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

Noise and Reboot Improvements

NAQCC Sprint Results, A Closer Look at the Rig

Project TouCans Digital noise issue fixed-ish

POTA K-4516: Project TouCans on Monjeau Peak

Spain on a 4 Foot Elevated Dipole on 20 meters with QRP: A Project TouCans Wireless Adventure

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.

First Wireless Toucans POTA K-1178

The straight key is up and Ummm... Limping!!!

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.

Things I Learned: Time Stamps on QSO Maps using the Google Charts API, Datasette, and KML

Things I Learned: Tarred Twine

Things I Learned: Embedding YouTube Shorts

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