Copasetic Flow

 New ham cleans up log book on QRZ with the help of o3-mini. A few days back, after the completion of SKCC month, a ham sent out a message asking others to please post their QSOs ot LoTW and/or QRZ.com for award verification. For me, a light bulb burst on. It does matter that I log my QSOs publicly. It had frankly, never occurred to me before, but it made sense. o3-mini and I got to work. I already have a log book built on Datasette for my QSOs. I just needed to get the QSOs from there and ship them off to QRZ.com . I needed it to be automatic though, since there were more than 1,000 QSOs to transfer. I asked o3-mini to write a Python script to do this for me. I gave it the database schema for my QSO database. I also fed it the l ogging API instructions for QRZ.com.  I had something that worked well enough after about 40 minutes. After three hours, that included a 40 minute coffe break, I had a script that automatically calculated my tx grid square, (it changes a lot becuase...

 I got my Halikey to work on my ChromeBook again! Regular readers might remember that I chose poorly when my ChromeBook asked what I wanted to do with the Halikey, assign it to Linux or Android? The correct answer was not to choose . Both choices are wrong. After a bit, the dialog box will simply disappear if you don't answer. Then, everything works fine. The settings stored my choice in a place I couldn't find... until today... and so, no more ChromeBook HaliKey for me. Here's what made everything better. I went to the ChromeBook's settings and wound up at the Manage USB devices tab. It wasn't easy to figure out. I have yet to find a path to this screen. Here's what you can do. Select settings in your Chromebook. Click into the 'System preferences' tab. Search for usb, but do not hit enter. Notice the , 'Linux development environment' selection. Choose it from the drop down. Then, click on 'Mange USB devices in that screen. You'll land a...

 KO6BTY and I have been playing with ground and spaced based ionospheric data for the last couple of years. This week, we started looking at the NOAA experimental GloTEC project's data. It's really nice in that it has virtually complete global coverage. Also, it's very up to date. At the time of this writing, it's 16:11 UTC and the most up to date data is from 15:45 UTC. I've used ChatGPT o3-mini to update our data analysis code for the new, to us,  GloTEC format and we're starting to see really interesting results. Below are two videos of maps we've created. The first one is for the maximum height of the F2 layer, also known as hmF2, and important for 20 meter ham radio propagation. The data is from Tuesday evening, 2025/02/12 UTC. The second is of the critical frequency, aka foF2, (the maximum frequency radio signal that will bounce vertically from the F2 layer), for the same time period. You can see the  Equiqtorial Ionization Anomaly (EIA) very clearly ...

 I came across the Logitech-G shopping site this morning, which was kind of like getting the Christmas Sears Catalog way-back-when: Soooooooo much stuff I don't Need with so much giggling and imaging that yes, I really do need a glowing keyboard. Anyway.  Is anyone using one of these as a bench-top soldering light? They seem like a great form factor for the desk the kid and I share between gaming, work, and radio assembly, but maybe they're not? I've hit the point in my eyes where I need more light, and yes I could get a desklamp from a garage sale... maybe, but this little guy just looks kinda cool.

 I made a livestream of my POTA activation from US-4571, Juan Bautista National Historic Trail in San Francisco on YouTube last night! It was pretty fun although the audio mostly didn't work out great. I'll be making notes here and in the video's comments on the QSOs in the vieo over time. (One of the things I learned was that there's no editing or even downloading of YouTube livestreams after the fact.) Here's the video, scroll for more details and, eventually, a map of the QSOs.  Park Details Here's a look at the QTH. The vertical antenna is taped to a carbon fiber mast that is in turn supported in a tree with electrical tape. You can see the rig on the ground by the tree. Happenings When a touchdown was scored in the SuperBowl at one point, there was a seven minute delay till the  next QSO. QSO Map: By moving the animation slider all the way to the left, you can see all the QSOs at once. Clicking on play will play the QSOs in order as grey line moves along as...

 I found ChatGPT o3-mini the day after it relased last weekend. I then spent most of the weekend cranking out apps that I've wanted for months and could now have up and running in about an hour and then fairly polished about an hour after that. It was outstanding! I'd used ChatGPT to help with the CW historgram over the last few weeks. Coding wennt quickly, but occasionally things got dropped on the floor. o3-mini has exceeded all my expectations by just cranking out code that works. Oh! Before I forget, the point of this post was to point out, (pun intended), an article Simon Willison mentioned that talks about the age of having ideas and making them real quickly. The article by Geoffrey Huntley talks about this kind of rapid prototyping and the cultural shifts among developers that are happening around it. Here's a sampling of what I've done with o3-mini: I've wanted a web control panel for our, (we is KO6BTY and I, KD0FNR), ham radio, Project TouCans ever since...

 Changing TouCans so that the Pico-W that controls the rig could be accessed by my smartphone hot spot did more than just get rid of the noise coming back from the rig. It also allowed me to start thinking about a Project TouCans web based control panel, a project I'd given up on last year when I decided that the Pico-W had to serve as the host of the network for TouCans rahter than just another device hooked onto a larger network. With TouCans hanging on the same netowrk as the laptop I usually use to control it,  the laptop was able to also access the internet at large through the phone's hot spot. I quickly thought through what this might enable. I then, asked o3-mini to write  up a web page for me, and before very long at all, I had: Messages typed into the 'Custom Message' block are sent out over the keyer when the 'Send' button is clicked. The page contains panels that show both the Utah SDR that's most like to pick up TouCans, and the Reverse Beacon ...

 Did you know there's a Morse keying world championship? Neither did I, but Martin, a ham radio op from the UK does. He's compiled a list of episodes from the BBC Sounds podcast that leans into the radio-esque, but contains other interesting topics including a family who, well.. here's a quote from Martin's blog: In 1966, Roy Bates occupied a disused military platform in the North Sea, and moved his family aboard.The next year he declared it to be the sovereign Principality of Sealand. Martin also did a cool thing and started a list of internet links referred to in the GQRP Sprat journal . It looks like it would be a lot of work, but it's a welcome relief from typing in addresses from the printed pages of the journal. I love that the journal is printed by the way, don't get me wrong.

 The radio is so quiet! I mentioned that I changed the configuration of Project TouCans so that my smart phone's hot spot serves as the centrial connection for TouCans and the computer(s) we use to control it.  Yesterday, at the Pony Express National Historic Trail, I only made a single POTA QSO on 20 meters with TouCans, but it was an unbelievably noise-free one: You can hear background noise in the real world—planes, waves, boats, people wandering by—from the camera. You can also hear some pretty gentle AM broadcast interference, but that's it! To give you an idea of how much things improved, listen to this QSO from before the change. The helicopter noise you hear in the video QSL below is from the Pico-W. The screehing noise also appears to have been from the Pico-W.

 When I started down the road of putting a Raspberry Pico-W in charge of the Morse code key and on/off switch on our 20 meter rock-locked, QRP CW rig, Project TouCans, last year, I came across many, many microPython code examples where the entire point was to WiFi connect your Pico-W to your home router and then access it from other devices.  KO6BTY and I however, mostly use Project TouCans while out camping for POTA/SOTA. Consequently, the 'home router' route, (pun intended), didn't seem helpful. Ultimately, I found code example for setting up a Pico-W as a network as an access point as opposed to a client. That worked. We were able to WiFi connect a laptop to Project TouCans to turn the rig on and off and send either auto-keyed or straight key CW . It did however, lock whichever device into TouCans exclusively. That wasn't too big of a problem though, because I could make POTA self-spots and check out our signal on various SDRs using my smart phone. Then, yesterday, a...