Copasetic Flow

  This morning at the 2nd POTA activation here, I got to talk (OK, CW), with JG0AWE again! Just like last year! I was using a bit more power this year. Project TouCans is running somewhere between 3 and 5 Watts at the moment. He caught me just before the gang go the oatmeal ready, (we're camping on the edge of Great Basin National Park), On top of that, a RBN station in Japan had spotted Project TouCans about half an hour before. There wasn't a grey line between our locations, so I'm curious about what was going on, but delighted to have made the QSO! Here's the activation in Cesium so you can see where the sun was in relation to the QSO. The QSO takes place at 14:49 near the end of the animation.

 There was a lot going on this morning. Propagation was almost exclusively to the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains; I successfully used an atlatl to launch the attena twine; and the RockMite reached Japan!.  There were so many mosquitos up there this morning, I managed to get a rain coat on farily soon, but I'm so going to pay for that. The recent rains left a couple of largeish puddles near my usual antenna spot, and the mosquitos took adavantage. Park: Mt. Davidson  W6/NC-423 I finally lighted on what I believe is the easiest public transit route for an early morning arrival at the summit—keep in mind, the park opens at 5:00 AM PST. Catch the  43  at Geneva and Mission, or you're favorite stop. Ride to Juanita—yup, that is the first step of the gang's and my original route. Here's the change: wiggle through the streets to Dalewood, and make your entire ascent there. In aboout 10 minutes, you'll be at the trailhead next to the 36 bus stop. This is much fas...

 We talked to Japan using the little RockMite 20! It was our first SOTA on Mt. Davidson here in San Francisco, and it was almost a total wash until I heard JG0AWE! and here's the video from the outing: Summit: Mt. Davidson  W6/NC-423 We wanted to get there really early, (the park opens at 5), so we took the 43 from Geneva and Madrid. We got off at Juanita, walked through the neighborhood to the northwest side of the mountain, and began our hike. And then, our hike was over. Terminated by the closed trail ahead of us. The city is still catching up with all the trees that were downed by the rainfall last month. A brief walk up Dalewood Way—that felt like it was almost straight up—brought us to the southwest trailhead. About ten minutes later, we were at the summit with the cross made famous by Dirty Harry. The cross was built as a WPA style project during the Great Depression. Pro tip: If you can wait to depart until a little bit after 6 AM, take the 36 from Glen Park BART st...

More on this later, but on the kids and my first SOTA activation of Mt. Davidson here in San Francisco, we made only one QSO... To Japan!!!!! The Rockmite was operating on 14058.4 MHz as always, powered by 8 AA batteries. The view from the radio: