green board RockMite that makes up half of Project TouCans could support a 15 V supply becau...

 I did not think Project TouCans would make a single QSO in the ARRL Sweepstakes. I was wrong. When all was said and done, the little rig housed in the dipole in our backyard in San Francisco made 17 QSOs whilel working the contest for about three and a quarter hours. One of the QSOs was even to New Hampshire, one of the dwindling number of states the gang and I haven't contacted yet! The rig did great, lots of people were able to hear it. The thing that struck me as being really, really nice of everyone was that while I don't think calling /6QRP made anyone any more interested in calling, it did seem to open up a space on the QRP frequencies. The screenshot below shows the hole that Project TouCan's two available frequencies, 14057.5 and 14058 kHz, fit right into. I used the Utah SDR as a waterfall display for the Project TouCans receiver. It's a RockMite which means that it's really, really wide, and, of course, there were a lot of really loud stations to either s...

 What a nice afternoon! The F2 over San Francisco decided it was ready to go! Five QSOs from the house on 4 W in just a few hours. Project TouCans finally reached into Wyoming, a state we've been mysteriously up until now. Also? I talked with someone on an Elecraft KH1. I'd hear a lot about the rig this week. It was really cool to get to talk to one so soon! TouCans made five QSOs during the afternoon into the early evening. Here's a look at the QSO map .