Copasetic Flow

 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...

 Happy Holidays! It's been a rainy few weeks here which, with the holidays, has led to less playing radios. I finally got a break in the rain one afternoon this week and headed out to play radios and to try my new Christmas present, a Lumix DC100 camera. I've been playing both with how I want to use the camera and how I want to publish the results. Expect to see more notes on both of these things. Park: US-4578 Pony Express National Historic Trail I headed to the end of Pier 7 which is on the Pony Express National Historic Trail. The pier was crowded, what with the sun being out and the really nice view back towards town. I took the BART downtown, made a brief stop at The Palace near Montgomery Station for a cocktail and to make sure I knew how the camera remote control via smartphone worked, hopped back in the BART tunnel, popped back up at Embarcadero, and walked the rest of the way from there. Here's a look at exiting the BART. Radio Details: I was still using a tent...

I've been recording more of my POTA and SOTA activation, and then experimenting with how to  publish the results as well as exploring what information I can derive from the recordings post-activation. One thing I'm findin out is that—of course—my CW copy isn't perfect. Searching through the entire recording of an activation is a bit much for me at the moment, so I lighted on a middle ground technique: determine whether or not the QSOs were with POTA registered users, and if not, investigate those portions of the recording I was fairly certain that ChatGPT could help with this coding task. I was right. The entire coding session took 14 minutes from start to finish. I told ChatGPT about the undocumented REST API presented by pota.app  , gave it an example, and asked it to write a Python script for me that would accept a callsign through the Linux input pipe and then tell me either all the info for the callsign, or print that the callsign wasn't found. Out dropped a script...

  I used ChatGPT to crank out a new blog feature: a slide deck that shows all the QSO videos from an activation.  Before I get started, allow me to admit that I just found out that YouTube provides code to embed a playlist on an html page. I didn't know this when I started this project, and frankly, I'm kinda happy about that. If I found an embedded playlist, it would not have been obvious to me that there was more than one video. I would have missd all the others. An example of the resulting video deck can be seen on the field report from my latest POTA activation. I asked ChatGPT to create the CSS and HTML for a video deck presented on a statically served HTML page. It got really close on the first attempt. I only had to refince the code a bit to get exactly what I wanted. The AI even dumped out JavaScript code I hadn't remembered to ask for to control the deck. Later I realized that adding video links one at a time to my blog page was a bit tiresome. I asked the AI to w...

 I'd heard that a tent pole wouldn't work well as an antenna mast, but it's all we had. I've heard from folks that  a tent pole might not be the best antenna support. They're probably right, but on our last flight from San Francisco to El Paso, TX, I was a bit tired, and completely forgot our carbon fiber collapsible mast—which also isn't supposed to work—in the overhead bin above my seat. So, what we had was a tent pole! The above picture shows how to work with a tent pole mast that's shorter in length than a quarter wavelength long. You simply attach the pole to something—anything really—in nature that will provide the extra bit of required height. As far as processes go, the simplest way to figure out the first tape point to attach the wire to the mast is to hold the wire on the mast where the tree, or in this case the campsite marker,will support the mast and drape the wire down to the rig. In this way, you know that your vertical antenna will be support...

  Gate mounted vertical at US-4551 on the west side of the Organs. KOBTY and I tried a few different things with TouCans that had never happenned before First, we operated on the Western slope of the Organs by Dripping Springs. Second, we mounted the tent pole antenna mast to a steel gate piling at the edge of the Dripping Springs area. We were still completelylwithin the Organ Mountains National Monument for those keeping score. A note about gates: I grew up in New Mexico. Almost every gate in the state has one or more parking spots next to it. It's just assumed that when the gate is closed, you'll park and walk in. I personally believe the parking spots are there because people tend to just park in front of the gate if there's not a space. We parked in the spot near the gate because we needed an antenna mount, but sure enough, about a minute after we'd started transmitting, the parak ranger turned up and closed the gate. If you're worried that we'd have been l...