Copasetic Flow

 Back in November, I pushed a datasette plugin to the rm-rbn-history repository that used Jinja and the existing table of QSO coordinates that's also housed in the repository to create kml maps based on Datasette queries.  Here's a video of the latest use case: applying for the SKCC 1,000 Miles per Watt Award In the video I demonstrate the following: Creating a histogram of QSOs by date Querying QSOs by date range to isolate a single day Creating a KML map that loads into Google Earth installed on a Chromebook

 Just a brief post about our recent Organ Mountains K-4551 POTA. The outing was a blast! KO6BTY and I had to go to New Mexico to pick up our Christmas Tamales last weekend. On the way we worked both Cibola National Forest K-4514 and Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument K-4551 . And! at the Organ Mountains, Project TouCans made a QSO with SM2SUM in Sweden on 5 Watts! There was a really cool thing about the grey line as well! That's documented in the video below. Oh! And one last note! There was Aurora flutter on the CW signal from Sweden! So Cool! Here are the propagation maps with 10 QSOs at Cibola National Forest and 32 QSOs at Organ Mountains . 10 QSOs from Cibola National Forest K-4514 32 QSOs from Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument K-4551

 OK, here's the map and it's data gif and a timer thrown in for good measure. This was all created using the repository on Google Earth Engine . The data is the surface moisture in the Bay Area from 11/28 to 12/7 measured every 3 hours for 9 days to give 72 images that are displayed at 8 images per second making a 9 second gif.

 Everything I learned today centers around a question I still haven't learned the answer to. Can we use groudn wave propagation SnR data between San Francisco, Berkeley, and Stanford to measure soil moisture? I noticed that the SNR (signal to noise ratio) as measured  by the RBN (reverse beacon network) spotting stations went up after we started routinely getting rain last week. First, let's get some data to support what I'm saying. The stations are W6YX, (located in Stanford), W6BB, (located in Berkeley), and NU6XB, (also located in Berkeley). Using Datasette to look at the SNR levels from the three stations for the last three weeks gives The top two charts, W6BB and W6YX show some trends. The chart for NU6XB, at first glance, actually seems to disprove that the increased ground water had anything to do with better SNR. In any event, here's the ground moisture data captured over the same time span. PMoisture data 11/22 ...

 When I get up to head to work, most mornings I check out the 20 m band conditions. I get up well before grey line, but every so often... The F2 drops in out of nowhere, or it just stayed from the day before. Today was one of those days! I saw that the maximum usable frequency was clocking in at 13.61 MHz, so I kicked off the keyer on Project TouCans as I staggered about the house waking up. A few minutes later, I was fairly certain I heard something over the rigs speaker. I keyed '?' but no one was there. The RBN, however, had lit up all the way to the East Coast! A few minutes later, using the SKCC Sked Page I'd made a QSO with N1FG in Hew Hampshire again! The contact lasted just long enough for the two of us to exchange SKCC numbers, and then the band started to shut back down on both ends. As a last little interesting piece of data (ephemera?) 10 minutes after our QSO, the RBN station at Stanford, W6YX which routinely measures 10 dB over what I assume is a ground wave ...

 We have new software projects to play with here at the KD0FNR/KO6BTY ham shack in December. First, Datasette announced a new toy to play with! Enrichments If you've been regularly reading, or watching the repository for the logging software the kids and I have been building for oursevles, you've seen me mention Datasette before. It's a tool for browsing data sets using SQLite, and then applying various analyses to the data. The kids and I have used it to map  QSOs in a number of different ways. Simon Willison announced that the tool now feautres something called enrichments . What do they do? In short, they allow the user to apply operations to data that can subsequently be written back into a database. The post linked to above demonstrates how enrichments work using a geocoding example. The example uses OpenCage to geocode addresses. We've been using the Google Maps API here to do a similar thing, so the first obvious project is  Creating a Datasette enhancement th...

 I saw that I haven't written in a while. We've been busy to put things mildly. December is one of our busiest months around here. KO6BTY is working on building out here 10 meter Rockmite! It's coming along nicely and a little bit at a time. That's about all I got for now. Baking is also ramping up here at the house. Hopefully I'll have more on that soon. Oh and Pico Ws! But anyway.