Copasetic Flow

 The 11 year-old and I played CW Simon through two airports and plane rides last night. We got a little better at sending CW, and bothered absolutely no one. Haptics rock ! But what if you'd rather practice Morse with your own set of paddles, not on a smart phone touch screen? By the way, did I mention that the smart phone easily supports 20 wpm iambic keying ? Still want your own paddles? Ok, ok, ok, ok. We're working on adding Halikey support! We've got a code basis to work from becuase there are other apps in the Project TouCans portfolio, namely the CW Fist-ogram —a tool for practicing your dit/dah timing consistency—and the inter-person, internet CW transciever . that already support Halikey. Both those tools were built for the OG serial Halikey. I was worried that device was going away and therefore was delighted this morning when I saw that the serial version will continue to be sold along with the spiffy new MIDI version of the Halikey! I perused the new User...

CW Simon: Simon, but, you know, for Morse code Remember Simon from the ’90s? The handheld game with four buttons that played a sequence you had to copy back from memory? Each round added one more step, and you kept going until you finally made a mistake. KO6BTY built a phone game, Project TouCans CW Simon , using Gas Town that does the same thing, but for Morse code. Part of the inspiration for CW Simon was W1REX telling KO6BTY and I that he’d worked on Simon 2. You can hear more about that on Rex’s episode on HRWB. Why CW Simon Exists KO6BTY found that keying CW was helping her learn Morse more quickly, but she and I didn't always have enough time to get on the air together. CW Simon grew out of that. It is a quick way to get more sending practice in, one short round at a time. CW Simon gives you a way to spend more time sending, not just listening. Long Island CW Club points out: “At least a quarter of practice should be sending.” How CW Simo...

 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...