Copasetic Flow

 Hey Everyone! It snowed! The ham radio was awesome though! Project TouCans was spotted in England, and made three QSOs into Europe about about 4 AM in the morning in New Mexico! Here's TouCans braving the winter storm. It's low in the center of the picture in it's coffee bag rain/snow shield. The white streaks are the camera picking up rather rapidly falling snow flakes. Unbeknownst to me, the rental car that KO6BTY and I had picked up the night before was very, very much not a 4WD SUV. Just two, and not a good two at that. We'd checked the weather three times on the way up the mountain the day before, and snow was not in the forecast. When I woke up t midnight to a gentle pattering on the top of the tent, since it was a bit warmer, I assumed the pattering was rain. It wasn't. It was snow. A thin layer of snow on the rain fly will actually serve as insulation, warming the tent a bit. Oh boy. As an aside, Tawnse, the youngest of the gang ( now 9 ) and I had a simila...

 Project TouCans made 52 QSOs in well under 24 hours while the gang (12 year-old Diaze, 10 year-old Mota, and 8 year-old Tawnse; all internet monikers), and I were camping in Cibola National Forest above Mountainair, NM. That's more QSOs than we've ever done in a POTA before! That's also more QSOs than we've ever had in a 24 hour period before! Project TouCans is working great!!! Here's a map of all the QSOs. On top of everything else, Project TouCans was spotted by two European RBN stations. That's never happened before. No European QSOs (that has happened before ... more than once ... before the tuna topper amp of Project TouCans), but still!

 The gang—12 year old Diaze, 10 year old Mota, and 8 year old Tawnse; internet monikers all—and I spend a significant amount of time looking at propagation maps from our POTA outings. We do it to see how our little radio is doing, to learn about geography, and to discuss physics—all popular unschooling topics here. It's important to remember though that sometimes a correlation is just that, a relationship between variables, not a causation. One of our QSO maps from this weekend's POTA illustrates this perfectly. Keeping in mind that red place markers indicate RBN spots and that blue markers indicate QSOs, at first blush you might be tempted to say that Project TouCans was getting out to the East Coast and environs, and rather flummoxed by the Rocky Mountains behind our campsite. Sure, those fancy RBN stations—some of them are very fancy—out West could see us, but that's just because, well, you know, they had better antennas. But, real stations? You might think that TouCans...