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Threading the Valley: Australia from Colorado on 20 meters and 5 Watts with Project TouCans

 The gang and I made our first QSO with Australia this week!

The QSO came bundled with two other DX contacts made with Project TouCans—all in a 16 minute window—which I'll write about soon. Our camping site is nestled below Anvil Mountain to the East and across the Million Dollar Highway from South Mineral Springs, about two miles north of Silverton, CO. We're surrounded by peaks on all sides. Bear Mountain peak is framed in my pictures of the rig.

Project TouCans was probably 20 feet up in its dipole. This turned out to be difficult to show in photographs with the proper perspective. I finally decided to make a gif of different zoom levels of a single photo. The picture below starts out focused on Bear Mountain Peak and then zooms out to include the rig and the ground outside my partner's and my tent.


You can see the Bluetooth transmitter that brings the head phone audio down to the ground hanging from the bottom of the rig.

The campsite is gorgeous and almost completely bug free. I managed to make it out on one hike. Tawnse—the nine year-old—our puppy, and I were treated to views like this



Notice the mountains lurking very nearby in every shot.

That brings us to the circumstances of the QSO with VK3YV, the first DX QSO of that morning. Here's our campsite from a way's out showing the F2 skip path (estimated using real-time data from the Boulder, CO ionosonde), as well as the path of the QSO along the ground. 


Zooming in a bit reveals just how many peaks we were surrounded by and shows our location relative to Silverton.

So, with all those mountains in the way, how did we talk to Australia?

Project TouCans threaded the valley to the west of our campsite! Check this out!

I'll leave you with the map of the QSO so you can trace along the path at your leisure. Use the time control in the lower left corner or the slider along the bottom of the map to locate the QSO at 12:40 UTC. From there, you can zoom in and out using a mouse center-button wheel. You can also tilt by holding down the control key, and then moving the map using the left mouse button.




Update

Due to a bug in the ionosonde code that I'd immediately introduced, the F2 layer height was not 307 km as shown in the diagram above. It was in fact, 235 km over Hawaii which had data at the time, (Boulder, CO in fact did not), and which was closer to the middle of the QSO path as well. The difference in F2 height resulted in the first mountain intersection that used to look like this



with the incorrect data looking like this with the new F2 height data



References

Ionosonde Data

This was made possible with data collected by 

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