Copasetic Flow

 The second time TouCans Vertical activated Juan Bautista Trail, US-4571, it was from near the top of Russian Hill in San Francisco. The longest, (distance-wise), QSO was to Alaska which became a bit of a thing last week. The Park and My Forgetful Journey to It: For this activation I was in a city park within the POTA Park. To be specific, I was perched on the side of Russian Hll in George Sterling Park at 10 in the morning. I'd intended to be at the park much earlier in the morning, but I had.. well... I forgot to pick up the radio in my hurry to get to the bus stop. So, I finished my early swim at Hyde Street Pier as intended. The area is gorgeous seated just below and to the East of Ghirardelli Square. And then, I headed back to the house for the rig. In a testament to the public transit around here, I was back up on Russian Hill a mere hour later after taking the MUNI 30 to Powell St. BART station, then the BART back into Excelsior, taking another bus to the house, grabbing t...

 TouCans Veritical activated the Pony Express Trail from Pier 7! Here's the map. Blue markers are QSOs. Yellow markers are RBN spots. Colors indicate relative signal strength using the resistor color scale, (violet is second biggest, black is lowest.) Once again, the rig reached Alaska from downtown San Francisco. In it's usual thumbing-its-nose at conventiatonal wisdom way, the path to Alaska, (the orange line in the map detail below), from the location of the antenna is straight down the metal railing the antenna was mounted in Here's the antenna setup QSOs Callsign rx RST tx RST Time (GMT) Frequency kj7dt 559 579 2024/11/06 21:48:00 14057.4 wx7or 559 559 2024/11/06 21:56:00 14057.4 k0yo 449 559 2024/11/06 22:10:00 14057.4 k5ohy 229 559 2024/11/06 22:18:00 14057.4 kc4cr 229 559 2024/11/06 22:25:00 14057.4 al7kc 449 539 2024/11/06 22:27:00 14057.4 k7esq 559 599 2024/11/06 22:30:00 14057.4 ak6fq 539 459 2024/11/06 22:43:00 14057.4 ve7atj 339 559 2024/11/0...

 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...

 I needed a data set to try out the new ham radio QSO/spot mapping features I built today so I loaded in the Mt. Tamalpais POTA data. I was busy that week, so this is the first chance I've had to look at it, and wow! Park: Mt. Tamalpais State Park, K-1178   Our station was located at the highest camping site in Pantoll Campground. To get there, we headed to the ferry building early that morning, caught the first ferry to Sausalito , and from there caught the Marin Stagecoach 61 up the hill to the campground . On our return trip, we try to synch back up with the ferry, but we're not at all above just catching the GGT 130 in Sausalito near their ferry terminal, and taking the ride back into town over the bridge. Radio Details:    We made perhaps one of our highest tree mounted antennas to date. If you look at the first picture of the post you'll see the radio up in the antenna as usual. I was able to bring the keyer into the tent for night station operations.We made ...