Copasetic Flow

 Sometimes you get an idea about two variables that might depend on each other, so you look to see if there's a correlation. That's science. What happens not as much is that if the variables don't correlate, or at least they don't seem to,  you should publish anyway. The lack of a relationship can in fact be new information. So, along those lines, here goes.  We activated US-0757 twice last week. In both cases, we deployed the TouCans vertical antenna on a pier with the ground wire submersed in the Bay waters below. In both cases, one of the Utah RBN stations that spotted us suddenly had very high signal levels with respect to our station on 20 meters. On the second day's activation I happened to notice that the water seemed closer to the pier when the signal dBs went up than it had been at the start of the activation. As it turned out, I was correct about the water level so I graphed tide levels vs. TouCan's signal into Utah. It turned out there wasn't an o...

 Soon, I'll get the bandwidth to document Project TouCans entire power supply system. For now, suffice it to say that, like the rest of TouCans, it is non-standard. One of the non-standard issues we run into is that while there's a USB-C cable accessible outside TouCans for charging the internal batter pack, the battery pack's charging indicator is hidden inside of TouCans in its optional batter pack housed in an empty can of Progresso tomato soup. Consequently, we've occasionally not charged the batteries because the USB-C connection was unhappy. Enter the MakerHawk multimeter. The meter acts as a USB-C female to female adapter, which frankly we needed. It also ships with a USB-C female-to-female barrel, I'm not sure why yet. We haven't used it. When we plug the radio in to charge, we plug the charger into one side of the meter and the internal battery pack's charging cable to the other. When the cables are plugged in correctly, (sometimes we have to flip t...

 I found out this morning that carbon fiber masts are not ideal for mounting vertical antennas. The carbon mast acts as a conductor,  (allbeit a poor one), and that throws off the resonant point of the antenna. At least that's the story on the ham radio streets. One day, I'll try a fiberclass mast to do a caomparison. As mentioned yesterday, our POTA came off without a hitch and with nice signals  all around that were comparable to or stronger than the levels we normally get out of Project TouCans. I'm documenting our setup here so we can easily compare it to future deployments and so that others trying the similar things can use the information. Here's a picture of the setup. The wire was taped to the mast using electircal tape,  with one piece of tape per mast segment. The mast was secured to the edge of a wooden fence using tarred twine. The rig, (Project TouCans is a 20 m RockMite feeding a Tuna Topper II powered by am Imuto phone charging brick providing 15 Volt...

 We did it! The gang and I activated San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park US-0757 using Project TouCans, the five Watt QRP 20 meter ham radio rig we built, and a vertical antenna! Us being us, we did everything the lazy way. We had a perfectly good horizontal dipole, so.... We taped half the dipole to a Goture 4.5 meter pole and dumped the other half into the Bay. The Bay water served as a really good ground!  Getting There We took the 29 from Excelsior to the stop on 19th and Holloway across the street from San Francisco State University. From there, we caught the 28 and took it out to the Golden Gate Bridge and around, finally winding up in just up the hill from The Buena Vista on North Point and Hyde. QSOs The rig was spotted in New Zealand and Australia. Our furthest acutal QSO was to Minnesota. As I was sitting on the pier operating, I also made three eyeball QSOs with hams that wandered by. Callsign tx RST rx RST Time (GMT) Frequency kk7lxu 559...

It's not grey line here in San Francisco, but the line did just slide by two spotting stations in Canada! I think it's particularly cool that the station further to the East saw TouCans ham radio CW signal first, followed by the station a little bit to the West about eight minutes later. When grey line made it to San Francisco, the rig was visible in Utah for the first ime today. And here's the signal out in Utah at 14:51 UTC on 2024/10/26 And now Washington and Los Angelese have opened up along with the biggest signal I've seen so far from the vertical antenna into Utah at 25 dB!

 Project TouCans now has a whip antenna option! The kids—Mota and Tawnse—helped me assemble our first mostly proper ham radio vertical antenna on 20 meters this morning. We used the Goture pole I mentioned in the previous post . We're still dropping one side of the half-wave dip[ole eantenna off the balcony as a counterpoise/ground reflection for the new "quarter" wave vertical antenna. It's so nice to have data because I was immediately able to see that the poled version of the antenna is doing generally as well as the simply suspended veritcal antenna from the previous post did. The pictures below show how we mounted the antenna. I tied a piece of twine near the end of the wire to the small string at the top of the pole. After that, I washi taped the antenna to each section of the carbon pole. The rig itself is sitting on the balcony with the other antenna wire draped doown to and across the ground below actins as a counterpoise. As seen from the second kitchen wind...

 I'm getting some bandwidth to put more work into my book about Boleslaw Gladych and his connections to the gravity (and antigravity) research communities that included characters like Agnew Hunter Bahnson Jr. during the 1950s.  I found an article [pdf], (pamphlet? it's 42 pages), that sheds more light on the woork DeWitt did with superconductors and gravitomagnetic fields in the '60s. Take a look at page 34 where DeWitt comments on his work to try to verify Bahnson's fringe pet project: Thomas Townsend Brown's gravitators. There you'll find a reference to DeWitt looking into superconductor theory .  I also found a nice little JSTOR blog post on the whole Babson and Bahnson Gravity Days era. I haven't seen anything new in it yet, but I aslo haven't taken the time to focus on it. Speaking of DeWitt, this history of the UNC Field Institute is interesting in that it mentions DeWitt's work related to 'large spaceships'.  One final note, Wolfgan...

