Copasetic Flow

The QSL cards for Project TouCans first POTA have gone out, so now I can talk about them online without any spoilers and—hopefully—a few clarifications and elucidations. First, this was Project TouCans first POTA , so it was kind of a big deal to the (12, 10, and 8 year-old)gang and I. It became even a bigger deal because TouCans managed to do—in a single outing, no less—something the Flying Rockmite hadn't been able to do in two different POTAs to the same site; namely, to breach the Golden Gate Bridge with a QSO! In our previous two attempts, all of our QSOs avoided the center span of the bridge leading us to hypothesize about the number of 20 meter wavelengths that might fit into the bridge span, the height of the bridge above the water and whatnot. Here's a look at the QSOS from our cliff-side perch during the Flying Rockmite outings. And here's roughly the same view with Project TouCans! Notice the green (I've added RST color coding to our mapping app since the fi...

 Diaze (the 12 year old kid here) and I are adding F2 skip paths to the QSO maps from Project TouCans. One point of the project is to give us us an opportunity for Diaze to learn Python. Another point is to better visualize what the radio is doing with real-time data—within a 7 minute window—about the F2 layer! I'll talk more about unschooling and learning Python in another post, for now, here are some of the results we're seeing! Yesterday I made a single QSO to VE7ZD in Canada. I mapped out all the reverse beacon network spots for KD0FNR as well as the QSO using our  new code additions . I can see that the radio did it's usual thing of hitting the stations in the Bay area first. Stanford led the way The map immediately brings up a good question. What do we do for ground wave comms? Another good question is, are they always ground wave, or are some of them veritical incidence skywave? I believe Stanford is mostly ground wave because moving the antenna a bit in the backyar...

 Working POTA in San Francisco is a treat!  On the way to the POTA site—Lands End—I got to sttop off at two art musems, and ride, oh, I don't, know, at least 7 different buses, and it was awesome! My first stop was at the DeYoung Museum. While there, I checked out the Robert Henri paintings. He founded (helped to foun?) the ashcan school . We know about him because he influenced Leroy Neiman who made several paintings of one of our favorite hangouts, the Buena Vista. He's also an interesting artist to me because up until about a year ago, there were portraits of his wife and his mistress—hanging on opposite walls of a gallery in the DeYoung—staring at each other. The mistress was missing from the DeYoung yesterday. I remembered that I'd last seen her painting hanging in the Legion of Honor and since I was headed to Lands End anyway, I made the Legion my next stop. And the buses lined up! I'd walked to the bottom of the hill to take the 44 to the DeYoung. I hopped back ...