Copasetic Flow

 A seagull had a delicious crab breakfast, be sure to checkout the video QSL with VE7JYD below for all the details. Park: US-0757 San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park Park: If I get going early enough in the morning, I get to take the Powell St. cable car to this park. Alas, this particular morning I got a late start so I took the MUNI 30 . Radio Details: This was one of the first outings with the new Anderson PowerPole connectors inspired by Ham Radio Workbench . They worked well. You can see the rig without the antenna attached below. Note that our antenna is now also color-coded. Frankly? That's a bit too much organization for my taste :) QSO/ RBN spot map: Happenings of Interest   Right as VE7JYD called in a seagull started working on its breakfast—a crab—on the beach to the side of the station.  You can see the video below in the album of recorded QSOs! I've been working on this on and off for the last week or so. I don't know that I'll keep it up becau...

 We did it! The gang and I activated San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park US-0757 using Project TouCans, the five Watt QRP 20 meter ham radio rig we built, and a vertical antenna! Us being us, we did everything the lazy way. We had a perfectly good horizontal dipole, so.... We taped half the dipole to a Goture 4.5 meter pole and dumped the other half into the Bay. The Bay water served as a really good ground!  Getting There We took the 29 from Excelsior to the stop on 19th and Holloway across the street from San Francisco State University. From there, we caught the 28 and took it out to the Golden Gate Bridge and around, finally winding up in just up the hill from The Buena Vista on North Point and Hyde. QSOs The rig was spotted in New Zealand and Australia. Our furthest acutal QSO was to Minnesota. As I was sitting on the pier operating, I also made three eyeball QSOs with hams that wandered by. Callsign tx RST rx RST Time (GMT) Frequency kk7lxu 559...

 On a far less math-heavy jaunt, I finally got around to trying to figure out how fast the auto-keyer KO6BTy and I put togehter could send CW. For the moment, the keyer's record is 31 WPM without errors. I can't key that fast, so I'm going to go ahead and declare that fast enough!

 Back in November, I pushed a datasette plugin to the rm-rbn-history repository that used Jinja and the existing table of QSO coordinates that's also housed in the repository to create kml maps based on Datasette queries.  Here's a video of the latest use case: applying for the SKCC 1,000 Miles per Watt Award In the video I demonstrate the following: Creating a histogram of QSOs by date Querying QSOs by date range to isolate a single day Creating a KML map that loads into Google Earth installed on a Chromebook

 I've been plunking through our household chargers and power supplies with a few USB-C breakout boards I purchased at Adafruit. As I mentioned previously , it's not immediately obvious which power supplies will do what, and thankfully the Adafruit boards in combination with my power supplies—so far—down-step their voltage if they don't think they can provide enough current. Today, I moved a step towards making this whole process more deterministic when I found a link to the USB power distribution (USB PD) standard on Wikipedia. The tables there at the time of this writing show: I still need to build a table of what portable chargers I can acquire, but this is a good start to—I hope—a really nice backpack or Project ThreeCans supply.

 Project TouCans managed a coat-to-coast POTA QSO with K2JVB out on Long Island the morning! The Dell wall power laptop supply continues to do great things with the rig, driving it to almost it's full QRP allocated five Watts. In other news, the rig was spotted in Uruguay earlier this week! It's signal was anyway :)

 Yesterday I used Datasette to make a map of the QSOs I'd made from the Pantoll Campground area, Then, I remembered that I also wanted to know how the locations of the stations on the receiving end of my POTA QSOs from there compared to W6CSN's . That map turned out to be very easy to make. I remembered that the Datasette cluster map looks for the column names 'longitude' and 'latitude'. Keeping that in mind, I renamed the columns that I'd use datasette-leaflet-freedraw to search for to 'longitude_t' and 'latitude_t', and then added two more columns containing the latitude and longitude of the receiving station. So,  select rm_rnb_history_pres.tx_lng as longitude , rm_rnb_history_pres.tx_lat as latitude, rm_rnb_history_pres.timestamp, rm_rnb_history_pres.dB, rm_rnb_history_pres.Spotter, rm_rnb_history_pres.QSL_link, photo_path.path, photo_path.uuid, json_object( 'image', '/-/media/thumbnail/' || uuid, 'title', Spotter...

 I've run into issues of late with the keyer on the Rockmite inside of Project TouCans rebooting as the output power of the amp was increased via increases in the final transistor's bias current. Simply put, after a certain power level, the keyer would spontaneously reboot when the 'dit' key was pressed. In keeping with our more is less theme, our key is homemade. I wrote an article about it that appeared in Sprat 195 this year! The homebrew nature of the keyer meant there were lots of possible root causes for what I was observing. Here's the radio's view of the mechanical portion of the keyer. The switch on the lower left is the one that was was causing resets. Here's a view of the whole rig, battery (since replaced by a LiFePO4 of the same size), keyer, and Project TouCans mounted in the antenna over the backyard. The key switch that caused resets is mounted on the right hand side of the keyer from this angle. The switch on top is the keyer programming bu...

 I've never outright said it, but one of the points of these ham radio posts is to demonstrate that you can have a whole lot of fun with ham radio without doing a whole lot of prep or worrying a whole, whole lot about perfection. Towards that end, I wanted to mention our QSL cards, and our antenna launcher. I'm getting the QSL cards ready to go for the recent California QSO Party. I'm using our tried and true design that involves photos printed by the Walgreens at the bottom of the hill on our 54 line, and USPS double reply postcards . Here they are: The picture features the TouCans radio housed in the antenna that sweeps from the top of the house just above the kitchen window down to the back fence. The radio is also sporting its rain/fog cover which is a donut bag from the donut store at the bottom of our hill on the 52 line.  Turns out the inside of donut bags are waxed, and that's quite enough to shield the little radio and amp housed in a pineapple and tuna can fr...

 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 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...

 I'm curious about how many QSOs I'm waking with TouCans from the home station with Project TouCans. I know I'm making many more QSOs, but the data should also bear this out. I could do a cursory glance at my log book, but since most of my QSOs are from POTAs and SOTAs, the analysis becomess a little tedious. Fortunately, I learned SQL years ago, and then the gang and I found out about Datasette.. Here's my query for QSOs per day: select strftime('%Y/%m/%d',timestamp) as day, db, count(*) from rm_rnb_history_pres where dB > 99 group by day order by day asc This yielded the following fairly noisy data because POTA/SOTA. I made the chart by clicking the CSV link in 'This data as json, CSV' on the Datasette page for the query results, copying the data into Excel, and then charting. To find out only about QSOs from my home station, I refined the query to only look at QSOs with tx_lat and tx_lng that were within a few 1/1000s of a degrees from the house a...

 I spent some time testing out a theory about briefly running a quarter wave vertical antenna from the backyard.The short answer? The theory did not pan out during an empirical trial this morning. A few days ago, while adjusting the antenna with the radio in beacon mode, I accidentally dropped the end that stretched down to the backyard. The sturdy little radio bounced off of some chicken wire below our back deck. The rig—still embedded in the antenna—was about five feet off the ground, hanging from it's antenna mount on the second floor of the house, and still transmitting. When I got everything sorted back out about half an hour later, I noticed something that seemed weird. The radio had reached W3UA and W3RGA just before it went away during my fixes. I knew I had data on the whole thing , so I put off checking things out until last night. After I updated my database, I wrote a query that found the dropped antenna data select rowid, id, tx_lng, tx_lat, rx_lng, rx_la...