Copasetic Flow

 Note: The following will probably change over time, and is not ready for primetime. It's in the nature of a lab book entry so that I don't lose information about changes to Project TouCans.  I dodged a lot of near disasters this weekend by waiting to make sure I understood what was going on before acting.  The day before what I'm going to detail here, the Pico-W that's been in in outdoor service on TouCans for just over a year gave out. It was the curse of the Butterfield Overland Trail. I may never activate that park here in San Francisco. Not only do I not make many QSOs at the locations I've tried, the rig also tends to become damaged in one way or another. This time, the Pico-W jsut wouldn't boot after I got home. It also wouldn't respond to a direct USB connection anymore. When I replaced the Pico-W, I thought we'd done a better job of revision controlling our code than we had. I loaded code onto the new Pico-W, and nothing! I assumed the Darlingto...

 The Nashua Area Radio Society did a series on the RockMite! Part 3 is about the transmit oscillator which I have to admit, I did not completely understand. Varactors kind of rock!

This has been fun! KO6BTY and I have been working on QSO maps on 20 meters vs. the F2 layer for the last few years. We finally have a map of the F2 layer, one half hour behind real time with global data provided by the NOAA's GloTEC product . Check it out .

 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 ...