Copasetic Flow

  US-4571 at City College San Francisco, around sunset is one of the best propagation spots in the city for Project TouCans and a Stick. I discovered this a few months back when I had a little time to kill before Cantonese class. Given, TouCans isn't quite as compact as a KH-1, but it's not much bigger than some people's water bottles, and therefore pretty easy to carry around for just-in-case POTA activations. I haven't made any calls to Europe or Sweden from this QTH yet, but I did wind up with two QSOs to Maine in my log from my latest afternoon POTA activation.  I hit the park, quite unintentionally, at the sweet spot for racking up activations. The first activation ran from about 2300 UTC till midnight. The second one started immediately afterwards and lasted about another hour. Park Details: Getting to the park is a piece of cake since it sits near five different transit routes, specifically, the 29 , 43 , 49 , K-train , and the 8 , not to mention the Balboa Park ...

 Project TouCans has an issue with Pico-W power supply noise acting as RFI over the rig's Bluetooth audio system. I found an interesting "fix" yesterday that I do not suggest you replicate. What I believe I did was to capacitatively couple the VBUS pin to ground. VBUS is where power comes into the Pico-W in TouCans. When I accidently placed the ground wire for the Pico-W near the VBUS pin, the helecoptering noise went away. You can se that teh ferrule is support just above pin 40, the VBUS pipn. Meanwhile, the socket for the wire is resting on top of the USB connector for the Pico-W board. I used the keyer a bit more. That's how I know I didn't just short the VBUS and ground lines; a thing that would have disabled the keyer altogether. I'll experiment with this more today, but the incident hints at a simple and more polite, less dastardly dangerous fix that could remove the noise. Here's a video QSO with AB9CA from US-4571 Juan Bautista Trail where it pass...