Copasetic Flow

 Here's a thing that happens. The 1 Mii Bluetooth 5.3 Transmitter/Reciver shuts off its power automatically when it either doesn't hear audio for five minutes, or when it's not paired to a pair of headphones for five minutes. These are pretty common things when you're out on a POTA camping trip as the gang and I frequently are.  (Yes, I do see them. No, I haven't had time to figure out what they are this time :) ) One of my favorite things to do is wake at about 3 in the morning to see what weird things the F2 layer is doing. I can actually hear far away signals when there's not a whole city's worth, (I love you San Francicsco, but geesh), of noise. That's how we wound up talking to three stations in Europe on our last POTA above Mountainair while it was snowing outside! But! If the power goes off on the Bluetooth transmitter now that Project TouCans is completely wireless, then I have to bring the whole rig down to reset it. There's an answer thoug...

 TouCans continues to fly on its own! We need to work through the bluetooth transmitter turning itself off to save power. We also need to work through strategies to extend battery life with the Pico-W. At the moment, I'm looking into the MicroPython machine.lightsleep method. It looks like I can suspend operation of the Pico-W for a set amount of time after which it will automatically wake back up. This might be particularly handy for camping expeditions where I could essentially snooze the rig while I snooze.  Work continues on the straight key via WiFi for the rig. Yesterday I hauled the rig around with me all over Lands End hoping for a chance to set up a POTA. It didn't happen, but I did find out that the rig travels well. No issues at all when I reinstalled it in the backyard. As far as kinda cool pictures of the rig for the week, I managed to capture it framed between an almost full moon and Orion It appears that the local aviary life think that TouCans was more than ...

TouCans has always had an issue of accumulating charge... somewhere. This manifests itself as the Rockmite's keyer chip rebooting the first time the key is closed after a long delay (on the order of minutes usually.) The downside of all this is what happens next. The keyer (even though it's in straight key mode) is unresponsive until the Rockmite is power cycled. Here's the thing though. TouCans' power source is in the air now. It's in the antenna with the rest of the rig. It's up there: Consequently, cycling power has become a bit of an issue. Not to worry though. KO6BTY and I added two additional relays this morning, (we're eventually going to also be able to toggle the RockMite's programming line to be back to  working on two frequencies.) We changed the keyer code just a bit to interpret a capital 'P' as a command to reboot the Rockmite. The command fires GPIO-17 on the Pico-W. That pin is used as the control line on the first addit...

 Project TouCans is still on the air! I made a QSO with W2AZZ last night, and the rig was spotted in Europe again last night. The rig has a bit of an issue in that the Pico-W drains its two AA batteries over the course of less that 12 hours. For POTA outings of a few hours, this won't really be an issue. For our POTA camping outings, this is a bit more of a problem. We're going to look into ways to have the Pico-W got into a semi-sleep mode via firmware. The plans I'm thinking of right now would entail the keyer turning off its WiFi and then checking back in say every two minutes for 30 seconds. Seems like kind of a reasonable tradeoff. I mean, I've had tube rigs that needed that long to warm up :)

Powered TouCans made its first QSO today. The operator on the other end was K8IIJ north of San Diego, CA. Rather fittingly it was a QRP to QRP QSO!  KO6BTY had the idea to power the Raspberry Pi Pico-W from the same Imuto battery bank as well. We'd abandoned this idea early on in the prototype stages of the keyer because RFI on the battery return line from the rig would flumox things about 7 characters into a CQ call. I thought we might have better luck now that the battery line's only six inches long. We had different luck. In this incarnation, the Pico is unable to make WiFi connections when powered by the brick, so back to the 2 AAs we went. In other news, the rig survived its first unintentional drop test this morning! The cranky antenna connector acted up again. This time, the bolt simply stripped away from the threads dropping the rig ten feet to the ground. The Bluetooth audio transmitter popped its stereo cable on both ends, but that was the extent of the damage! The ri...

 When we talk about wireless we usually mean propagation. But what if a ham radio didn't even have a feed line!? Project TouCans has done exactly that! If you're new here, the goal of Project TouCans has always been to have a simple, (I know, it doesn't look simple at the moment), radio that alleviates the operator from needing to think about feelines and SWRs. (Becuase I'm the operator and I don't like thinking about those sorts of things.) The first, very fruitful, year long iteration of this was to move the radio into the antenna. The rig still had wires descending to the ground for the keyer controls, power, and audio though. They all traveled along an Ethernet cable terminated in an RJ-45 jack at either end. There was RFI. It was not as cool as it could have been. Over the last two weeks KO6BTY and I finally accomplished our ultimate goal: We got rid of the Ethernet cable!!! A week and a half ago, we rid ourselves of the need for keyer wires by adding a Pico-W...

 Hey Everyone! It snowed! The ham radio was awesome though! Project TouCans was spotted in England, and made three QSOs into Europe about about 4 AM in the morning in New Mexico! Here's TouCans braving the winter storm. It's low in the center of the picture in it's coffee bag rain/snow shield. The white streaks are the camera picking up rather rapidly falling snow flakes. Unbeknownst to me, the rental car that KO6BTY and I had picked up the night before was very, very much not a 4WD SUV. Just two, and not a good two at that. We'd checked the weather three times on the way up the mountain the day before, and snow was not in the forecast. When I woke up t midnight to a gentle pattering on the top of the tent, since it was a bit warmer, I assumed the pattering was rain. It wasn't. It was snow. A thin layer of snow on the rain fly will actually serve as insulation, warming the tent a bit. Oh boy. As an aside, Tawnse, the youngest of the gang ( now 9 ) and I had a simila...

Tracking down a mapping bug led me to watch clouds on Google Earth and after yesterday's snow storm—more on that later—I suddenly found myself scraping weather radar data to layer on top of the K-4514 POTA site KO6BTY camped at on Friday night. Here's the map of the POTA activation/camping trip that started on a clear evening, became a dusting of snow, and then became more snow than the rental car could handle: That's the camping site/radio station there at the pink x. The not quite beautifully formatted time in the upper left-hand corner is UTC time starting at midnight at the camp site. As you can see, the snow started, thought it might give up, and then resumed with gusto. I'll talk about that on my activation report. Here's the cool thing though! I've mostly automated the creation of radar weather maps for a given POTA activation site!  Here's how: The Source Data: I'm scraping nexrad data from this site. https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/maps/radar/ I learn...

 Just a quick update New keyer chip installed last night after blowing out the old one on an SOTA outing This morning, reattached antenna to tuna can mounts (inside) again Moved to coffee bag rain shield

 On a far less math-heavy jaunt, I finally got around to trying to figure out how fast the auto-keyer KO6BTy and I put togehter could send CW. For the moment, the keyer's record is 31 WPM without errors. I can't key that fast, so I'm going to go ahead and declare that fast enough!