Copasetic Flow

 The gang and I made our first QSO with Australia this week! The QSO came bundled with two other DX contacts made with Project TouCans—all in a 16 minute window—which I'll write about soon. Our camping site is nestled below Anvil Mountain to the East and across the Million Dollar Highway from South Mineral Springs, about two miles north of Silverton, CO. We're surrounded by peaks on all sides. Bear Mountain peak is framed in my pictures of the rig. Project TouCans was probably 20 feet up in its dipole. This turned out to be difficult to show in photographs with the proper perspective. I finally decided to make a gif of different zoom levels of a single photo. The picture below starts out focused on Bear Mountain Peak and then zooms out to include the rig and the ground outside my partner's and my tent. You can see the Bluetooth transmitter that brings the head phone audio down to the ground hanging from the bottom of the rig. The campsite is gorgeous and almost completely b...

 POTA activation from Silverton in twenty-one minutes! Project TouCans had one of its highest ever antenna placements. It showed in the QSO data. Check out the number of 599 reports, (white qso paths.) (All QSOs are shown with their associated F2 skip paths.) I'm loving the, (very real), yet very sci-fi look of what's going on with the F2 skips from this rig at this location Most of the F2 paths actually cleared the mountain, so I didn't have to think about diffraction or other radio optics effects. VE3EID did plow just a little bit into the mountainside It did come out the other side. (By the way, you can look at all of this on your own in the map below.) But, if Ontario plowed into a peak a little bit, how did Puerto Rico KP3CW spot the rig?  Turns out, it's line of sight between mountains from here QSO Map Here's the map you can steer around in on your own! Remember, click play in the lower left hand corner, then move the time slider all the way to the left. You...