Powered TouCans is heavy. The Imuto battery pack it uses weighs in at about a pound, making it the heaviest component of the antenna-borne rig. I've always enjoyed using butcher twine to support the rig, but it looked—and felt—very much like butchers twine was not going to support Powered TouCans, (aka Wireless TouCans.) Butchers twine has always had a bit of an issue getting a bit jammed up on the sap of various trees. This has led to be being able to feel when the twine is about to break. With the extra weight of the battery pack, I've been having this feeling a lot more often. I needed a different way to suspend the radio, but didn't want to resort to rope if I could avoid it. Enter tarred twine . I'd never heard of this stuff before it on Amazon, but wow! It's tensile strenght is higher, it can be about the same weight, and it doesn't hang up on tree limbs as much. The tar reduces the friction of the string overall. This led to no limb jams over the last w
Spain!!! My first QSO yesterday afternoon was with EA1EC in Spain. This is a new Project TouCans record—of sorts—for QSOs with a very-low-height 20 meter dipole! Do the Organ Mountains— K-4551— just have the knack for this? Maybe. In any event, TouCans does very, very well there. As usual, TouCans was running five Watts. Here's the QSO map from yesterday afternoon Also notice the QSO to Alaska! Here's the antenna placement: The antenna feed point is about four feet up! Just as strange, the antenna was supported—via a piece of tarred twine—by a metal picnic shelter on the other end, as shown in the video below One of the things TouCans has demonstrated really well is that amateur radio operators should 'just get an antenna in the air.' The rest usually takes care of itself.