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Ham Radio, Wi-Fi, Pico-W, Datasette, KML, and WonderCon: Week Notes for the Week Ending April 1, 2024

 Oh my goodness, it's been a busy week!

We made our triumphant return to WonderCon, finally pulling off a trip we had planned four years ago in 2020. The funny book show at the Anaheim Convention Center is just kinda spectacular. I highly recommend it. It's laid back enough for me, but there's still a lot of things going on. Among other people, we saw Gail Simone, Marv Wolfman, and Steve Orlando all on one panel. During the trip, we got to try out a new bus route, the Metro 206 which goes from near the convention center to downtown LA over the span of about two hours. We'd plan to take Amtrak, but then the train had delays and, as it turned out, even more delays. We did better taking the bus for $1.75 a piece.

I was able to play around with what felt like a lot of code in my spare time. I was releived to find that it's still pretty easy for me to set up a one off Datasette plugin. The result was the elevation profile plugin and template that sprung out of me right clicking a path in Google Earth Pro to see what the menu choices were.

Before we headed out on our WonderCon journey, I'd been playing with watching gray line for different New Zealand spots of Project TouCans, (still no ham radio QSOs to there yet.) That led to me learning a few things about camera angles in KML.

The last few days have been so busy that I forgot that earlier in the week Project TouCans slimmed down to a single battery pack. The rig is working quite nicely in that form factor.

I've been studying for my upcoming Cantonese midterm. That inspired me to 'ahem, accidentally, find my old tone typing chart and update it.

Finally, it won't be open for apps for several months, but there's a CW scholarship available.


Videos

I made shorts showing a never before seen view of Project TouCans looking back up the hill at the home QTH and a nice, quiet sunrise with birds singing in the background 
Project TouCans antenna looking up the hill at our home QTH
Sunrise at the KD0FNR/KO6BTY antenna farm
The final video of the week revolved around looking at gray line propagation to New Zealand:

This Week's Goals

I'm going to be traveling more, so I'm going to try to map POTA parks in LA with respect to bus and train stops. Maybe I'll get lucky. It's happened before.

I'd like to finally put a small hole in the bottom of Project TouCan's battery pack holder, (a Progresso soup can), to bring the audio output wire through. I have it in my head that this re-route will remove any remaining Pico-W audio interference issues. Here's hoping.

If I get to do a POTA activation, I'm going to try to film the whole thing ala K4SWL.

I'm hoping to send out some more QSL cards from our, I wish I could say recent, from our radio activities for the last several months.

I'm going to keep thinking about how to integrate a Halikey with Project TouCans.






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