Copasetic Flow

 N2CQR mentioned the waterfall being handy for QRP in that other operators can find your rock-locked signal on the ham radio bands.  In addition to the use-case pointed out by Bill , when operating Project TouCans in locations where there's an available internet connection, I've used SDR waterfalls to my advantage in a few other ways: 1. I can get more immediate feedback than the Reverse Beacon Network. On the West Coast, the Utah SDR can see our signal during most of the day. We can find out immediately if Project TouCans is working at all. 2. I rarely have zero-beat issues with TouCans. The contained RockMite's receiver is very wide, so I can hear a lot on either side of the frequency the rig works on. There is one big issue though. The crystal oscillator for transmit has found its home near 14057.4 MHz. The receive bandpass, however, is happiest at 14057.9 kHz. Especially when there's a crowd, the waterfall display from Utah helps me to determine if the loudest sign...

I'm not sure what to make of this yet, but I'm seeing different signal strengths received at the same receiving stations based on the output frequency of the Rockmite which only works on two different freuqencies: 14057.5 kHz and 14058.1 kHz. Here's the data I collected this morning: I wondered if this was simply variations in the atmostphere, but notice that in the case of reception by ND7K, there's a difference of 10 dB in the two transmitted frequencies with only a two minute difference between the measurement times. I saw even clearer results watching the waterfall display of the Utah SDR : Notice the nice, well-defined line at 14057.5, and then a few seconds later, the fuzzy, weaker line at 14058.1: first second I don't think it's an issu with the radio since sometimes the stronger recpetion was on 14057.5 and others it was on 14058.1. I'm not sure what's causing the differences. I'm looking forward to finding out.

 The (newly) three quarter watt Rockmite ham radio reached Hungary from Great Basin National Park a few days ago! Maui relayed the receive side from Hungary. A few days ago, a POTA outing from Great Basin National Park ( K-0032 ) had kind of petered out. I listened for the RockMite on the Maui software defined radio , SDR, because—for whatever reason—I can usually find the 20 meter output of the RockMite there during the day whether I'm operating from San Francisco or Great Basin. Sure enough, there was the station: But, this time, I heard another station as I listened. And! They were calling me! A bit more listening revealed that it was HA9RE . I answered back on the RockMite, where I could not hear HA9RE, and was immediately rewareded with his answer which I could only hear on the Maui SDR. Here a few more vidoes that detail the contact, the first ever software defined radio relayed contact with the Rockmite! From the IRL point of view: From the SDR point of view: ...