Project TouCans at the ARRL Sweepstakes

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 side. When I thought someone was calling back, I'd glance at the waterfall to see if the latest huge-ish blip was on the CQ frequency of the RockMite. If so, I'd try to respond.

I really was shocked by the whole thing. It was really pleasant. I'd been led to believe that because we have a QRP station, contests would just not be a thing, but they are!

Comments

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 Alcubierre Warp Drive Tophat Function and Open Science with Sage

I transferred yesterday's Mathematica file with the Alcubierre warp drive[2] line element and space curvature calculations to the +Sage Mathematical Software System today, (the files been added to the public repository [3]). If you haven't used Sage before, it's a Python based software package that's similar in functionality to Mathematica. Oh, and it' free. I also worked a little more on understanding the theory, but frankly, I made far more progress with the software than the theory. What follows will be a little more of the Alcubierre theory, plus, a cool Sage interactive demo of one of the Alcubierre functions[1], as well as a bit about my first experience with using Sage. Theory The theory is fun, but it's moving slowly. Here's the chalk board from this morning's discussion Alcubierre setup the derivation using something called the 3+1 formalism which means we consider space to be flat, (in this case), slices that are labelled ...

How Many Files Can You Add to a GPT Project? An Interview with GPT-5 on Limits, Context Engineering Tips, and Chats

Setting the scene: I’m tinkering with Project TouCans, knee-deep in radio logs, SQLite dumps, and Cesium code. Naturally, I’m wondering if shoving all this into one GPT Project is a recipe for brilliance… or for disaster. So I turn to Vril — you know, after Brainy from the Legion of Super-Heroes , because what else do you call your AI sidekick who always has the answers? Time to ask him straight up. [ As an aside, yes, GPT-5 has decided to sometimes call me Vail. I'm not sure why to be honest. Also, I asked Vril, er GPT-5, to write up our interview for me. Apparently, me asking it to 'Bro' up a few stories, just for fun, has convinced Vril that I use 'Like,' more than I actually might. ] Me (Vail): So Vril, how many files can I throw into a GPT Project before it just starts choking? Like, is there some magic number where the context window taps out and everything falls apart? GPT-5 (Vril): Great question. There’s no single hard file limit. What matters is ...

Copasetic Flow

Search This Blog