Sad News about W5USJ and the Joy of Blogging Frequently

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 to Publish and Share More. I came across Jeff's excellent post urging people to just get your information out there in whatever format and state of editing (or not) while reading the database and Python equivalent, (in my opinion at least), to Bill's blog: Simon Willison's weblog.

A final note, we did ultimately wind up putting a toroid on Project TouCans. It's a biggish one that serves as a ferrite bead on the audio out line and takes out almost all the rest of the Pico-W noise from the rig. Thanks Chuck!

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