US-0757 POTA Notes 2026-01-09 US-0757

An AM broadcast station was loud in my headphones for about two minutes. Then, TouCans mysterious noise cacnellation circuit charged, and the POTA was off and running. According to the POTA website, I haven't activated this park in about eight months. It was nice to be back! We'd had about a week's worth of atomspheric river rains, so it was pretty phenomenal to have this view during the activation. The temperature was in the low 60s which was very pleasant. I didn't go for a swim this time, but I'm going to get back to that soon as well.

View of the Golden Gate Bridge from over my shoulder

The transit ride—SF MUNI 54 to BART to San Francisco MUNI 30—was a piece of cake as always. The video below shows part of the route as seen from the bus window.

I just now realized that I copied my opeining into the video twice. You didn't imagine it. Sorry about that :)

I stopped for lunch at the Buena Vista

It was totally worth it! I had the crab cakes benedict and an Irish coffee.

From there, it was a short walk down the hill to the pier I'd be operating from. The setup of the radio changed after my last trip to New Mexico. I still haven't taken time to write about that, but suffice it to say, for the moment, that I'm now operating with wired headphones instead of Bluetooth audio. This has significantly helped out the operation of the phone based straight key. Again, I'll write this up in a separate post soon.

In any event, here are almost all the pieces of the setup

Project TouCans is housed in a Dole Pineapple can with a tunafish can on top that serves both as a cover and as the antenna outlet. The antenna is formed out of two quarter wave, (at 14.0573 MHz or so), pieces of 12 gauge wire from the hardware store. I'm using the rig in its TouCans and a Stick configuration—our fancy way of saying a vertical whip. The green wire winds up taped to the Goture carbon fiber mast shown at the left edge of the picture. The red wire stays about where it's already sitting and serves as the single counterpoise.

The rest of the equipment is shown in this picture.

I'm using a Sony voice recorder at the moment. I got the idea from Thomas, K4SWL's setup. For the time being, my audio is provided by a pair of Delta Airlines wired headphones that are working pretty well to be honest.

The only portion left to describe is the Pico-W hanging on the outside of the rig. That's what brings keyer controls into Project TouCans from the phone apps that control it via WiFi, (remember, TouCans can also be mounted in a dipole antenna several feet above ground.) The three AA batteries shown in the first picture powerw the Pico-W.

Equipment

Rockmite 20

TunaTopper Amp

Goture carbon fiber mast

During my QSO with AA7CW, a great heron dropped in to do some fishing.

I'm still perfecting the split screen phone control panel for the rig—I'd like to make the camera controls invisible whilre recording—but I did get a video qsl from that QSO that includes the heron.

Here's a quick look at the QSO map. Michigan was the furthest out QSO with Indiana a close second.

Here's a more detailed map that can also be animated by clicking on the map controls in the lower left corner to see the order the qsos occurred in.

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Copasetic Flow

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