Copasetic Flow

 When I started down the road of putting a Raspberry Pico-W in charge of the Morse code key and on/off switch on our 20 meter rock-locked, QRP CW rig, Project TouCans, last year, I came across many, many microPython code examples where the entire point was to WiFi connect your Pico-W to your home router and then access it from other devices.  KO6BTY and I however, mostly use Project TouCans while out camping for POTA/SOTA. Consequently, the 'home router' route, (pun intended), didn't seem helpful. Ultimately, I found code example for setting up a Pico-W as a network as an access point as opposed to a client. That worked. We were able to WiFi connect a laptop to Project TouCans to turn the rig on and off and send either auto-keyed or straight key CW . It did however, lock whichever device into TouCans exclusively. That wasn't too big of a problem though, because I could make POTA self-spots and check out our signal on various SDRs using my smart phone. Then, yesterday, a...

Powered TouCans made its first QSO today. The operator on the other end was K8IIJ north of San Diego, CA. Rather fittingly it was a QRP to QRP QSO!  KO6BTY had the idea to power the Raspberry Pi Pico-W from the same Imuto battery bank as well. We'd abandoned this idea early on in the prototype stages of the keyer because RFI on the battery return line from the rig would flumox things about 7 characters into a CQ call. I thought we might have better luck now that the battery line's only six inches long. We had different luck. In this incarnation, the Pico is unable to make WiFi connections when powered by the brick, so back to the 2 AAs we went. In other news, the rig survived its first unintentional drop test this morning! The cranky antenna connector acted up again. This time, the bolt simply stripped away from the threads dropping the rig ten feet to the ground. The Bluetooth audio transmitter popped its stereo cable on both ends, but that was the extent of the damage! The ri...

 The gang, (12 year-old Diaze aka KO6BTY, 11 year-old Mota, and 8 year-old Tawnse), and I did things with vector cross products, operated Raspberry Pis in the face of radio frequency interference (RFI) and started to update the ham radio exams Javascript charting package calls this week. Ionosphere and Cross Products KO6BTY and I put together kml files that show the approximated F2 skip of a QSO last year. The maps are very approximate because they only take the Pt Arguello ionosonde down the coast from us into consideration. To determine what other ionosondes to use data from, we needed to know how far each of the ionosondes was from the path between an arbitrary pair of QSO stations. In other words, we needed to work with spherical trigonometry. The first step was to figure out the algorithm. The solution was easy to find on StackOverflow, but it was hard to picture at first. I fixed that by getting back into using Sage for demos . The final step is shown below. Raspberry...

 We built a keyer! KO6BTY was gifted a FT-840 by the family of a silent key over the holidays. (It was very, very nice of them. Thank you all!) She also received a straight key kit from W1REX . (Thanks Rex!) Daize—as she's kown in these pages—quickly constructed her key; she and I added a 10 meter dipole to our now  growing antenna farm; and the kid was up and transmitting CW on 10 meters with her technician class license! Also! She's a new SKCC member! Here's the thing though. Neither one of us is good enough with a straight key—she's better than I am to be frank—to convince the Reverse Beacon Network that our callsign is actually decipherable. So, to make sure our signal was getting out and to help people spot us for event lke SKCC's SKM. Project TouCans has a memory keyer in the Rockmite that works quite admirably for just this sort of thing, but now so much the venerable FT-840. That's ok though. We built our own autokeyer ! Here it is in all it's early...