Copasetic Flow

 I made eight QSOs on my first hour long straight key month shift operating as K3Y/6! Points of note: I'm still operating five watts from the kitchen window in San Francisco. The ' shiny F2 ' cutoff was not disproven. The critical frequency between San Francisco and Utah did go below 7,750 kHz and there was only one QSO that went east of Louisiana out to New York. That happened when the fof2 value was about 8200 kHz. Does the Data Fit with ND7K in Arizona? I noticed that while Utah had disappeared again, I was still being spotted in Arizona at 01:00 UTC. Looking at the fof2 values to the spotting station, ND7K revealed that this spot conformed to my evolving rule of thumb. The midpoint fof2 is at about 8,000 kHz at the time, so above 7,750 kHz. Note for future use: The rig's freuqncy/fof2 = 14.0574/7.750 = 1.8138 The factor is for use with this figure.

 A few afternoons ago, I watched the signal from TouCans fade from an s9 into the Utah SDR to nothing in a matter of minutes. There was nothing wrong with the rig. I was literally getting to observe the effect the F2 layer has on propagation on twenty meters. Schedule 00:02 UTC/16:02 PST: Almost at S9 into Utah 00:32 UTC/16:32 PST: Running at S9 into Utah 00:36 UTC/16:36 PST: Already down to S5 00:37 UTC/16:37 PST: The signal is all but gone What Happened? Here's the F2 critical frequency, (fof2), along the path to Utah at each of the above time steps.  The critical frequency is the maximum frequency that will be reflected straight back down to the ground at any point rather than piercing the ionosphere and propagating out into space. When I say along the path, I mean the value for fof2 reported by GloTEC  at that time. GloTEC collects a number of ionospheric data sources and assembles them into a model of what the F2 layer looks like at any location on Earth at a give...

  FM modulation is so elegant it almost feels like a magic trick. After finally watching a 1940s U.S. Army Signal Corps training film, I realized just how simple frequency modulation really is—both on transmit and receive. Seeing the LC tank, limiter, and discriminator explained visually made everything click. Even better, that understanding immediately paid off in a modern, practical way: fixing an overly aggressive CW sidetone in my video QSLs using nothing more than an audio limiter. I finally understand FM modulation and it's so simple I'm amazed it wasn't developed first. I found an old US Army signal corp video that describes how both FM transmit and receive work. Audio Modulation I had not understood that modulating the transmit frequency was this simple. It all makes sense now that I see it, but I hadn't considered how simple this could be. The video demonstrates the use of an LC tank circuit to  generate the required RF. By placing a a condenser mic in p...

 I made a run to New Mexico a few weeks ago. I took the chance to attempt POTA activations from Ciblola National Forest, Lincoln National Forest, and a few other places I'll talk about later this week. My first activation in Cibloa National Forest the day I arrived in Albuquerque was by far my most successful in terms of raw QSO count. Having just arrived in town, I of course made my way to Blake's Lottaburger for a green chili cheeseburger. I've been trying to reduce my food intake a bit so I ordered an itsaburger as opposed to a lottaburger. (Seriously. It's an excellent naming scheme, no pun intended.) Next, I made my way out to Simms Park. The park is operated by the city of Albuquerque, but it's completely contained within the boundaries of Cibola National Forest, US-4514 , so voila. I taped the Project TouCan's vertical antenna on its carbon fiber support mast to a wooden railing post and got to work. I've found several references warning not to u...

 I wandered a bit down a rabbit hole this morning when I was innocently enough thinking about teaching trig to kids using a smartphone for building height measurement. Turns out there's all sorts of information about phones that can tell what angle they're at using a gyrscope. It also turns out that my phone, a Samsung S23+ uses an STMicroElectronics MEMs gyroscope. Anyway, here are the cool resources: STMicro gyroscopes page has a very nice chapterized video on how all this works. I could not find the same videos on YouTube. If you're looking for the physics reasoning behind the devices, this is the page. Here's the Mozilla API for accessing this kind of thing in your phone via JavaScript. Here's the Google specific API . Here's the STMicro intro video to MEMs from YouTube Expect to see more soon.

 I've been following the introduction of RSE wire on VE6LK's YourTube channel. It's pretty spiffy stuff. It has nickel coated carbon fibers as its core and a rope-like insulator. Basically, it's cable that behaves like a rope. It can also support up to 300 pounds without breaking. The tensile sttrength is what caught my attention. Could RSE be used as a dipole with Project TouCans? Remember, when TouCans is used with a dipole, all 22 ounces or so of the rig go up in the dipole as well. I haven't worked out how to actually connect the wire to the antenna terminals yet, but assuming I could, and I pulled the RSE taught over a couple of tree branches, could it hold up the rig? It's time to do some physics. I asked GPT-5.1 to do the physics for me. Here's my prompt: I'd like to do a physics problem with you. I'm doing this to find out  if we can hold a radio in the middle of a dipole. The wire has a breaking ension of 300 pounds. The radio weighs 2 po...