Copasetic Flow

 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