Copasetic Flow

 Through a timing miscalculation, I found myself arriving early to my Cantonese class at City College San Francisco. I'd taken my time getting there, even stopping for dinner on Mission at the Recovery Room, where some of the customers were carrying on about elections while others at the other end of the bar were avidly watching sports. Me? I was studying for my upcoming Cantonese quiz. However, after taking time for a nice dinner, I still found myself on campus at 01:10 UTC. I studied for a bit, then decided I needed a break. I'd been out all day carrying TouCans around town in a tote sack with its new carbon fiber pole compacted down to two and a half feet or so. Then, it occurred to me! Inspired by K4SWL 's many Ham Radio Work Bench tales of activating parks while out running errands as well as W6CSN 's treatises on activating parks in San Francisco with a KH1 and a vertical, I looked up the map for Juan Bautista National Historical Trail. Sure enough, it was locate

 I'm on a two day streak of activating US-0757 San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park.  This time, I was able to take a cable car to within 30 yards of the park. I hopped the Hyde Street cable car at Powell Street BART. It was a fun, easy ride that I take as often as I can get it. After realizing yesterday that TouCans seemed to do better with its ground wire on the pier than it did with the thing in the water, I ran a few more experiments and watched the signal into Utah decrease as a the ground wire touched the water. Also, the interference from AM broadcast stations also became louder exactly when the wire dipped into the water. I ran most of the activation with the rig's ground wire laying on the pier next to me again. I made more QSOs today, but all in all the signal levels were more contrite Here are the QSOs Callsign tx RST rx RST Time (GMT) Frequency n7jtt 579 419 2024/11/05 16:21:00 14057.4 n0aie 449 529 2024/11/05 16:21:00 14057.4 k6pb 559 559 20

 In radio engineering as in all thing, it pays to be kind. This morning while activating US-0757 with TouCans Vertical, I noticed a swimmer I'd seen before headed towards the pier I was prerched on.  Bear with me a little nautical explanation is in order to understand the rest of the this tale, so here goes.  There are currents in the San Francisco Bay. Currents thtat sweep out towards the ocean are called ebb currents. Currents that see in from the ocean are called flood currents. Even at Hyde St. PIer in its somewhat sheltered indentation in the shore of the Bay, swimmers experience these currents. They're a thing and sometimes they're just about as fast as a swimmer cares to swim. Getting back to this morning, the swimmer I saw coming occaionally takes advantage of currents to do 'infinite lap pool' swimming under the pier. She backstrokes while going nowhere because she adjusts her speed to the speed of the current. She also sings quite pleasantly while doing al

 Heartened by the vertical antenna results at  San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park US-0757, I headed out to a pier in San Francisco near the Pony Express Trail, US-4578. Project TouCans did not disappoint, and I made one eyeball QSO in addition to the 7, (yeah, I didn't quite make the activation before the keyer's batteries ran out), QSOs I meade on the pier. Here's a map of the QSOs and Reverse Beacon spots. Blue markers denote QSOs while yellow markers denote RBN spots. The color scale indicates signal strength using resistor value color coding. I find it really interesting that the rig made it up to Alaska again! The other interesting point about this activation attempt is the location. I took the MUNI F to the Washington Street stop and then walked just a bit north to Pier 7 Here's what the rig and antenna setup looked like. The antenna is one half of TouCans' ordinary dipole taped to what's supposed to be a carbon fiber rod, (it doesn't seem

 I wanted to take a look at the ionosphere over North America late last week, and that meant I needed to explore ionospheric readings via radio occultation from the satellite constelations launched by Spire and PlanetIQ. Spoiler: I haven't been able to get ionospheric data from either constellation yet, but that's a data publishing issue, not a data file structure issue. Exploring the availabel data was a bit clunky at first to say the least. Then, it occurred to me that I could probably ask an AI to write Python code to pull out the strucutre of each netCDF file somewhat automatically. Sure enough, the Google Gemini search enginee version gave me an immediate answer I modified the code just a bit per my personal taste. The complete code can be seen here . From there, with only the filename, I could get output like Where to get the data I was having the best luck with PlanetIQ data as published by UCAR at  https://data.cosmic.ucar.edu/gnss-ro/planetiq/noaa/nrt/level2/2024/ Howe