Copasetic Flow

 Happy Holidays! It's been a rainy few weeks here which, with the holidays, has led to less playing radios. I finally got a break in the rain one afternoon this week and headed out to play radios and to try my new Christmas present, a Lumix DC100 camera. I've been playing both with how I want to use the camera and how I want to publish the results. Expect to see more notes on both of these things. Park: US-4578 Pony Express National Historic Trail I headed to the end of Pier 7 which is on the Pony Express National Historic Trail. The pier was crowded, what with the sun being out and the really nice view back towards town. I took the BART downtown, made a brief stop at The Palace near Montgomery Station for a cocktail and to make sure I knew how the camera remote control via smartphone worked, hopped back in the BART tunnel, popped back up at Embarcadero, and walked the rest of the way from there. Here's a look at exiting the BART. Radio Details: I was still using a tent...

I've been recording more of my POTA and SOTA activation, and then experimenting with how to  publish the results as well as exploring what information I can derive from the recordings post-activation. One thing I'm findin out is that—of course—my CW copy isn't perfect. Searching through the entire recording of an activation is a bit much for me at the moment, so I lighted on a middle ground technique: determine whether or not the QSOs were with POTA registered users, and if not, investigate those portions of the recording I was fairly certain that ChatGPT could help with this coding task. I was right. The entire coding session took 14 minutes from start to finish. I told ChatGPT about the undocumented REST API presented by pota.app  , gave it an example, and asked it to write a Python script for me that would accept a callsign through the Linux input pipe and then tell me either all the info for the callsign, or print that the callsign wasn't found. Out dropped a script...

  I used ChatGPT to crank out a new blog feature: a slide deck that shows all the QSO videos from an activation.  Before I get started, allow me to admit that I just found out that YouTube provides code to embed a playlist on an html page. I didn't know this when I started this project, and frankly, I'm kinda happy about that. If I found an embedded playlist, it would not have been obvious to me that there was more than one video. I would have missd all the others. An example of the resulting video deck can be seen on the field report from my latest POTA activation. I asked ChatGPT to create the CSS and HTML for a video deck presented on a statically served HTML page. It got really close on the first attempt. I only had to refince the code a bit to get exactly what I wanted. The AI even dumped out JavaScript code I hadn't remembered to ask for to control the deck. Later I realized that adding video links one at a time to my blog page was a bit tiresome. I asked the AI to w...

 I'd heard that a tent pole wouldn't work well as an antenna mast, but it's all we had. I've heard from folks that  a tent pole might not be the best antenna support. They're probably right, but on our last flight from San Francisco to El Paso, TX, I was a bit tired, and completely forgot our carbon fiber collapsible mast—which also isn't supposed to work—in the overhead bin above my seat. So, what we had was a tent pole! The above picture shows how to work with a tent pole mast that's shorter in length than a quarter wavelength long. You simply attach the pole to something—anything really—in nature that will provide the extra bit of required height. As far as processes go, the simplest way to figure out the first tape point to attach the wire to the mast is to hold the wire on the mast where the tree, or in this case the campsite marker,will support the mast and drape the wire down to the rig. In this way, you know that your vertical antenna will be support...

  Gate mounted vertical at US-4551 on the west side of the Organs. KOBTY and I tried a few different things with TouCans that had never happenned before First, we operated on the Western slope of the Organs by Dripping Springs. Second, we mounted the tent pole antenna mast to a steel gate piling at the edge of the Dripping Springs area. We were still completelylwithin the Organ Mountains National Monument for those keeping score. A note about gates: I grew up in New Mexico. Almost every gate in the state has one or more parking spots next to it. It's just assumed that when the gate is closed, you'll park and walk in. I personally believe the parking spots are there because people tend to just park in front of the gate if there's not a space. We parked in the spot near the gate because we needed an antenna mount, but sure enough, about a minute after we'd started transmitting, the parak ranger turned up and closed the gate. If you're worried that we'd have been l...

 I heard last night that Chuck Carpenter W5USJ is a silent key. He passed on December 2nd. Chuck was a fun person and a great mentor for all things Rockmite on the groups.io Rockmite forum . His advice was instrumental in the creation of Project TouCans and he even mailed a few toroids to KO6BTY and I when we were working on removing RFI sources from the earlier wired version of the project. Reading through Chuck's site this morning, I found a reference to SWBCI . Having never heard the term before, I googled it. And found not much, mostly references to The Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. I tried again adding ham radio to the search and was rewarded with a link to a SolderSmoke post from March of 2010! If you look through the posts on that page you'll find things about shortwave broadcast interference, sunspots, WSPR, and safe-ish car tube based radio circuits! There's so much stuff! Bill had and continues to pull off the advice of Jeff Tripplett t...

