Copasetic Flow

  After contacting Alaska from San Francisco on 14.0574 MHz with 5 watts power delivered via a 1/4 wave vertical antenna through an apartment highrise last week, I started building models of HF propagation around buildings. This culminated in several new tools that I'll be discussing in more depths in future posts and the propagation map you can interact with towards the bottom of the page. What's in the Map Radio Contact Paths The map shows the QSOs (radio contacts) I made from the park on the top of One Maritime Plaza . Each contact is mapped out by a solid line running along the ground as well as a likely path the high frequency radio signal took as it bounced off the ionosphere on its way to the receiving station. I've talked about mapping F2 bounces before .  Fun F2 paths near a moutain outside El Paso, TX The paths in the map below use the maximum F2 layer height of the ionosphere at the time of the contact as it was reported by NOAA Glotec data . If you'd like t...

The San Francisco Pen Show last weekend at the Westin SF Airport, 8/26/2023 was incredible! I hear people had parking problems though. We came across this one more from necessity, rather than being inherently brilliant, what with not owning a car and all. Here's how we avoided the parking issues at the pen show: Take BART to SFO Hop the Westin SF Airport shuttle out front. Arrive at the pen show venue. Enjoy the show . Signs in the shuttle mentioned that it cost $5. No one asked us for a fare, so I'm not sure about the validity of the signs. We did tip the driver $5 or more each way, so maybe that covered both things. In any event, $5 is proabably less than the cost of gas for a car to the venue, and then throw in parking fees, and... yeah.

 Finally! Finally the antenna went up with very little fuss or muss. The key seems to be to have a new roll of twine. The little extra bit of heft gets it over the branch. Also! New York! Park: Mt. Davidson W6/NC-423 I did the easy-to-me route of taking the 43 to Forrester and Monterrey. From there, Google Maps plots out a walk to the mountain that looks like so: and vertically speaking was far from the worst hike in the world: Radio Details: As I mentioned, the antenna went right up this time. The radio ran like the little champ that it is. Unlike when I was there over the weekend, I did not couple into the antenna. I could stand up, or sit down, and no matter. I did notice that the radio picks up sixty-cycle hum above a certain height (about 10 feet?) Below that height, the band is quieter, but also the radiation angle goes up. I found this out by taking time to experiment with antenna height and see that the Utah SDR finally picked up the RockMite in the morning again. It's bee...

First, a San Francisco note: On the rare occasions it does freeze here, all the rooves change color. (Normally, they're black.) The scorpion tail switch for Rockmite programming was getting cumbersome, so I finally gathered up my courage to intstall a video game switch for the functionality . It worked! The initial mockup of the Rockmite programming switch didn't get in the way of keying, (those are two screwdrivers that came with the RJ45 breakout boards 'holding' the swithc in position, (they're simply placed through the holes.) So, I wired the thing, and voila: The ergonomics are good. Keying took about five minutes to get used to. Switching frequencies and keyer speed is so my easier, even with having to reach across to hold the switch in position to use it in this initial prototype!

 I'm having to figure out how to re-organize my blogging activities. I'm not posting to any social sites at the moment, consequently, some of my creative output has nowhere to go. But, there's a fix for that! Here it is. We had a gorgeous morning interlude between rain storms here in San Francisco, (Excelsior district to be specific)!