Copasetic Flow

Automating yesterday's post . Here are the steps to add elevation profile paths to any QSO map: Duplicate the datasette-haversine-point-to-path repository, renaming it datasette-gis-partial-path This should expose a method for lat and a separate method for lng The inputs should be the beginning and end of the path and the number of meters the elevation path should extend The package will use haversine. It will also repackage a few of the earthmid methods Given the inputs, calculate the entire QSO path length using the haversine method. Then, divide the total distance by the input partial distance to get the number of 'partial' length segments exist in the the entire path. Call partial_path_lng and partial_path_lat to get the coordinates of the end of the first segment. Add a new linestring to the kml template. The segment starts at the transmitting station and ends at the coordinates returned in step 3 above. Label the new segment with the receive station's callsign an...

 I started out wondering how to attach videos to kml maps and wound up working on elevation profiles. There's always something new to learn on this project. It's pretty cool! There's something I've often wondered about with respect to QRP on twenty meters with low antennas: how much help is the rig getting from the slope of the hillsides I transmit from? Using Google Earth elevation profiles, It looks like I'll be able to get quantitative answers! The Goal Map the elevation profile of the terrain Project TouCans is situated on in the direction of the transmit path to the other station in a give QSO (radio contact.) The idea is to wind up with something like this. The Steps to Get it Done (First Prototype) Issue: The elevation profile from station to station tends to be very long. I'd like to only look at the profile over a few twenty meter wavelenghts. I don't see any zoom controls in Google Earth for the elevation pofile, so I'll plot a shorter line on...

 This is so cool! I had a discussion a few nights back about what time of day Project TouCans had been spotted in New Zealand on 20 meters—the few times that its signal had reached out that far. We have a Datasette <add link> database of al the rigs QSOs and RBN spots, so it was simple enough to look up the answer. A few minutes after I started, I had a Google Earth Pro map of—kml file—of all the spots. Using the 'Show Sunlight' feature of app, I quickly realized that all of the spots had been at or near grey line. Here's the thing though, I wanted to animate how the sun's position on the horizon changed with each QSO, but... Every time I clicked on a new QSO, Google Earth Pro 'helpfully' moved the maps view camera to center the rather large QSO path on the map from space. Not. Helpful. <Add gif here> And this is where the kml concept of camera saved the day! I was able to add a camera tag to the kml file that pointed the map's camera at the ex...

 Up until yesterday, Project TouCans required two battery packs, one in the rig itself to power the Rockmite and Tuna Topper amplifier and a much smaller external one to power the Pico-W that controls the rig's keyer and straight key. I tried bringing a USB A cable directly from the Imuto power bank in the rig out to the Pico-W, but the RFI was too much for the Pico-W causing it to reboot, or just turn off. That led to the two or three AA battery battery pack, which frankly was a bit to much extra weight, and a bit unwieldy. Thant's all fixed now! I added as second Adafruit USB-C power adapter to the rig and that provided enough filtering that the Pico-W is happy as long as I make sure the rig doesn't transmit at all until the antenna is completely unfurled, which is a pretty reasonable expectation. When/if the rig does transmit with the antenna bundled up, the Pico-W reboots, then it presses the straight key which upsets the rig, causing the rig to reboot, except on re...

 I don't use the nascent straight key mode of the Project TouCans 20 meter ham radio as much as I could because the onboard Pico-W that serves as the control center and keyer of the rig, historically, has had unreliable Wi-Fi performance. (Alas, I partially blame the Windows laptop that sends the straight key signals as well.) Sadly, this can result in the key being stuck down which requires me to lower the radio and reset the keyer. While I've marveled at the fact that a laptop could be 20 feet from the Pico-W and have just adequate communications, and a signal level that showed as medium to weak. That's all, apparently, been fixed with a simple flip of the Pico-W. Literally. The Pico-W had power supply connection issues when mounted in a plug board directly on the rig like so: It's not too, too hard to see why. The battery leads are smallish, and were by no means a compression fit into the plugboard. I fussed fussed with this configuration, but to no avail. Also? ...