 Project TouCans went vertical this morning! Well, almost vertical. Listening to the Ham Radio Work Bench podcast, KO6BTY and I are frequently regaled with tales of carbon fiber pole mending for the casts vertical quarter-wave antennas. It finally got to be too much and I ordered a carbon fiber pole of my own. It was one of these guys  . It arrived yesterday. I haven't had time to get it out of the box yet, but after doing an antenna repair this morning, I found myself with a rig with an almost vertical quarter wave and a radial reaching down and along the ground.  I went ahead and keyed. The rig only sounded a little bit sick: vs the SWR mismatch I'm assuming. I checked out the reverse beacon network and low and behold! Signal was reaching most of the same spotting stations. Some of the stations even had more signal strength than they had reported with the antenna more closely approximating a horizontal half-wave dipole! Here are the results per station: The graph needs ...

 I'm still plugging away on the straight key for Project TouCans. It's still a tossup at this point how many of the keying issues are my keying speed, and how many are due to various delays in the system. I got a nice little boost from ChatGPT over the weekend though! It cranked out a straight key enabling web page that it took me about two hours to massage into what I wanted. You can see the finished code here . You'll notice that the sidetone uses a .wav file. There wasn't a more simple way to get JavaScript to generate a tone that I could find than using a .wav file. (Remember when computers beeped when you told them to beep? Sigh...)  But, that meant I needed a constant tone .wav file. I, of course, did not have one. I asked ChatGPT to create one for me and the direct results were underwhelming. It produced nothing that I could easily use.  Then! I noticed the analysis button on the chat results. I clicked there and was presented with the Python code that ChatGPT w...

 Hot on the heels of the night-vision Google pixel articles, Simon Willison clears up something I've often wondered about. Some of the metadata in jpeg IS in binary! Even better though, Simon mentioned that Chat GPT can help read a photo's binary metadata fields.

My recent POTA photographs of the Aurora Borealis from New Mexico were only possible because of the night mode of my Samsung 23S phone. I haven't located anything about how Samsung's night mode works, but I have accumulated a list of links about the Google Pixel's night mode. Here they are https://research.google/blog/night-sight-seeing-in-the-dark-on-pixel-phones/ https://research.google/blog/experimental-nighttime-photography-with-nexus-and-pixel/ https://drive.google.com/file/d/18tdBq1ROkQ9FGHtWd1RFtRC_7byOg-ji/view https://research.google/blog/astrophotography-with-night-sight-on-pixel-phones/ https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2980179.2980254

 I've posted a bit of information about this POTA outing already  photos AM0ID audio with aurora flutter The last thing left to report are the QSOs, the QSO map, and radio placement. Here goes I made a total of 34 QSOs with two of them reaching to Argentina and El Salvador. There were no QSOs made north of Denver on Thursday evening. I believe this corresponded roughly to a cutoff caused by the aurora.  The rig was spotted in New Zealand and Fiji, but no QSOs in either place. Finally, here's how the rig was sited above the tent

 I managed to record the affect of the Aurora Borealis on 20 meter ham radio signals while camping above Mountainair, NM last week. Here's the video: Notice that the first signal coming in from Kansas via AM0ID has a flutter superimposed on their CW. My sidetone, of course, does not. Finally, you can hear that K6KMH from Southern California does not have a flutter on their CW.

 I got to take pictures of the Aurora Borealis for the first time this week! I got up in the middle of the night while camping above Mountainaire, NM during the G4 geomagnetic storm on Thursday evening (the early, early morning of 24/10/11.) Left to my own devices, I couldn't see much of anything at first, but the cell phone camera did. It took me  a while to get used to how the Samsung S23+ camera worked vs the old Google Pixels I've got more experience with. The Samsung kept trying to save me time by putthing me in simple night mode. It did not save me time. Without being able to extend the shutter time I got kinda cool, but not the best pictures (Note: I need to find a way to turn the page background block on selected posts like this one.) A 1.5 second exposure came out like this While a 5.5 second exposure resulted in I had a heck of a time figuring out what had happened to the top of the tree ine middle of this picture because, well, pine trees don't have tops like tha...

Found this cute video about equitorial plasma bubbles and why they matter from an international consortium between Japan, Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos. They've deployed a series of very high frequency, (VHF), radar to detect bubbles in real-time to avoid problems with important things like airplane automatic landing systems. Here's the video . 

 We finally got all of the relays to work at once! We've been using a HFD2 003 M L2 D latching relay as the on/off switch for Project TouCans. I should say, we've been trying to. The most recent issue was that our keying relay was rated for 12 Volts nominal coil voltage due to a previous design decision that went away in favor of 3 Volts. A Digikey order later and some kinda messy soldering and we had the 3 Volt relay in. I left the 12 Volt relay in place because on occasion in the past, we've had to run the keying line through a second relay as a passthrough (literally using the 'normally closed' portion of the relay) to make the entire system happy enough to key the rig. That wasn't the case this time as it turned out, but it was also easier to just leave the relay in there because it's superglued dead bug style to the circuit board. The latching relay along the shorter wires to the Rockmite/Tuna Topper II pair are delivering plenty of current. The rig was...