Copasetic Flow

 In addition to some interesting ham radio happenings, there were fighter jets and hummingbirds. Stand-alone cameras rock! Park: Mt. Davidson in San Francisco:  W6/NC-423 I used the best-for-me-for-early-morning-transit route I mentioned in my last SOTA report  for this summit. I also used my Google Pixel phone to record the actual slope of the hike up from the bus stop. You might remember that I took umbrage that Google claimed the route was almost flat.  Today, I measured it using the 'degrees off kilter' display on my cell phone. The slope is a wopping 12 degrees. Hardly flat. Here's what the world looks like if you take a picture of the 'mostly flat' sidewalk: Radio Details and Gear: I saw that the  qrper.com  trip reports include a gear list. I hadn't ever thought about it before, so I figured I try it out. Interesting, or no? Radio: A green board Rockmite 20. You can get the red board kit at  QRPMe . Antenna: 12 gauge wire cut to a half-wave dipo...

The automated QSO mapping project can now handle p2p POTA and s2s SOTA QSOs. It does this, for the moment, by accepting two optional fields at the end of each QSO line in the .csv file the app uses for input. Those two fields contain the latitude and longitude of the SOTA/POTA station. When they are found, they are used immediately , rather than the geocoded information for the QSO receiving station. Here's the feature summed up in video This is the SOTA log the map is based on. I indicated which QSOs were S2S in my notes Here's the map with s2s locations denoted: and here are a few examples that show the summit to summit feature in action. The map to the summit is overlayed with the map to the home station: AA7OY and KT0A

This summit's a nice, fairly easy hike to a flat mountaintop with six foot tall cedars that worked just fine for suspending a 20 meter halfwave dipole ham radio antenna. Summit: El Cerro de Los Lunas  W5N/SL-015 This was a fun climb just a few miles off the interstate, I-25. I'd forgotten how gorgeous New Mexico rain clouds are, and how much advance notice they give. Where there are little whisps coming down out of the grey cloud, it's raining. It sprinkled on me just a bit, luckily after I was done playing radios. Getting there: The trail mentioned on the SOTA site for the peak—route A specifically—is a big improvement over any other routes I found, (alltrails for example), to the summit. There were a few issues though. There’s no longer a gate at the end of the road. There is a dip in the barbed wire though, and I was able to easily step over. I was unable to find the ‘main’ trail mentioned in the route’ on the SOTA site. I was, however, able to find a small arroyo that I...

 I continued my recent trend of ham radio in atomospheric rivers at the San Bruno Mountain summit. It was my first SOTA. Park: San Bruno Mountain State Park W6/CC-072 , K-1196 I climbed the mountain from the South San Francisco Side. I took BART to South San Francisco station, and then took the free blue circulator bus from there to the Chestnut and Hillside stop. The climb was very reasonable. There was a well worn trail the entire way. It would have been a bit more pleasant without the rain, but then in March and early April here in San Francisco, I wouldn't have done much of anything if I'd waited for the rain to stop. Radio Details: The antenna setup worked amazingly well! With the lack of trees, and the driving, nonstop rain storm going on, I just laid the antenna across two bushes, held the radio in my hand, and hoped for the best. And it worked!!!    QSO/ RBN spot map: Happenings of Interest   It was wet! I didn't expect to make any QSOs with the bush-bor...