 I mentioned the CWops scholarship yesterday beacuse I was looking at their site for an entirely different reason. The (seemingly?) old saw of whether or not to call /QRP as in KD0FNR/QRP had come up again in a ham radio forum. This time, the converstation on GQRP revolved around whether or not the /QRP designator should be removed from RBN calls. Someone remarked that /QRP might already be filtered on the RBN. I tired this morning wiwth Project TouCans. /QRP is still very much a thing on the RBN. I'm trying to understand what all the fuss is about. So, if you have clarifying remarks, or even an opinion, please comment!  Here's what I've got so far: The people that feel you shouldn't do it feel very strongly that you shouldn't do that. Also, the people that feel very strongly about it seem to only mention it in regards to DX pileups.My fifteen minutes of internet ham radio research led to a SOTA forum post where some (one?) ops revealed they would never respond ...

There's a scholarship available for CW ops! When I wrote the Sprat article on our keyer, I thought I was kidding, but I guess the keyer actually is for kids... er students... ummm not that students can't be older than kid age... Anyway. :) The CWOps club offers a $1000 scholarship annually for students who operate CW on the ham bands . Here's what a student needs to do to prove they operate CW "CW Ability: Demonstrated CW operating ability within the last 24 months by providing a copy of a certificate,listing in a magazine showing results or a letter from a person responsible for membership. Examples include but are not limited to the following : i.  ARRL Code Proficiency certificate at 15 wpm or higher; ii. Successful completion of CWA Basic Level or higher; iii. Membership in CWops or HSC or other club where some level of CW proficiency is a requirement for membership; iv. Participation in a CW contest where the results have been published (participation in a multi-o...

 Project TouCans was featured in the qrper.com field kits column!!! I forgot to mention this when it came out a few months ago, but it's there !The noise issues for TouCans are much improved, and getting better. I'm still learning what should go where, but my learning curve seems to be accelerating a little bit at least. The most recent improvement—as of this afternoon—is that it helps to tape the transceiver to the back of the rain shield. Wireless TouCans enabled me to do something I've never done before. I activate, not one, not two, but three parks in New Mexico last weekend! I activated  US-4551 Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument, US-4516 Lincoln National Forest, and finally,  US-7877 Valley of Fires National Recreation Area. (Notice the new US designators in place of the Ks.) From the Organs, my first QSO was with Spain ! Given that I haven't published a 'week notes' in about a month, I should also add that I have a very rudimentary straight...

 Just a quick note. I mentioned yesterday that the rig has been rebooting when the keyer is run to quickly. This appears to be related to a design choice I didn't mention. I'd moved the headphone plug's ground wire directly onto the USB-C power adapter ground port. Moving the wire back to a ground connection at the keyer relay has solved the reboot issue, at least for the morning. At the same time, I also routed the ground wire across the bottom of the battery pack, keeping it even further away from the USB-C power adapter. Speaking of mornings

 Only one QSO for the sprint. Still, TouCans did well with respect to noise and was spotted in Northern Europe! Also, I had a great QSO with an op new to CW, and that's one of the points of NAQCC, so I'm calling this a win. As the sprint was winding down, I made a video of the rig suspended above the back yard. You can see the arrangement of the Bluetooth transmitter I've been talking so much about lately . You can also see the edge of the Pico-W board that's handling the keying functionality for the rig. The rig made its first QSO of  the evening out to Utica, NY followed by two more QSOs into Colorado. The QSOs to Europe happened right at gray line

 The intermittent noise issues in Wireless TouCans are fixed! Sort of. After a variety of fixes that involved resoldering the audio jack and taping the audio cables in various locations, I finally arrived at a solution yesterday. The solution came in two parts and is still a little bit rough. First, I replaced the rig's headphone jack with a headphone plug. It doesn't make a lot of sense for the rig to have a headphone jack, except for debug purposes—on  rare occasions I plug in headphones while the rig is being worked on. It does make sense for it to have an audio micro-stereo plug since that's the format the Bluetooth audio transmitters expect. You can see the original version of the audio out plug and patch cable in the picture of an early TouCans version below. Notice the headphone jack to the left of the Bluetooth transmitter under the rain shield. That's the bit that's been removed. Now, the audio wires from the rig that were attached  to the jack are soldered...

Project TouCans did its first somewhat high antenna elevation POTA in Lincoln National Forest over the weekend. The cloud cover was thick at 9,000 feet, so I didn't notice something about the QTH that definitely affected the QSO map. The cloud cover also made for a very quiet forest with the occasional exception of four wheel drive vehicles turning around because the last little bit of Forest Service Road 117 up to Monjeau Lookout was gated closed. This was the first POTA where TouCans was substantially—meaning more than four feet up —suspended by tarred twine . It turns out that the stuff works spectaculalrly well!  The area was gorgeous. I grew up in the mountains around here. Both the drive up and the very small hike felt very famililar and very comfortable. The air felt right. I live at sea level these days, so I had to move slow—it's all my body was going to allow me to do—but the space called for slow, easy movements anyway. You'll see. QSO Maps You'll probably no...

