Copasetic Flow

 Just saw this link to a tiny, gorgeous, transmitter on the GRQP forum via DL2KI .

This is the POTA activation that just keeps giving. Going through all the recordings of the blustery day POTA from US-0757, I wanted to make a few shorter clips. Consequently, I dusted off my nascent ffmpeg skills. One of the tings I had to find was how to make a video clip. Here's the command I'm using to divide my larger recordings into smaller ones: fmpeg -i us_0757_waves.mp4 -ss 00:00:00 -t 00:00:48 -c:v copy -c:a copy sm0gjn.mp4 The -i argument is the input recording. -ss denotes where in the recording in hh:mm:ss format I want the clip to start and the -t argument indicates in hh:mm:ss format how long I want the clip to last. The -c arguents are telling ffmpeg to copy both video (:v) and audio (:a). The copy argument says to copy these thingis for the duration of the clip into the file name copying the 'copy' argument, (cm0gjn), in this case. The clip procesing takes about two seconds, and for me anway, is so much faster than using any GUI video editing program I...

  This a follow-on to the crashing wave post. While activating POTA US-0757 with TouCans and a Stick , (the vetical antenna version), during the wind storm, the first call in was from SM0GJN! It was very cool because it was from Sweden, but also the signal had aurora flutter! I got the idea for recording POTA activations from K4SWL. I haven't quite perfected my method yet, but I'm getting better at it. Here's what I'm doing. I'm dialing my phone into the Utah SDR, then turning on the screen recorder to record the screen as well as any media audio output, (the Utah SDR), and the phone's microphone. I listen to TouCans' audio ouput via a pair of Bose Bluetooth noise canceling headphones. the sgnal audio you'll here is from Utah. The waves crashing were under me in San Francisco. Here's the QSO recording. \ And here's the map of the aurora from  https://aurorasaurus.org/ for that morning Along with the QSO map. I'll try to get these superimpos...

I had the RF out leads on TouCans vertical reversed. The fix led to a very fun radio day with correlated data and radio events. In the past, when TouCans was a dipole, both RF out lines, RF+ and GND, were attached to antenna wires. Now, one wire goes up a carbon fiber mast forming a vertical antenna. The other lies coiled on the ground near the rig serving as a counterpoise . A few days back, while fixing a shorted power supply lead on the Tuna Topper amplifier component, I realized that the RF+ output port was attached to the counterpoise. I reversed it so it went to the vertical. It didn't seem to make a huge difference from the home QTH Those are pretty common snr numbers from the house. Friday though, there were rumblings of greatness. TouCans handily made a POTA activation followed by a SOTA activation where it was spotted in Japan on the RBN three times. Sunday I made a Juan Bautista activation from Civic Center that was remarkable, I'll write more about that later. The...