Copasetic Flow

Over the weekend, KOTBTY and I got to spend more time moving the CW key relay inside Project TouCans and adding a power on/off latching relay. As you can hear and see in the video below, the latching relay is up and running! Thanks for Simon Willison for the Claude artifact that enabled me to easily package up the video below. Ha, that's interesting! It's not so much a video packaging as a video thumbnail tool , which is of course what it said it was. Well, here's the video all bundled up into an iframe ready for your viewing—and listening—pleasure. I'll have to work with the gang on a version of the tool that outputs iframes soon. What you can see in the video: the Darlington array has two control leads coming into it from the PICO-Ws GPIO 17 and GPIO 18 pins, (the orange and red wires respectively.) Now that we're using a latching relay, we need one control wire to latch the power on and a second wire to latch the power off. Positive rely coil power is attached...

 One remotely controllable switch that Project TouCans has been missing is an on/off switch. Once the rig's up in the air, it's powered until we bring it bakc down or the battery goes dead. We're working on changing that. A few weeks ago after reading about Darlington arrays on a ham radio forum message I can no longer locate, we put a plan in place. K06BTY got our twow main comcponents soldered ont a board and we stepped away from the project for a few weeks. We're back and just about ready to go. Here's what we have now K06BTY installed our keyer relay dead-bug style using superglue below the single-pole double-throw power relay . We're using the Darlington relay pictured at the top of the column to protect the Pico-W from directly delivering current to the relay coils, an activity that can destroy at least the GPIO portion of the Pico-W, (ask me how I know.) More updates soon. For step by step progress updates see TouCan's github page for this project .

 Project TouCans is rock locked, meaning that it operates on a single frquency: 14057.4 kHz at teh moment. This leads to station operation that looks a bit different from most. Notice that while we do use the RBN , it's mostly as a wellness check for TouCans. For us to call a station, they have to be on frqueqncy, so we also use the tool shown in the terminal window to the left, rbn_telnet.py . We can start it with a signal range such as  python3 rbn_telnet.py -b 14057 -e 14059 The tool then connects to the RBN's telnet feed and filters for only calls between the -b and -e arguments in kHz.

 Immediately after getting TouCans back on the air a few days back,  I was presented with the opportunity to see a few things about how the rig works and whether or not its antenna angle might be an issue. W6CSN shared a post about his POTA outing with his KH-1 on the same day. I inquired as to the power  he used. He replied that he was running 4 Watts into his EFHW antenna from San Pablo Bay National Wildlife Refuge, US-0212 .  I have, for a long time, wanted to find out if the Rocky Mountains barrier faced by TouCans during the day is a feature of the rig, the ionospher, or the rig's antenna angle, (sloping down a hill in the backyard.) Based on Matt's QSO report and RBN spots vs. my RBN spots for the day, it looks like the barrier might be an ionosphere thing: Matt's QSOs on 9/2/2024 Notice the cutoff  with no QSOs past Utah and Arizona. That's what I saw during the same day for TouCans on the RBN: Project TouCans RBN Spots 15:00 UTC to 22:00 UTC Here, you c...

I mentioned earlier that Project TouCans is back on the air. It's also on the air with a stronger signal than it had two weeks ago. The difference? That's it! That's the whole thing. Notice that the wire, which is coming apart and needs to be replaced, is wrapped onto the insulator with only about two or three inches of itself. For the last several weeks, I've been wrapping it with between six and seven inches of itself. Going back to the shorter wrap immediately led to more signal! I guess resonant dipole antennas are really resonant!

 Project TouCans is back up and running! The rig just stopped dead in its tracks during the NAQCC Sprint a few weeks back, and that was that. After two hours of debug and soldering yesterday, it's back. A few things of note: The battere was completely dead. The imuto power supplies TouCans uses hold their charge for weeks, so I'm guessing this was the number one issue. But! The battery didn't do it's usual buck supply hum into the radio, (hence me not realizing it was even close to being out of juice.)  The lack of buck supply hum might have been precipitated by the second issue I found. The audio output wire was severed within its insulation. A DC ohmmeter check indicate that there was an open circuit. I'm wondering though, if the wires were close enough together in the insulation if they weren't capactatively coupled, and therefore still producing sound and providing a bit of a filter. I replaced the wire in question, so we may never know. Here are the spots...