Powered TouCans is heavy.  The Imuto battery pack it uses weighs in at about a pound, making it the heaviest component of the antenna-borne rig. I've always enjoyed using butcher twine to support the rig, but it looked—and felt—very much like butchers twine was not going to support Powered TouCans, (aka Wireless TouCans.) Butchers twine has always had a bit of an issue getting a bit jammed up on the sap of various trees. This has led to be being able to feel when the twine is about to break. With the extra weight of the battery pack, I've been having this feeling a lot more often. I needed a different way to suspend the radio, but didn't want to resort to rope if I could avoid it. Enter tarred twine . I'd never heard of this stuff before it on Amazon, but wow! It's tensile strenght is higher, it can be about the same weight, and it doesn't hang up on tree limbs as much. The tar reduces the friction of the string overall. This led to no limb jams over the last w...

 Spain!!! My first QSO yesterday afternoon was with EA1EC in Spain. This is a new Project TouCans record—of sorts—for QSOs with a very-low-height 20 meter dipole! Do the Organ Mountains— K-4551— just have the knack for this? Maybe. In any event, TouCans does very, very well there. As usual, TouCans was running five Watts. Here's the QSO map from yesterday afternoon Also notice the QSO to Alaska! Here's the antenna placement: The antenna feed point is about four feet up! Just as strange, the antenna was supported—via a piece of tarred twine—by a metal picnic shelter on the other end, as shown in the video below One of the things TouCans has demonstrated really well is that amateur radio operators should 'just get an antenna in the air.' The rest usually takes care of itself.

 I'm still using that API that was deprecated. I know I should give it up, but it just keeps being useful. It's possibly the best Google product ever. (In that it just keeps on existing rather than falling into the deprecation void.) Specifically, I used the dynamic icon portion of the Google Charts API.  The Google Earth Pro animations of our QSO are missing something. (OK, maybe lots of things, but one thing I saw that I could add on this iteration.) They don't have a way to easily view the time of each QSO, or the progression of time during the POTA or SOTA session. Thanks to a suggestion  from a StackOverlow user , dynamic bubble icons have provided that! I've added icons that appear with each QSO on the map, displaying the callsign, received RST, and and time of the QSO, as well as a different set of time icons that simply update each minute of map time to display the UTC time as the map animates. Using the Google Dynamic Icon API The following address gives b...

Project TouCans made its first POTA flight this weekend! The rig made 51 QSOs! Alas, there were issues we get to fix.. Which is actually kind cool :) What the rig did well OK, the rig made it coast to coast, up to Alaska, and into Canada! Pretty impressive if I do say so myself. You might n otice that the bottom of the irg is about eight feet off the ground.That might make it seem like our radiation angle for 20 meters would be pretty high based on this Taken from  Radio Antenna Engineering The antenna is about 0.12 wavelengths off the ground, so the angle—and I'm being kind giving it that extra .012, but the twine was stretchy making that within the margtin of errorr for this back of the envelope estimation—should be about 60 degrees as marked by the red arrow. But, that's if the ground is flat. We were on the edge of a ridge. I know this because I kept having to chase the roll of butcher's twine down the hill. I used the SOTA map for nearby Mt. Tamalpais  (CC-063) summit ...

  Wireless TouCans made its first straight key QSO with N2TNN last night! There are definitely kinks to work out in the straight keyer—most of them having to do with the keyer locking on—but I was able to hobble along at about twelve words per minute to complete the QSO! As you can see, the QSO was just about coast to coast, from San Francisco to  Gloucester, VA on five watts! For now, the straight keyer constructs a stream of keyboard key up and key down times in milliseconds. When the op hits the 'esc' key, that list is sent to the Pico-W that lives on the rig. The Pico-W then holds down the key for the first number of milliseconds in the list, releases the key for the second number and so on. Essentially, it records the op's fist, and then plays it back just a little bit later. Next steps include auto-buffering up key presses and shipping them off so that the op isn't bothered with that part of the process. Another nice feature might be a relay that shuts off the aud...