Copasetic Flow

  This a follow-on to the crashing wave post. While activating POTA US-0757 with TouCans and a Stick , (the vetical antenna version), during the wind storm, the first call in was from SM0GJN! It was very cool because it was from Sweden, but also the signal had aurora flutter! I got the idea for recording POTA activations from K4SWL. I haven't quite perfected my method yet, but I'm getting better at it. Here's what I'm doing. I'm dialing my phone into the Utah SDR, then turning on the screen recorder to record the screen as well as any media audio output, (the Utah SDR), and the phone's microphone. I listen to TouCans' audio ouput via a pair of Bose Bluetooth noise canceling headphones. the sgnal audio you'll here is from Utah. The waves crashing were under me in San Francisco. Here's the QSO recording. \ And here's the map of the aurora from  https://aurorasaurus.org/ for that morning Along with the QSO map. I'll try to get these superimpos...

 I'm on a two day streak of activating US-0757 San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park.  This time, I was able to take a cable car to within 30 yards of the park. I hopped the Hyde Street cable car at Powell Street BART. It was a fun, easy ride that I take as often as I can get it. After realizing yesterday that TouCans seemed to do better with its ground wire on the pier than it did with the thing in the water, I ran a few more experiments and watched the signal into Utah decrease as a the ground wire touched the water. Also, the interference from AM broadcast stations also became louder exactly when the wire dipped into the water. I ran most of the activation with the rig's ground wire laying on the pier next to me again. I made more QSOs today, but all in all the signal levels were more contrite Here are the QSOs Callsign tx RST rx RST Time (GMT) Frequency n7jtt 579 419 2024/11/05 16:21:00 14057.4 n0aie 449 529 2024/11/05 16:21:00 14057.4 k6pb 559 ...

 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...