Pony Express POTA Activation with Project TouCans After all the Rain

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 pole as a mast. TouCans did great though! It chugged along with very little noise and reached LU4HK in Aregentina, making a greater than 1000 mile per Watt QSO.

QSO/RBN spot map:

Happenings of Interest

I played with what output levels the camera needs to do speaker to mic audio transfers. They're kind of high. Everything worked well in the end.

It was fun getting to watch ferries and cargo ships come and go.

Comments

Cool Math Tricks: Deriving the Divergence, (Del or Nabla) into New (Cylindrical) Coordinate Systems

Now available as a Kindle ebook for 99 cents ! Get a spiffy ebook, and fund more physics The following is a pretty lengthy procedure, but converting the divergence, (nabla, del) operator between coordinate systems comes up pretty often. While there are tables for converting between common coordinate systems , there seem to be fewer explanations of the procedure for deriving the conversion, so here goes! What do we actually want? To convert the Cartesian nabla to the nabla for another coordinate system, say… cylindrical coordinates. What we’ll need: 1. The Cartesian Nabla: 2. A set of equations relating the Cartesian coordinates to cylindrical coordinates: 3. A set of equations relating the Cartesian basis vectors to the basis vectors of the new coordinate system: How to do it: Use the chain rule for differentiation to convert the derivatives with respect to the Cartesian variables to derivatives with respect to the cylindrical variables. The chain ...

The Alcubierre Warp Drive Tophat Function and Open Science with Sage

I transferred yesterday's Mathematica file with the Alcubierre warp drive[2] line element and space curvature calculations to the +Sage Mathematical Software System today, (the files been added to the public repository [3]). If you haven't used Sage before, it's a Python based software package that's similar in functionality to Mathematica. Oh, and it' free. I also worked a little more on understanding the theory, but frankly, I made far more progress with the software than the theory. What follows will be a little more of the Alcubierre theory, plus, a cool Sage interactive demo of one of the Alcubierre functions[1], as well as a bit about my first experience with using Sage. Theory The theory is fun, but it's moving slowly. Here's the chalk board from this morning's discussion Alcubierre setup the derivation using something called the 3+1 formalism which means we consider space to be flat, (in this case), slices that are labelled ...

How Many Files Can You Add to a GPT Project? An Interview with GPT-5 on Limits, Context Engineering Tips, and Chats

Setting the scene: I’m tinkering with Project TouCans, knee-deep in radio logs, SQLite dumps, and Cesium code. Naturally, I’m wondering if shoving all this into one GPT Project is a recipe for brilliance… or for disaster. So I turn to Vril — you know, after Brainy from the Legion of Super-Heroes , because what else do you call your AI sidekick who always has the answers? Time to ask him straight up. [ As an aside, yes, GPT-5 has decided to sometimes call me Vail. I'm not sure why to be honest. Also, I asked Vril, er GPT-5, to write up our interview for me. Apparently, me asking it to 'Bro' up a few stories, just for fun, has convinced Vril that I use 'Like,' more than I actually might. ] Me (Vail): So Vril, how many files can I throw into a GPT Project before it just starts choking? Like, is there some magic number where the context window taps out and everything falls apart? GPT-5 (Vril): Great question. There’s no single hard file limit. What matters is ...

Copasetic Flow

Search This Blog