Skip to main content

Week Notes: TouCans Noise Improved, 3 QRP Ham Radio POTA Activations, an NAQCC Sprint, and Camping and Programming


 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 keyer working with TouCans Wireless. Development on the straiht keyer has been slow, but I did make a QSO using it.

And... I haven't written about it yet, but you'll notice the gang and I used OpenAI to build a banner for Project TouCans!

Blog Posts over the last few weeks



The gang and I finally got to go camping again. Mota and Tawnse, the 11 and 9 year-old have learned to start fires at their forest-esque school! This led to s'mores which, I hear were delicious! 
During the trip, we also tested out TouCans Wireless. It worked well, reaching Alaska and the East Coast pretty handily.



Things I Learned

I finally have a repeatable method to add timestamps to my Google Earth map animations. Of course, it's based on the Google Visualization API, so it's not necessarily permanent.




I'll try to be a bit more reliable with these 'weekly' updates. Who knows? Maybe this is the start of a streak!






Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please leave your comments on this topic:

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...
10 comments
Read more

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 ...
3 comments
Read more

The Valentine's Day Magnetic Monopole

There's an assymetry to the form of the two Maxwell's equations shown in picture 1.  While the divergence of the electric field is proportional to the electric charge density at a given point, the divergence of the magnetic field is equal to zero.  This is typically explained in the following way.  While we know that electrons, the fundamental electric charge carriers exist, evidence seems to indicate that magnetic monopoles, the particles that would carry magnetic 'charge', either don't exist, or, the energies required to create them are so high that they are exceedingly rare.  That doesn't stop us from looking for them though! Keeping with the theme of Fairbank[1] and his academic progeny over the semester break, today's post is about the discovery of a magnetic monopole candidate event by one of the Fairbank's graduate students, Blas Cabrera[2].  Cabrera was utilizing a loop type of magnetic monopole detector.  Its operation is in...
1 comment
Read more