I've been having a great time the last few months reading World's Finest and The Brave and the Bold.  World's Finest is exactly what you might expect it to be if you read comics back in the '80s. It's got Batman and Superman together in stories that include a somewhtat random selection of other DC characcers each month. (As of this writing, the cast includes both the JLA and the JSA!) The stories are between 1 and 3 issuees long and are light-hearted (enough) and fun! What do I mean by fun? Next month, there will be a story featuring Superdong, Supercat, and Ace the Bathound! Oh! And also Jimmy Olsen and maybe Batgirl. Meanwhile, The Brave and the Bold has turned into a monthly anthology. It has about four stories a month. Some of them are sequential, some are one-shots, and there's even the occasional flash fiction like the adorable ManBat story by G. Willow Wilson. Again, the sotries are fun, not "important." Think Shazam, (Billy actulaly), meets Gre...

 I was able to hop over to this park twice, once before, and once after work. Operating portable with a vertical antenna netted me almost no foot traffic attention which was kinda surprising and also kinda nice. This will all get updated as I go (or not) Park: US-0795 World War I National Monument Getting There: I walked to the park from my Mt. Vernon Square area hotel. I took transit back though! I walked up a few blocks to the nearest metro station and took the Red Line east where I connected with a northbound Yellow Line to Mt. Vernon Square, the end of the line for that train. Radio Details: I used the rig's new configuration that's getting me into  so many urban parks: TouCans and a Stick. Trees on the East Coast seem to have more branches that the ones in San Francisco, so I was able to just place the vertical in the tree with no tape. The branches held it up. The tree still had most of its leaves and was quite wet. I suspect this was the main difference cause of propag...

 A seagull had a delicious crab breakfast, be sure to checkout the video QSL with VE7JYD below for all the details. Park: US-0757 San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park Park: If I get going early enough in the morning, I get to take the Powell St. cable car to this park. Alas, this particular morning I got a late start so I took the MUNI 30 . Radio Details: This was one of the first outings with the new Anderson PowerPole connectors inspired by Ham Radio Workbench . They worked well. You can see the rig without the antenna attached below. Note that our antenna is now also color-coded. Frankly? That's a bit too much organization for my taste :) QSO/ RBN spot map: Happenings of Interest   Right as VE7JYD called in a seagull started working on its breakfast—a crab—on the beach to the side of the station.  You can see the video below in the album of recorded QSOs! I've been working on this on and off for the last week or so. I don't know that I'll keep it up becau...

 I'm working on creating video clips of each QSO during a POTA/SOTA activation. I was inspired by K4SWL 's YouTube channel . Thomas records his entire activations without edits. For various reasons, my outings so far have required edits. I've been recording using my cell phone and a variety of things happen because of that. For example, I can't ignore incoming texts because I'm the 'guy in the chair' for three kids. I don't, however, need to publish those messages either, so for some clips, I need to crop the top of the phone screen away. That's where this ffmpeg post came in handy. To clip off the notifications in the top of the screen, I used ffmpeg -i serccrab.mp4 -ss 00:02:11 -t 00:01:14 -vf "crop=in_w:in_h*.80" -c:a copy ki6pxv_sh2.mp4 Where the extra argument  -vf "crop=in_w:in_h*.80" Clips off the top 20% of the screen. Here's the QSO. You'll hear the phone vibrate, but the message across the top of the screen isn...

 I made it back out to Candlestick Park on Saturday morning, and this time, more than a year and a half later , pulled off an activation. I made four QSOs to British Columbia, three of them in rapid sucsession. Park: Candlestick State Recreation Area, San Francisco, CA This park is accessible via public transportation and a short hike via two different bus lines, the MUNI 54 and 29 . I took the MUNI 54 to the North Shore of Yosemite Slough portion of the park. I wandered back home on the 29.  54 29 To me, the whole city is gorgeous. The bus ride down did not disappoint with the rising sun beaming through the windshield of the 54. When I hopped off for my short walk down to the park, I found myself in one of the last remaining light industry portions of the city. By the end of the block I was presented with the view of the park you see above. The tall brush you can see in most of the park photos is fennel. It smells like black licorice, which thankfully I like,...

 And that'll be my submission for the year's most acronyms in a title award (MAIAT.) On the Ham Radio Work Bench discord, NK8O mentioned this following spiffy looking Python script for tracking the parks near you that you haven't activated yet. The creator of the script is Ian Renton, MØTRT. He has other cool looking stuff !